VANCOUVER, B.C. – New mothers who want to give up their infants because they face addiction, poverty, or are still just children themselves, will soon be able to walk away after anonymously dropping their babies off at a Vancouver hospital.

St. Paul’s Hospital will launch its Angel’s Cradle program, the first of its kind in Canada, on May 3. The downtown hospital said Thursday the initiative is designed to provide a safe haven for troubled mothers who can’t care for their infants.

Mothers will be able to place their babies inside a bassinet in the emergency department and leave. The cradle, which sits in a secure area, is equipped with an alarm that lets hospital staff know 30 seconds after the baby has been put inside.

Neither hospital employees nor Vancouver police will make any effort to track the mother down.

Dr. Geoffrey Cundiff, who works in the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department and helped design Angel’s Cradle, said he doesn’t believe it will lead to more children being abandoned.

“I think that there’s a sizable subset of people who, when they first hear about it, it seems wrong because the whole idea of a mother abandoning a baby is hard to take,” he said.

“But I think when they actually stop and think about what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to make sure that there’s an alternative for the baby, I think that it’s usually well received.”

Providence Health Care, a faith-based organization that operates the hospital, said infant abandonment is a fact of life and this initiative provides a better option than simply leaving a baby outside, or worse.

St. Paul’s has had abandoned infants before, including a three-to four-hour old newborn that was found wrapped in a towel and plastic bag. A newborn’s body was found in a Richmond, B.C., dump last February.

Once a health assessment on any infant left at St. Paul’s is complete, the baby will be placed in the care of the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

If the mother later decides she wants her baby back, she has the option of contacting the ministry and arranging a meeting with social workers.

“We feel that women who are in this situation are part of our patient population and there is really no other resource for them that specifically allows them to remain anonymous and so we thought it was in our mission to provide this,” Cundiff said.

“Women who are in these circumstances, obviously, it must be a very difficult situation.”

Greg Smith, executive director of Vancouver-based Options for Sexual Health, previously known as Planned Parenthood, said his organization is firmly behind the Angel’s Cradle program.

“From our perspective, this is a good idea. Anything that supports the health of new babies and new mothers is good,” he said.

Like Cundiff, Smith said it’s unlikely the program will lead to a greater number of babies suddenly being abandoned.

“I don’t think that anybody will be less careful about their decisions on sexual health or sexuality just because the Angel’s Cradle is there,” he said.

Smith said mothers leaving their babies behind is very rare and when it does happen, it speaks to the extreme level of crisis in one’s life.

“I think we need to really appreciate what kind of crisis a woman is in to come to this decision,” he said.

“Having a baby can be overwhelming for anybody but if you’re young and not very capable in terms of looking after a baby and so on, then that becomes a very daunting prospect.”

Sarah Payne, coordinator at Sheway, a Downtown Eastside pregnancy outreach program that’s located just a couple of kilometres from St. Paul’s, said age isn’t the only obstacle new moms in the area might face. There’s also poverty and addiction.

BEIJING – China’s top health body said Thursday that health workers who improperly dispose of dead babies will be “severely dealt with” following an investigation into the dumping of several bodies along a river in eastern China.

A scandal erupted last month when the bodies of 21 babies and fetuses – some with hospital identification tags around their ankles and at least one stuffed in a yellow bag marked “medical waste” – were found washed ashore on the Guangfu river on the outskirts of Jining city in Shandong province.

The Ministry of Health said on its website that hospitals should dispose of dead babies as they would any other corpse.

“The incident exposed loopholes in the hospital management, created negative social influence and yielded profound lessons,” the Ministry of Health report said.

The report said dead babies and fetuses should not be treated as medical waste, but did not give details on how local hospitals normally dispose of medical waste.

Calls to the Ministry of Health rang unanswered Thursday afternoon.

Two hospital mortuary workers, Zhu Zhenyu and Wang Zhijun, were fired by their hospital and detained by police as suspects, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Jining government spokesman Gong Zhenhua. The babies’ families had paid the pair to dispose of the bodies, but they instead dumped them at the river.

In China, most families are permitted to have only one or two children and a traditional preference for sons remains strong and the abandoning, aborting and killing of newborn baby girls is still common in rural areas.

Infants who die from disease are often abandoned or buried in unmarked graves, not being old enough to be formally considered part of the family.

Parents who purchased Foaming Baby Wipes Solution at four stores in Ontario and Quebec will want to pitch them after Health Canada issued a warning they could pose a health risk.

Northern Essences of Georgia produces the solution, which is contaminated with bacteria, Health Canada said in an advisory.

Consumers who have the product are being told to stop using it immediately and throw it out.

Foaming Baby Wipes Solution is in a clear bottle with a white label and carries the Universal Product Code 2008100227.

The product is contaminated with a Micrococcus species of bacteria, which may cause urinary tract infections, skin infections, or result in more serious complications in people with weakened immune systems.

Health Canada became aware of the contamination through its routine sampling and testing program.

It’s unknown how many units were sold in Canada, but there are four retailers listed on the company’s website. They include Boutique Pousse-Pousse in Longueil, Que.; Calins et Popotin in Montreal; Vive la vie in Ste-Marie de Beauce, Que.; and A Mother’s Touch in Ottawa.

Health Canada says it hasn’t received any complaints related to the use of the product.

CALGARY – Cassandra Murray is a true believer in the benefits of infant chiropractic care.

The 35-year-old mother of four from High River, Alta., just south of Calgary, has been bringing her brood to Calgary chiropractor Dr. Judy Forrester for the past six years, and is just one of a growing number of parents looking to chiropractors as an alternative to traditional health care.

“She adjusted both of us today. I’m getting adjusted just because of carrying a baby around in a car seat,” said Murray, holding three-month-old Brady in her lap following an appointment at the clinic last month in northwest Calgary.

“Through all of my pregnancies she adjusted me to help align my hips and kind of helped baby drop near the end and actually while I was pregnant with Brady she helped me because I had a lot of sciatica, sharp pains up my back.”

Anyone who has ever heard the sharp crack of a chiropractor adjusting a patient’s spine might cringe at the idea of an infant being treated. But for babies, the manipulation amounts to little more than a light touch or massage.

Proponents of infant chiropractic care say a child can experience misalignments of the spine during the birth process which can be corrected with this gentle manipulation. And although there’s skepticism in the medical community, they also believe it can be a cure-all for digestive problems as well as for constipation, colic and even ear infections.

“I knew she wouldn’t adjust a baby the way she would adjust an adult,” explained Murray. “When I got adjusted the first time it scared the crap out of me. It is just such a loud crack I had never experienced it before. But no, it’s a lot different.”

Murray had successfully brought her daughter Rylee, 4, to Forrester to deal with colic. Now she is worried about the range of motion in Brady’s neck.

“He would not turn his head to the left. That’s why he had a flattening of his head and in three appointments he looks to the left all the time now and it’s done wonders,” she said.

Forrester, who has been on the job for 32 years, estimates that about 65 per cent of her practice is infants and young children, and she sees about 20 new babies each month.

“A lot of people go to a chiropractor as a last resort. They’ve tried everything else. We’re only the last few years considered more mainstream so there’s been all those years where we’ve been held in a little bit of suspicious light,” Forrester said as she treated Brady.

“I’m just feeling his neck. We want to feel what the structures are doing because there can be just a normal deformity or what we call an anomaly,” she explained.

“I’m moving his head a little bit because I’m determining what the range of motion is between the vertebra, looking to see if there is any imbalance between the musculature which, in this little guy, is one of the specific things.”

Forrester said most patients who seek her services have done their homework but still need reassurance.

“What they want to do is the laying on of the eyeballs, especially if they’re pregnant because they are making decisions for more than themselves or they’re bringing their babies in,” she said with a chuckle.

“But they’ve usually been referred and kind of have their ducks in a row but want to make sure that I don’t have hairy armpits and chew garlic and I’m going to be gentle.”

There was a time when the gap between chiropractors and doctors was very wide indeed. That has changed, said Forrester, who receives referrals from some family doctors and pediatricians.

“It’s more of a collaborative approach now.”

The president of the Alberta Chiropractic Association said the number of parents bringing in their little ones for treatment is growing, and he’s seen many children in his 35 years of practising.

“People would believe as the twig is bent so grows the tree. People would bring kids in for spinal checkups in the same way they would make their first dental appointment,” said Dr. Clark Mills, who has an office just west of Edmonton.

But there are no guarantees.

“I’m not saying it’s the kind of thing where chiropractic bats a thousand but in the odd infant, if you’ve got one of those screaming mimis who is going night and day these parents are literally at their wits’ end,” he noted.

“Sometimes a little bit of manual adjustment of the spine seems to calm them down. Sometimes it’s miraculous and sometimes it takes a few sessions.”

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine there is no actual evidence that spinal manipulation helps with the treatment of colic.

“The totality of this evidence fails to demonstrate the effectiveness of this treatment,” read the website. “It is concluded that the above claim is not based on convincing data from rigorous clinical trials.”

Some members of the medical profession were hesitant to discuss the practice but Dr. Paul Woods, the clinical/medical director for the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Calgary, was willing to weigh in.

Woods said he is “open-minded about complementary therapies” and does refer some of his patients to chiropractors for treatment for some muscular-skeletal problems, back disorders, and problems with peripheral joints such as shoulders and knees.

“A lot of it depends if it is the type of person that think they would benefit and I do have that conversation because some people are terrified of chiropractors and some embrace them for all things,” said Woods.

He is not enthusiastic about infants being taken to chiropractors for treatment because they are not able to verbally communicate what is wrong with them. But he acknowledges there’s no indication that it will be harmful.

“I haven’t see a child that has been injured by it and I don’t think there are any reports of any miraculous life changing events for these children,” he added.

“I am doubtful about claims such as food intolerance or ear infections and that sort of thing. It’s kind of outside scientific feasibility which is one of the sort of assumptions that we do to evaluate any treatment.”

But Woods acknowledges that the two professions are working a lot more hand-in-hand now then they did in the past.

“I trained 25 years ago and back then it was doctors hate chiropractors and chiropractors hate doctors,” said Woods.

“I really have tried to get away from that because I do believe chiropractors do provide valuable care in certain conditions. I try and make it a collaborative relationship rather than a turf issue.”

LONDON – The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.

A separate report by a group headed by the United Nations reached a very different conclusion on maternal mortality, saying the figure remains steady at about 500,000 deaths a year.

The disagreement reveals the politics behind public health, where progress made in tackling a health problem can jeopardize funding. Public health officials are gearing up to ask for billions of dollars this week at U.N. meetings .

The British medical journal Lancet rushed out a paper on Sunday that found the number of women who die in pregnancy or childbirth has dropped by more than 35 per cent over 28 years.

Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, said he was disappointed when maternal health advocates pressured him to delay publishing the report until September, after several critical fundraising meetings. He also wrote a commentary in Lancet on the pressure.

“Activists perceive a lower maternal mortality figure as actually diluting their message,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “Advocacy can sometimes get in the way of science.”

He did not name any group or individual who tried to pressure him.

In their paper, Christopher Murray and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington found that maternal deaths have fallen from about 500,000 deaths in 1980 to about 343,000 in 2008. The study in the Lancet was based on more data than was previously available in addition to statistical modeling and was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It was a surprising finding for experts who have long assumed that little progress has been made in maternal health.

But on Tuesday, another report by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a global alliance hosted by the World Health Organization, claimed progress in maternal health has “lagged.” According to their “detailed analysis,” from 350,000 to 500,000 women still die in childbirth every year. The authors did not explain where their data came from or what kind of analysis was used to obtain that wide range of figures.

In that report, U.N. officials also claimed they need $20 billion every year between 2011 and 2015 to save women and children in developing countries.

Dr. Flavia Bustreo, director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, denied there was any conflict between her group’s study and the Lancet study. She said her group was not involved in pressuring the journal not to publish Murray’s study.

“The debate on numbers may continue,” Bustreo said Wednesday. “But we welcome this as good news. There is hope at last for maternal health.”

In the world of public health, good news can paradoxically be bad news. The more people who are dying, the more money U.N. officials can raise, making some experts less keen to acknowledge that a problem is not as bad as they once thought.

The U.N. is hosting a meeting of public health experts and heads of state on maternal and child health this week in New York, followed by another one in Washington in June.

For years, U.N. AIDS officials threatened that the epidemic would spread among general populations in countries worldwide, and claimed more than 40 million people were infected. Money for projects fighting AIDS, meanwhile, grew exponentially.

When U.N. officials finally admitted they had been overestimating the numbers for years and dramatically revised their figures – down to 33 million – donors began to rethink their financial commitments.

Experts say public health figures need to be taken with a huge grain of salt, particularly when they come from people who are also soliciting funds for the campaign.

“The U.N. has a track record of inflating disease figures to keep the aid money flowing, so I’d probably place more faith in the figures which show a lower disease burden,” said Philip Stevens, of International Policy Network, a London think-tank . “This is yet more confirmation that whoever paints the most apocalyptic picture gets the most cash, even if they have to manipulate and spin the data.”

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On the Net:

www.lancet.com

www.who.int

Dozens of countries are unlikely to meet U.N. goals to significantly reduce the deaths of mothers and children by 2015 without a new approach to health care and an additional $20 billion annually, according to a study released Tuesday.

The study, conducted by the scientific-advocacy group Countdown to 2015, found progress lagged mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where an estimated 82 per cent of maternal, newborn and child deaths take place.

The study was released on the eve of a press conference by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to kick off a new global initiative on reproductive, maternal and newborn health.

“This is a multi-layered problem that can be addressed with a combination of many, very simple interventions,” said Dr. Flavia Bustreo, director of The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a group of more than 300 organizations, foundations, institutions and countries hosted by World Health Organization, working to achieve the U.N. goals.

What’s needed is “seamless” continuing care that includes family planning, breast feeding, hand washing, skilled attendants at delivery and childhood immunizations, Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta of Pakistan’s Aga Khan University, who co-chairs of Countdown to 2015, said in a statement.

While countries have almost doubled their donations for maternal, newborn and child health in recent years, the study found there is a funding gap of about $20 billion per year between 2011 and 2015.

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals call for reducing the under-five mortality rate by two thirds and the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters by 2015.

According to UNICEF, 135 countries have child mortality rates of less than 40 per 1,000 live births or have a rate of reduction sufficient to meet the U.N. goal, but 39 show insufficient progress and 18 show no progress or a worsening of child mortality.

Countdown to 2015 estimated 350,000 to 500,000 women still die in childbirth every year.

If the funding gap was filled by 2015, the study found the lives of up to 1 million women, 4.5 million newborn babies and 6.5 million children aged 1 month to 5 years would be saved.

BEIJING – A top Chinese leader called for stepped-up research into vaccines and drugs for hand, foot and mouth disease after 40 children died from outbreaks last month, a state news agency said Saturday.

The Ministry of Health reported 77,756 cases of the disease in March. The number of deaths increased sharply, up from 10 in February.

“Preventing and controlling various infectious diseases such as the hand-foot-mouth disease is a key task,” Xinhua News Agency quoted Vice Premier Li Keqiang as saying.

China sees deadly outbreaks of hand, foot and mouth disease every spring and summer, particularly in rural areas where hygiene is poor. There were 353 deaths from the disease in 2009, according to Health Ministry figures.

Li called for more research into vaccines and drugs to fight the disease, plus stronger prevention and control efforts, Xinhua said. Outbreaks were reported in southern China’s Guangxi Autonomous Region as well as Guangdong, Henan, Hebei and Shandong provinces.

Currently, there is no vaccine or specific treatment for the virus, but most children recover quickly without problems.

Hand, foot and mouth disease typically strikes infants and children and is characterized by fever, mouth sores and a rash with blisters. It is spread by direct contact with nose and throat discharges, saliva, fluid from blisters, or the stool of infected people.

The virus is unrelated to the foot and mouth disease that affects livestock.

The first known conjoined twins born in the Palestinian territories made a rare journey from the impoverished Gaza Strip to a Saudi hospital aboard a plane chartered by the Saudi king.

To get there on Tuesday, the tiny, 11-day-old girls had to overcome a particularly Gazan string of obstacles: blockaded borders, squabbling governments and holiday restrictions in Israel and Egypt.

The twins, who are joined at the chest and share a small intestine, arrived safely for separation surgery in Saudi Arabia and doctors say they have a good chance to survive and lead normal lives.

Khaled al-Marghalani of the Saudi Health Ministry said the girls named Rital and Ritaj were taken to the National Guard Hospital in the capital, Riyadh.

The twins were born on March 27 in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. They weighed four kilograms (8.8 pounds), said Gaza doctor Ayman Abu Amouna, who treated them.

Each girl has her own heart, lungs and other organs, he said, increasing chances they’ll be able to survive apart.

TV footage of the twins in the Gaza hospital shows them sleeping face to face, each in her own diaper, one with an arm around the other’s body.

The birth sparked curiosity in Gaza, and doctors from around the territory came to see a condition they had only read about in books, said Mohammed al-Kashif of Gaza’s Health Ministry.

“This is a very rare and strange case,” he said. “The doctors have never seen anything like it.”

Al-Kashif said the girls’ birth was the first of conjoined twins on record in the Palestinian territories. A spokesman for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry concurred.

Separating the twins requires a skilled surgeon and resources not available in Gaza.

Gaza’s hospitals have suffered under the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after the Islamic militant Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007. Since then, Hamas has ruled Gaza, while the Western-backed Palestinian Authority governs only the West Bank. All attempts at reconciliation have failed.

Al-Kashif said Gaza health officials knew they lacked the resources to separate the twins, so they requested help from the Saudi Embassy in Egypt.

Saudi King Abdullah heard about the twins through the media and ordered they be brought to the kingdom for surgery, said Ahmad al-Sedairi, the Saudi ambassador to Egypt. The king has funded such surgeries in the kingdom from other parts of the world.

But these twins ran into obstacles in getting there. The girls and their father lacked passports, which must be issued by the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority.

Since Israel forbids nearly all Palestinian travel between the territories, the Saudis enlisted the West Bank Health Ministry, which made special arrangements to have the passports issued on Saturday, said health ministry spokesman Omar Nasser.

Since the family hadn’t paid their fees, the health minister himself paid the required $190, Nasser said.

Because Israel was observing the last Sabbath of the Passover holiday, the passports couldn’t be transferred across the Jewish state to Gaza until Sunday, Nasser said. The family received them, but couldn’t travel on Monday because of a separate holiday in Egypt.

Further complications arose because Egypt has minimal contact with Gaza’s Hamas government, preferring to deal with the rival Palestinian Authority.

But on Tuesday, the Saudis intervened again, and Hamas facilitated the twins’ trip to the border, which Egypt opened specially so they could cross.

Tuesday afternoon, the family boarded a special medical plane chartered by the Saudi king. In Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom’s chief surgeon and Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabia will perform the surgery, said al-Sedairi, the ambassador.

The king will pick up the bill.

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Hubbard reported from Ramallah, West Bank. Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, Ashraf Sweilam in Rafah, Egypt, and Maamoun Youssef in Cairo contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on what are billed as fat-melting injections used in spas across the U.S., saying the drugs have not been proven safe or effective.

Lipodissolve injections, a popular nonsurgical alternative to liposuction, are used to dissolve small fat deposits around the legs, arms and belly. The FDA said Wednesday the drugs have not been cleared by federal scientists, as required by law.

The agency issued warning letters to a half-dozen spas that offer the injections, citing them for making unsubstantiated claims about lipodissolve therapy.

“The claims made for your lipodissolve products are false and misleading in that they are not supported by substantial evidence or substantial clinical experience,” states a letter to All About You Medspa in Madison, Ind.

Other spas cited by the FDA included: Pure Med Spa of Boca Raton, Fla., Monarch Med Spa of King of Prussia, Pa., and three others.

The website for Monarch Med Spa claims that, “Rather than go through the pain and discomfort associated with liposuction, patients now have the option of a series of injections with very minimal discomfort.”

Calls to Monarch Med Spa were not immediately returned Wednesday.

FDA regulators called on the spas to stop using such claims and notify the agency within 15 working days of steps they are taking to correct the violations.

“FDA is not aware of any credible scientific evidence to support these claims,” said Kathleen Anderson, an FDA deputy director, on a call with reporters.

Spas that offer the injections say they are safe and effective. But public safety advocates have called for proof and urge patients to think twice before paying thousands of dollars for an unproven procedure.

FDA said it has received reports of permanent scarring, hard lumps and dark spots on their skin after receiving the therapy.

The FDA also issued a warning to a Brazilian company that sells lipodissolve treatments on two websites: zipmed.net and mesoone.com.

Lipodissolve and similar treatments use two chemicals, phosphatidylcholine, or PC, and sodium dioxycholate, or DC. Those chemicals occur naturally in the human body, but that doesn’t necessarily make them safe, said Lenox Hill Hospital plastic surgeon Dr. Jennifer Walden.

“They are used in the metabolic process of our bodies to break down fat, but they were never intended to be extracted, mixed with other ingredients and reinjected to break down fat,” said Walden.

According to Walden, lipodissolve injections are often performed by beauty care specialists who have little or no medical training.

Other ingredients in the cocktails often include the drug Infasurf, which is used to treat respiratory problems in premature infants, according to the FDA.

Lipodissolve formulations are usually mixed at medical spas through a process called compounding, in which a pharmacist combines multiple drugs to create a new formulation, Walden said. The FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine and declined to discuss drug compounding.

“We’re not aware of where these spas are getting their drugs, therefore we cannot comment on the issue of compounding this product,” said FDA pharmacist Suda Shukla.

The FDA urged physicians who are using the drugs cosmetically to submit an approval application for regulatory review.

New research shows that light exercise during pregnancy may improve the future health of a child by controlling weight in the womb.

The New Zealand and U.S. experts claim that overweight or obese moms are more likely to have larger babies which could be at higher risk of health problems later in life. A study of 84 first-time mothers found exercise was associated with slightly lighter babies.

Dr Paul Hofman, from the University of Auckland, says, “Given that large birth size is associated with increased risk of obesity, a modest reduction in birth weight may have long-term health benefits for offspring by lowering this risk later in life.”

The rising weight of the U.K. population over the years has led to a rise in the number of overweight mothers.

(CL/WNWCCB/PAW)