Word: risking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...idea that environmental conditions in the womb may have lifelong effects on the fetus is certainly not new. British epidemiologist D.J. Barker first proposed his theory of fetal origins in 1992, arguing that when the fetus doesn't get enough nutrition in utero, for example, an increased risk of future heart disease and diabetes somehow gets "programmed" into his or her development. There wasn't very much data to back Barker's theory at the time, but over the decades, a wealth of animal and human data has suggested it's true. Maternal conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes...
Perhaps the most commonly cited paper is one by researchers at Columbia University, which associated a mother's influenza with her child's risk of mental illness. In that landmark study, researchers collected blood samples from 12,000 pregnant women in Alameda County, California, between 1959 and 1966 and monitored their sons and daughters for more then three decades. Children born to women who had been infected with flu were three to seven times more likely to develop schizophrenia later in life, the study concluded. (See the top 5 swine...
...what is the link between a mother's influenza and her child's cardiac health, physical stature or risk of mental illness? Well, we don't really know. What we do know is that it's probably not the flu virus itself. There is no known biochemical mechanism that links heart disease or other health outcomes to prenatal exposure to flu. And the flu virus, unlike the pathogens that cause herpes, German measles and syphilis, is not teratogenic - that is, it doesn't cause malformations in the fetus, says Dr. Ellen Harrison, the director of obstetrical medicine at the Montefiore...
...weeks into my pregnancy and haven't fallen sick and have been healthy all along, and I don't see the point of introducing a foreign body into my body," says first-time mother Laurie Koch-Smith, 41, in Westchester County, New York, who says she thinks the risk of H1N1 infection has been overhyped...
...success, especially in science, is relative. Yes, as media reports immediately crowed, the vaccine was 31% effective at reducing the risk of HIV infection among the 16,000 healthy volunteers in the study. But that's nowhere near the 70%-to-80% rate that most public-health experts say is the minimum needed for an immunization to be judged worthwhile. Consider also that circumcision can cut the risk of HIV infection nearly twice as effectively...