A mother's depression and anxiety from conception through the first year of the baby's life is associated with negative developmental outcomes through adolescence, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

That could affect a lot of women: About 15% to 23% of women worldwide experience anxiety during pregnancy, while 15% deal with anxiety after childbirth. Depression through pregnancy is estimated to affect 10% of women, and 15% face postpartum depression. The burden is greater for women who are experiencing poverty or are teen parents, according to Postpartum Support International.

For the baby, the perinatal stage — which is defined as the time from conception through pregnancy (antenatal), birth and the first year of the baby's life (postnatal) — is "a time of unprecedented growth and sensitivity," the study said. That's when exposures and early life experiences may modify development starting from when he or she is in the womb to that critical first year as a growing child and onward.

A mother experiencing depression and anxiety before and after birth was moderately linked with her child's deficits in language and cognitive and motor development in infancy.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

The rate of suicide among those aged 10 to 24 increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise occurred in most states, with 42 experiencing significant increases.

"It's a real trend that has been demanding, for a while, a serious public health and research effort to understand what is happening and why," said Anna Mueller, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in adolescents. "I don't buy that it's just social media, which is one of the explanations that I most consistently see."

"We absolutely need to be really careful to not think about suicide as just a white kid problem," Mueller said. "It's absolutely not. Kids across racial and ethnic groups and sexual orientations experience suicidal thoughts, and even attempt at significant rates."

But Mueller cautioned not to lose sight of the fact that suicidal thoughts are not uncommon, especially among young people.

Much of Orange County is transporting homeless people into Santa Ana, placing an unfair burden on that city to address the county’s homelessness crisis, city officials allege in court documents filed Monday.

The filing marks the city’s latest effort seeking legal relief over this issue. And this time, officials have some numbers and additional data that they hope will prove their point that many other cities in the county are “dumping” their homeless in Santa Ana.

“We now have better evidence that the county did not stop this practice. It’s just being done in other ways,” Santa Ana City Manager Kristine Ridge said.

Santa Ana officials and residents have long complained that they’ve become a dumping ground for the homeless.

Santa Ana officials said transfers from other communities have led to to a disproportionate number of homeless people in their city. From 2017 to 2019, homelessness in Orange County increased by 43 %; but in Santa Ana, homelessness increased by 77 %, according to the lawsuit. As of April 2019, more than 25 % of the county’s homeless lived in Santa Ana.

A new report from researchers at MIT and University of Oxford shows current social distancing guidelines may no longer be effective. Researchers are warning that in some cases, the 6-foot rule is not great enough.

The recalled hand sanitizer list from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is growing. In June, the FDA warned consumers against using hand sanitizer that contains the toxic ingredient methanol. Now the agency says there’s another toxin showing up in hand sanitizers that is causing concern.

It’s called 1-propanol, and the FDA on Wednesday said in a new warning that the ingredient can be “toxic and life-threatening when ingested.” The biggest concern, the FDA says, is with young children accidentally ingesting the toxin or adults or teens who drink it as an alcohol substitute.

A sign at the entrance of a metal-cutting shop in Kentwood, a suburb of Grand Rapids, asks customers to “remove your mask or raise both hands high” to avoid being mistaken as a robber.

The sign in front of Tubergen Cutting Tools Inc. reads “In responce [sic] to Gretch, attention: This facility is protected by armed employees for your safety! Remove your mask or raise both hands high and keep um up! Don’t be mistaken as a robber! Thank you, management. Open carry still welcome.”

Adults and children in the United States have been blinded, hospitalized, and, in some cases, even died after drinking hand sanitizers contaminated with the extremely toxic alcohol methanol, the Food and Drug Administration reports.

In an updated safety warning, the agency identified five more brands of hand sanitizer that contain methanol, a simple alcohol often linked to incorrectly distilled liquor that is poisonous if ingested, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin.

The number of newly reported coronavirus cases worldwide hit a daily record this week with more than 100,000 new cases over the last 24 hours, according to the World Health Organization.

Almost two-thirds of the cases were reported in just four countries, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference Wednesday at the agency’s Geneva headquarters. “We still have a long way to go in this pandemic.”

The majority of new confirmed cases are coming from the Americas, followed by Europe, according to WHO’s daily report. The U.S. reported 45,251 new cases on Tuesday, according to the agency. Russia had the second-most reported cases Tuesday at 9,263, according to WHO.

A video of a giant hornet attacking a mouse has emerged following news a "murder" species has invaded the U.S.

In the clip, the hornet pursues the mouse for roughly a minute, remaining attached as the mouse attempts to bat it off. The mouse gets weaker and eventually gives up. At which point the hornet flies off and the mouse lies still breathing heavily.

Oprah Winfrey has warned African Americans to take the coronavirus outbreak seriously because it is 'ravaging our community' and 'taking us out'.

The TV mogul said the coronavirus outbreak continued to have a devastating impact on black communities across the United States but that people weren't getting the message about the risk of asymptomatic carriers.

Speaking to CBS This Morning on Tuesday, Winfrey said it was important for black people to understand that pre-existing conditions including diabetes and asthma put them at greater risk if they contracted the virus.

She also voiced concerns for her own health, saying she was staying indoors because she suffered from pneumonia last year and that her 'lungs never really fully cleared'.

Hello, lost generation.

The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.

Recessions are not good for anyone, from infants to the elderly. Nor are pandemics. Americans born during this calamity will be more likely to have low birth weights and to be in poor health generally, with lifelong effects. Children will not just endure this trauma—manifested in lost months of schooling, skipped meals, housing volatility, and increased abuse—but will carry it with them. Zoomers graduating into the recession will die sooner because of it, suffering increased incidence of heart disease, lung cancer, liver disease, and drug overdoses in the coming decades; they will also earn less over the course of their lives. The elderly are likely to be the most economically insulated group but are facing the most terrifying health consequences.

Among adults the news isn’t good, either. And particularly not for those youngish-but-no-longer-young adults who came into this crisis already vulnerable, already fragile, already over-indebted and underpaid. The Millennials were left with scars during the Great Recession that never quite healed, and inherited an economy structured to manufacture precarity for the young and the poor and black and brown, and to perpetuate wealth for the old and the rich and white.

As much of the world settles into a new routine of social distancing, couples are likely to have a lot more free time at home to snuggle together.

At first blush, you might think couples with some extra time on their hands would do things that could lead to a stork visiting nine months from now.
Yet with US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin warning of dire scenarios and a possible 20% unemployment rate, couples whose jobs are vulnerable in this economy are likely to think again about kicking off their parenting journeys this spring.

Then there's the possibility of more couples splitting up. One marriage registry official in China said he saw a quarantine-related spike in divorces, showing that more time in closed quarters may be doing some couples more harm than good.

But for couples weathering this storm together, is this a time when many will choose to add to their brood?

San Francisco, which once championed reusable shopping bags to reduce plastic waste, has banned the environmentally friendly totes in an effort to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

An amendment to the city’s Department of Health’s social-distancing protocols requires that stores restrict customers from bringing their own bags, mugs or other reusable items from home.

How the ban affects city's prohibition on plastic bags is not clear — the ordinance did not address that regulation. In 2007, San Francisco became the first major city in the nation to outlaw single-use plastic bags.

For parasitic worms of the genus Anisakis, life typically goes like this: after floating through the ocean in an egg, they hatch as wriggling larvae with a peculiar desire—to be eaten. Small crustaceans like krill gobble up the larvae, and those infested krill are then eaten by squid or small fish, which are devoured by bigger fish until they finally earn their nickname, whale worms, and end up in the bellies of whales or dolphins where they complete their life cycle by laying eggs that are subsequently ejected in the hosts’ feces.

But sometimes, those big fish full of the worms—like salmon or herring—get intercepted by fishers and end up in markets. Although fish suppliers and sushi chefs diligently remove parasite-infected fish from their wares, occasionally one of those little buggers may wind up in your sushi roll.

Now, new research finds the global population of those parasitic worms, commonly found in sushi and other kinds of uncooked fish, has exploded in recent decades. The worms are 283-times more common than they were roughly 40 years ago, according to a new paper published in Global Change Biology.