By Maggie Mertens

A coalition of food safety researchers and advocates is throwing some new fuel on the fire in an effort to press Congress to pass a food safety bill. The question is whether there is enough appetite in Congress to pass two health bills this year.

First shot: Bring out the kids. Kids are most at risk for foodborne illness, according to a report by the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention. Half of reported foodborne illness occur in children, the majority in kids younger than 15. Some of the most dangerous pathogens hit kids younger than four the hardest.

Veggies like this have made kids sick (iStockphoto)

Why? Kids are still developing, so they have weaker immune systems and smaller bodies. Not to mention they have less control over their diet than adults, says The Make Our Food Safe Coalition, a group of several public health and consumer organizations that advocate for safer food, including the CFI.

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By Maggie Mertens

When you unfold your swanky Maclaren umbrella-style stroller, you don't expect to sever a child's finger. But a dozen kids reportedly lost fingers that way, prompting the maker of upscale strollers to recall about 1 million of them.

One of the Maclaren strollers being recalled. (CPSC)

The Consumer Product Safety Commission released information on the affected strollers today.

The recall applies to every umbrella stroller Maclaren has distributed in the US since 1999. The specific models are: Volo, Triumph, Quest Sport, Quest Mod, Techno XT, TechnoXLR, Twin Triumph, Twin Techno and Easy Traveller.

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By Maggie Mertens

The bad news about the U.S. health system just keeps coming.

A premature baby, born at 28 weeks, lies in the neonatal intensive care unit of a New York hospital. The CDC says the large number of premature births is one factor behind the high infant mortality rate in the U.S. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Infant mortality in the U.S. is worse than in 29 other countries, including practically all of Europe, Canada and Australia, says a report just out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If there's any good news, it's that the situation in the U.S. hasn't gotten even worse. Based on 2005 data, the U.S. ranked 30th in the world in infant mortality, compared with 29th in 2004 and 23rd in 1990. Back in the good old days of 1960, the nation ranked 12th.

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By Maggie Mertens

With all the attention on the danger malaria and HIV/AIDS pose for kids around the globe, you might be surprised to learn that pneumonia kills more than 2 million children worldwide each year--more than any other disease.

A woman holds her 8-month-old, sick with pneumonia, in Bangalore, India. (Aijaz Rahi/AP )

Pneumonia is a preventable and treatable. But antibiotics and immunizations that we take for granted in the US, just aren't available in parts of the world where pneumonia is a big problem.

Almost all the pneumonia deaths in kids--98 percent--occur in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where vaccines, antibiotics and basic medical care are often hard to come by. The death toll has prompted global health groups to mobilize in a fight against pneumonia in children. They're kicking off the effort today.

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By Joanne Silberner

Antipsychotic drugs used in kids can carry a steep health cost. Many children gain an unhealthy amount of weight after just a few months on the medicines.

Research just published in JAMA found the drugs led to weight gains ranging from about 10 to 19 pounds, depending on the medicine, in about 11 weeks. The analysis looked at popular brand-name drugs Abilify, Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa.

The findings confirm what doctors pretty much already knew about the medicines. So why bother? For one, to tell doctors exactly what they can expect to see. Doctors have been prescribing these drugs more and more to kids -- not just for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, but also for attention deficit disorder.

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By Scott Hensley

The time has come for school meals to join the modern nutritional age.

This lunch tray features healthy choices that could become more common. (Peter Cosgrove/AP)

Pile on the fresh fruit, vegetables and whole grains; cut the salt, saturated fat and trans fat, recommends the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine.

A report just put out by the IOM offers a roadmap for upgrading the nutritional standards for lunches and breakfasts served under the federal program that subsidizes meals for needy kids. Perhaps the most profound piece of advice is placing a limit on calories, which would be a first.

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By Scott Hensley

The appeal of those little pet turtles escaped us, even before we first heard about their role as carriers of disease. Give us a dirty rat any day.

Little pet turtles, like these being inspected at an Atlanta airport in 2006, pose a big salmonella risk--especially for kids. (Ric Feld/AP)

Now our low opinion is bolstered by an in-depth report on a 34-state outbreak of salmonella infections linked to those slimy little reptiles back in 2007 and 2008. Researchers talked with 78 patients or their parents to find out more about the role of turtles in the spread of the dangerous infections. Not a pretty picture.

Most of the folks who got sick--60 percent--were around turtles the week before they fell ill. Sixteen, or 34 percent, said the turtles came from a pet store.

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By Scott Hensley

If you take your kid to the doctor, there's about a 70 percent chance you'll walk out with the child having got a shot or instructions to take some sort of medicine.

Be watchful for kids' reactions to medicines. (iStockphoto.com)

Afterward, there's a possibility of a bad reaction. Nearly 600,000 times a year, kids head to the ER, clinic or doctor's office because of problems with medicines they took, say researchers who crunched more than a decade's worth of federal data. The findings were just published online by the journal Pediatrics.

The youngest kids--newborns to 4-year-olds--accounted for 43 percent of the visits, making them the most likely to run into trouble. Antibiotics were the most common culprit, especially for the youngest kids. Those first doses of antibiotic, often penicillin or related medicines, are the ones that can reveal an allergy. For young children there's a higher risk of errors in medication dosing, and youngsters are more sensitive to those kinds of mistakes, too.

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