Conversations… | with Dr. Greene

A concerned father recently contacted me about the no-added-mercury flu vaccine. He had called the manufacturers who admitted that there were still trace amounts of mercury in the vaccine.

Asthma in children is increasing around the globe. It.s not unusual for it to be a country.s number one reason for a child to be hospitalized. Researchers from Australia (a continent where asthma is the leading cause of childhood hospitalization) have completed an important, long study. They followed over two thousand children from birth until the children were 6 years old.

Together, more than 400 brave parents have given us an invaluable treasure: they have shared with us the painful, intimate wisdom they learned going though a devastating personal journey. Learning that your child is terminally ill from cancer is a crushing blow. Treatments have failed; hopes have withered. And you are faced with a terrible decision: should you tell your child what you have learned?

Babies hear dramatically different things in their two different ears, according to a startling study published in the September 10, 2004 Science. This could change our understanding of the fundamentals of hearing.

Changes in the home environment can be as powerful as medications in treating asthma, according to an exciting study in the September 9, 2004 New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers in the Inner-City Asthma Study Group followed almost 1,000 elementary school children with allergic asthma severe enough to require at least one hospitalization or two emergency visits.

Is it dangerous for kids to sleep with the lights on? Lots of interesting news has been coming out of the 2004 Children with Leukemia conference in London. We.re making great progress in leukemia, but also falling behind. Even though cure rates are climbing, more children are getting leukemia than ever before .

What can take otherwise vibrant, healthy teens and permanently give them the lung capacities of 50-year-olds? Air pollution! Perhaps spare the air days should be called spare the children days. The air in some cities is so dirty that it hinders normal lung development. A landmark study in the September 9, 2004 New England Journal of Medicine followed 1,759 children from twelve different California communities with widely different air pollution levels.

Wouldn’t it be great to have an effective lice treatment that didn.t require marathon housecleaning, obsessive nit-combing, or dousing in toxic pesticides? A new treatment developed by Menlo Park dermatologist Dale Lawrence Pearlman may be a dream come true for parents, teachers, and kids. Nuvo, the new non-toxic lotion, is applied wet and then blown dry with a hair dryer to create a shrink wrap.

It seems like kids these days get so many shots. One of the recent additions to the routine vaccine schedule is the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV or Prevnar). Pneumococcal bacteria are the leading bacterial cause of ear infections in the United States, as well as of several serious infections such as meningitis and pneumonia.