Pregnant mothers with the highest exposure to pesticides had kids with lower IQ at age 7. Image courtesy of C. G. P. Grey.

Three studies published last week in Environmental Health Perspectives concluded that pesticide exposure in pregnant women is linked to lower IQ scores in their children at age 7. This is pretty scary news for expectant mothers, but what does it mean practically?

Pesticide exposure can come in many forms. In one of the studies done at UC Berkeley, scientists estimated pesticide exposure in the agricultural town of Salinas (Monterey County, CA) by measuring organophosphate metabolites in the mother's urine during and after pregnancy. While these women had slightly higher than average pesticide exposure due to their proximity to farming centers, their levels were not out of range of national averages.

Interestingly, the effect of pesticide exposure on intelligence was only significant before birth; childhood exposure to pesticides did not appear to have an impact on intelligence scores.

The other two studies were conducted in more urban environments in New York City. In these studies done by researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center and Columbia University, pesticide exposure was determined by measuring either urine metabolites or umbilical cord levels of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, respectively. Intelligence scores were significantly lower in children whose mothers had been exposed to the most pesticides while pregnant, indicating that these results are consistent across populations and not limited to farming communities.

In urban populations, pesticide exposure often comes from eating crops that have been treated with pesticides. People can also come into contact with pesticides in home gardens, schools and other public buildings with landscaping.

The good news is that use of organophosphate pesticides have declined steadily over the past decade, declining approximately 50 percent since 2001. Also, though choosing organic produce will help decrease pesticide exposure through food, consumers shouldn't feel they need to switch to 100% organic to protect their children.

Every year the Environmental Working Group publishes the “Dirty Dozen,” a list of the conventional produce likely to contain the highest amount of pesticides. It also publishes a list of the cleanest conventional foods, “The Clean 15,” with the lowest pesticide levels. The researchers found that the impact of pesticides on intelligence scores is dose dependent, meaning any reduction in exposure can be beneficial.

While making these decisions it is important to realize that eating a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables is one of the most important thing you can do for the health of your developing baby. You should not drastically restrict the different kinds of produce you consume while pregnant. Being smart about which organic foods you purchase, and carefully washing the conventional produce you continue to buy can make a big impact on your exposure.

Are you worried about pesticide exposure? How do you handle it?

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Prudent, persistent children ultimately live longer than their happy-go-lucky peers. Image courtesy of Meanest Indian.

Happiness is tied to good health later in life, but childhood happiness does not predict longevity—in fact it does the opposite, according to a new report.

Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin, researchers from UC Riverside, analyzed and supplemented data collected by the late Stanford University psychologist Louis Terman in a new book titled The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study.

Terman followed 1,500 children from age 10 beginning in 1921, tracking them through their lives and collecting many details and data points including work life, relationships, personality, hobbies, pets, education and professional successes.

“Probably our most amazing finding was that personality characteristics and social relations from childhood can predict one's risk of dying decades later,” Friedman said in a press release.

But the findings aren't what most people would expect. The researchers discovered that the most cheerful children ended up taking more risks with their health as they got older.

“We found that as a general life orientation, too much of a sense that 'everything will be just fine' can be dangerous because it can lead one to be careless about things that are important to health and long life,” said Friedman. “Prudence and persistence, however, led to a lot of important benefits for many years.”

Other of Friedman's findings are counter to conventional wisdom as well, like the idea that less work and stress contributes to a longer life. Those who were the most productive and committed to their jobs lived significantly longer than those who took it easy.

“It turns out happiness is not a root cause of good health. Instead happiness and health go together because they have common roots,” according to Friedman.

Friedman's work implies that good decisions are more important than disposition for health and longevity, meaning that any one can learn to make better choices and take steps to lengthen their life.

Workaholics rejoice!

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Kids at schools with the School Lunch Initiative ate more vegetables, fruits and demonstrated greater knowledge of nutrition and health.

A recent report issued by scientists from the Atkins Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley examined the impact of the School Lunch Initiative (SLI) on the eating behaviors of children transitioning from elementary school to middle school. The SLI is sponsored by the Chez Panisse Foundation, founded in 1996 by Alice Waters.

The SLI is a system-wide program that includes cooking and gardening classes, integration of school lunch with food and nutrition curriculum, and improvements in campus food and dining services. The report examined the eating behavior of children at schools enriched with the SLI compared with children at schools with similar foods but without the program. The research followed fourth and fifth graders for three years to see the effects of the program during the transition from elementary school to middle school, since this is a time when healthy eating often deteriorates in children.

According to the report, SLI may have the potential to reverse the deterioration of healthy eating habits that children typically exhibit as they transition to adolescence. Compared with children in control schools, kids at schools with the SLI ate more vegetables, fruits and demonstrated greater knowledge of nutrition and health. Students in the SLI also showed greater preference for vegetables, particularly green leafy vegetables. Over the same period, children in schools without the SLI decreased their intake of fruits and vegetables both in and out of school. These trends were still apparent one year after completion of the SLI, when the students were in seventh grade.

The report is the first examination of the effectiveness of integrated school lunch programs on the healthy eating behaviors of children over an extended period. With the growing epidemic of childhood obesity, comprehensive school lunch programs have tremendous potential to improve the health and habits of developing children.

Though body mass index (BMI) improvements were not found in the current study, small sample size and measurement limitations may have made changes statistically undetectable. Since the trends observed in the eating habits of children in the SLI would predict a decreased risk for obesity, further studies are warranted to pursue the value of the program for improving health and body weight.

With the recent attention on the importance of school lunch programs (October 11-15 has been declared National School Lunch Week by the USDA), data on programs like SLI will be critical and could serve as a model for more broad government programs to improve nutrition at schools.

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By Deirdre Kennedy.

It is well known that strokes can happen in the elderly. But what many people don't know is that babies suffer strokes. So an entire month, May, has been dedicated to childhood stroke awareness. Infants often don't show the same symptoms as adults and because babies can't tell us when they're having problems moving or thinking. There is just a lot less known about infant strokes.

A stroke happens when the blood supply is cut off from a part of the brain or a blood vessel bursts and causes a build up of pressure in the brain. Doctors can tell that a child has had at stroke as an infant by taking an MRI of the brain. Researchers at UCSF Children's Hospital are working to develop early treatments for babies who suffer from stroke before it causes long-term brain problems. Donna Ferreiro, Chief of Child Neurology at UCSF and one of the nation's leading experts on neurological complications in babies, says a baby with a stroke can look completely normal.

"Often those strokes get missed in the nursery because these are babies who generally look well, they're cherubic, they weigh the right amount, they feed ok…It's not until they're older and then all of a sudden the parents notice that they're only reaching with one hand, and not both hands like they should, or that when they try to stand up and walk they topple to one side".

A stroke can continue to cause brain problems over time. It may cause seizures, which researchers believe, can damage the brain further. Like strokes, seizures are also hard to notice with the naked eye. Babies don't have big shaking movements like adults. They may have a subtle eye or head movement, some lip smacking or bicycling movement of the legs, says Ferreiro. By monitoring the brain waves of babies who have had birth problems or are born premature, doctors can intervene with drugs and other therapies. Both strokes and seizures can also happen in utero but there are no established treatments for newborn or fetal strokes yet.

UCSF is heading up an international consortium to test new drugs for babies. One involves using a growth factor called erythropoietin that promotes the formation of new blood cells. Ferreiro says it has been shown in the lab to make new neurons grow. You can find out much more about current treatments being used on newborns with brain defects, by listening to our Quest radio report, Baby Brain Development.

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The paint on this piggy bank tested for lead at 7253 parts per million (ppm); that is 11 times higher than the legal limit for lead paint.

Editor's Note: This week we have the first of two special reports on lead.

As a parent, there is a lot to worry about when it comes to the safety of my kids. Lead wasn't high on my list. Lead poisoning in children has dropped significantly in recent decades since the ban on lead-based paint in homes and the phase-out of leaded gasoline. Then came the record toy recalls of 2007, where millions of imported items coated in lead paint and made by household names like Mattel and Fisher Price violated the 30-year-old lead law.

Suddenly, parents, including me, eyed the toys in our homes and on store shelves with suspicion. Extensive research links lead exposure in children to lower IQ scores, neurological and behavioral problems, even anemia.

The toy recalls prompted congress to pass the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

The Act not only lowers limits for lead and bans certain kinds of phthalates–it makes manufacturers and distributors accountable for products sold to American consumers by requiring items to be certified by third-party labs. But the testing, or certification piece of the Act, was postponed for a year. That raised a lot of questions for me as a reporter and as a parent.

I contacted the Center for Environmental Health, which researches lead, and other toxics, in consumer items and has sued manufacturers and distributors for violating standards.

CEH and KQED were interested in looking at what's sold at discount chains and 99 cent stores because of the history of previous recalls. CEH, through its regular spot testing, also thought that many of the larger retail outlets seem to have improved their process to weed out lead in children's items after the 2007 recalls.

I got some tips from CEH about potentially problematic products to look for. We purchased about 200 items and then CEH did the first round of testing using an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) device. The XRF is a handy tool used by a lot of commercial lead inspectors. It shoots high-energy x-rays at the item and sends back a chemical analysis, including the lead content.

Most items that exceeded the lead limits (600 parts per million) set by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act using the XRF device were then sent to a federally-accredited lab, MACS in Hayward, for detailed testing. At the lab, the parts or components that exceeded the lead limits were cut or scraped off and dissolved in an acid solution. Then tests were run to determine the lead content.

View a slide show of several of the items that violate the new lead limits below. We've also put together a list of items that violate the new lead limits, along with the test results.

So how can parents keep leaded toys away from kids? In addition to avoiding vinyl products, stay away from metal jewelry.

If you can, choose natural wood toys instead of painted items, especially if they are in yellow. Check the recall list posted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Many companies sell home lead test kits for consumer products. They're not 100-percent reliable and can give false negatives-and false positives too. If you're really concerned about your child's lead level, the best thing to do is to get a blood lead test.

Listen to the Playing with Lead – Part 1 radio report online.

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The rate of asthma in children younger than five increased 160
percent between 1980 and 1994.

But asthma researchers are still very much working to figure out what, besides changes in the way asthma is diagnosed, might account for the 160 percent rise in the rate of asthma in children younger than 5 that took place between 1980 and 1994. Our QUEST TV story looks at one interesting hypothesis, called the "hygiene hypothesis." The hypothesis proposes that as certain types of bacteria have become less and less present in our lives, we have developed allergic diseases in response.

I also asked researchers if their findings allowed them to make recommendations to parents on what they might be able to do to help reduce the risk of their children developing asthma. Although our two interviewees were careful to caution how little scientists know with certainty at this point, they were willing to venture some advice, which you'll see in our Web-only video.

Watch the Asthma television story online.

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You're as likely to be struck by lightning
as to have a severe reaction to a vaccine.

I was reading an article in Time last week about parents not vaccinating their children. The story was about how this phenomenon is becoming more widespread.

These kinds of stories are weird to me because vaccines are pretty safe. The risk of an adverse side effect is incredibly small. For example, the risk for anaphylaxis from the Hepatitis B Virus vaccination is around 1 in 600,000. This is about the same risk as being struck by lightning (1 in 700,000).

Of course, the article wasn't talking about known risks. Instead, it was referring to a hypothesized link between vaccines and autism.

People proposed this link when they noticed that cases of autism and the number of vaccinations were rising at the same time. Of course, just because two things happen to occur at the same time, this does not mean they are causally linked. For example, the increase in global temperature is not related to the decrease in the world's populations of pirates (despite what the Pastafarians say).

So how could an increased number of vaccinations cause an increase in the number of cases of autism? I have seen two ideas put forth. The first is that thimerosal is to blame. The second is that there are so many vaccinations now that we are stressing out the body's immune system. Most likely neither idea is valid.

Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative that used to be used in vaccines. Even though there haven't been any good studies on the effects of thimerosal on brain development, everyone knows mercury is bad for the brain. So the idea behind thimerosal makes some sense.

Back in 2001, vaccine manufacturers decided to eliminate thimerosal from their vaccines. We would predict, then, that cases of autism should go down significantly if thimerosal was linked to autism. They haven't. In fact, in one California study, cases have continued to climb. So thimerosal is most likely not to blame.

Another point that has been made is that there are so many vaccines now that we are stressing out our bodies' immune systems. Again, this concern is unfounded.

Vaccines are injections of viral proteins. Our bodies see the proteins and raise antibodies to them. Then when a virus invades, we have antibodies that recognize the virus and target it for destruction.

It is the number of viral proteins that matter in terms of taxing the body's immune system and not the number of vaccinations. All of the current vaccines put together do not have as many viral proteins as the old smallpox vaccine (150 vs. 200). So the number of vaccines is unlikely to be the issue.

What all of this means is that vaccines are probably not responsible for the significant increase in the number of cases of autism. What is responsible? No one knows for sure.

It may be that the rise just comes from all of us recognizing the symptoms more. Or it could be due to some cause we don't know about or understand.

What we do know is that vaccines save many lives. I assume no one wants to go back to the early 20th century when polio epidemics swept the country. For example, 2,500 cases of polio ended up at one Los Angeles hospital between May and November of 1934. And in 1952, the U.S. had 21,000 cases of paralytic polio.

We can prevent this sort of thing from happening by making sure everyone is vaccinated. And yet there are people who choose to hide behind the people who take the miniscule risk of getting vaccinated.

Is this a matter of free choice? Should parents be allowed to opt out of vaccinating their children even if it risks society at large?

One idea, I suppose, is to have people who choose not to be vaccinated to sign a waiver saying they accept full responsibility for their actions. In practice this would mean that health insurance and the government would not be responsible for their children's health care bills if they become ill with one of the diseases they refused to be vaccinated against.

And if your infant, grandma, or immuno-suppressed cousin came down with a disease these folks refused to be vaccinated against, then you could sue the un-vaccinated for damages. The common good isn't enough to encourage these folks. Perhaps threats to their pocketbook will be.

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I'm the third from left to right.

Every year, during the decade or so that I was a Girl Guide in Costa Rica, my fellow guides and I would trek up the steep hill, usually carrying our own sleeping bags and supplies. Once we got to the top, we chopped up wood with machetes and cooked over open fires. We woke up at the crack of dawn and showered in icy-cold water. During the rainy season, we got very wet. During the dry season, we got sunburned.

Camping took precedence over almost everything else. The day I graduated from high school I was in the middle of an international camping trip with girl guides from around the world. My parents drove up the hill, put some ointment on my sunburned ears and whizzed me over to the theater to pick up my diploma. Then they drove me back up the hill to finish the event.

My childhood home in Costa Rica, with the
campground ridge in the backgroundOur trips were always full of that sense of adventure you can only experience as a kid when you're out in nature and away from your parents. We ran up and down the mountains, crawled in muddy pits, climbed trees and cut ourselves with our machetes. By the end of our trips we were always completely worn out. Once, I sat on my bed and fell asleep with my backpack still on my back.

But all this happiness came to a crashing halt. On Aug. 20, 1988, when I was 16, a young couple my age was murdered in a coffee field on the road to the campground. My sister and I were supposed to go camping a few days later. But my parents wouldn't hear of it, no matter how much we begged. And who could blame them? The way he had killed his 14 victims was so cruel that it was impossible to incorporate his methods into his moniker, à la The Boston Strangler. So the press simply called him el psicópata, The Psychopath. Fear of el psicópata marked my adolescence and early adult life.

What was near-miraculous was that in time I was allowed to go camping again at Campo Escuela Iztarú. This photo of me is proof, I guess, although it doesn't make any sense, because my parents were so fearful of everything when it came to their daughters. Perhaps they let me go because they both had good memories of the time they spent outdoors, my mother as a little girl camping all summer long in New England and my father as a teenager pedaling up and down Costa Rica's mountains to make it to the Pacific coast by sundown. I'm so grateful to them for overcoming their fears (or not – I'm sure they had many sleepless nights). Those fleeting moments of freedom and that sense that anything is possible that I felt when I was camping are so much a part of me that I can't even really consider them memories. So thank you, Mummy and Daddy, for letting go and letting us go up the mountain.

Watch the "Nature Deficit Disorder" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also, please share your own photos of childhood nature experiences in our Flickr Photo Pool.

Gabriela Quirós is a Segment Producer for KQED-TV, and is the producer for this story.

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