Babies

At 5 weeks old, with a crown of dark hair and big blue eyes, Anastasia Garcia is one of the newest faces of the economic crisis. She was born homeless. "When we are lucky enough to be settled, we will tell her that things were not always as easy as you may think," said Angela Garcia, 26, laying the infant down in a crib at the Broward Outreach Center in Pompano Beach, Fla.

Many parents slather Vicks VapoRub on their sniffling, coughing kids when they're sick -- because, by gosh, that's what their parents did to them. For children under the age of 2, the folksy remedy could be dangerous, researchers warned today.

Even as the birth of octuplets at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center drew attention and applause from around the country, questions arose Tuesday about whether the mother's doctors did enough to prevent such a risky pregnancy. The chances that the eight babies born Monday were conceived naturally are infinitesimal, infertility specialists and doctors in maternal-fetal medicine say.

When a stray bullet from a gang member's gun struck 3-week-old Luis Angel Garcia in the heart and killed him in 2007, police, politicians and ordinary Angelenos expressed outrage over the infant's death. But they weren't the only ones. Members of the Mexican Mafia, the notorious prison-based organization that authorities say controls Latino street gangs, demanded that those responsible be killed, according to an indictment unsealed this week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

After a vigorous debate among experts, the state medical board this week dismissed accusations of negligence against a perinatologist at Kaiser Permanente's Fresno Medical Center who was involved in two tragic deliveries. The Medical Board of California had accused Dr. Hamid Safari of mishandling the procedures. One child died in the delivery room in April 2005, and the other died months after her January 2004 birth.

You sit down to write a novel, and soon the characters are crowding around demanding attention with the urgency and self-obsession of 3-year-olds. A few weeks in, and you can no longer shake them. In fact, nothing shuts them up until the manuscript is ripped from your hands on deadline, when you go from total control to utter powerlessness with one click of the Send button. Goodbye! Good luck! After that comes the weird silence of the empty nest, with its combination of freedom and loneliness.

Infants and toddlers exposed to baby lotions, shampoos and powders carry high concentrations of hormone-altering chemicals in their bodies that might have reproductive effects, according to a new scientific study of babies born in Los Angeles and two other U.S. cities. The research, to be published today in the medical journal Pediatrics, found that as the use of baby care products rose, so did the concentration of phthalates, which are used in many fragrances.

Before actor Dennis Quaid went to bed Nov. 18, he gave one last call to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where his newborn twins were being treated for staph infections. "Oh, they're fine," Quaid recalled a nurse telling him about 9 p.m. "They're just fine." Actually, they weren't. Earlier that day, nurses had mistakenly given Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace 1,000 times the recommended dose of the blood thinner heparin.

New studies in infants show that the mercury used as a preservative in vaccines is cleared from the body at least 10 times faster than researchers had previously believed, a finding that casts further doubt on the theory that the preservative causes autism. Researchers had believed that the ethyl mercury in the preservative thimerosal is metabolized in much the same way as the methyl mercury found in fish and other sources.

The use of antiretroviral drugs by mother or baby for several months after delivery can significantly reduce the risk of transmitting the AIDS virus during breast-feeding, researchers reported this week. Public health officials have had great success blocking HIV transmission to newborns using the drugs AZT and nevirapine about the time of delivery, but they have had few tools to prevent transmission through breast-feeding.