The Skillful Mom

How to Treat Baby Acne

The advice of doctors is to ignore baby acne, bathe your baby normally, don't pop the tiny zits and it will go away eventually.  It doesn't hurt the baby, and it's entirely normal.  This is 100% true - IF your baby has baby acne.  But your baby's little white pustules may not be baby acne.  You can treat this type of baby "acne" easily, without hurting your baby in any way. 

What is it that your baby has instead of baby acne?  Thrush.  Thrush is a yeast infection of the skin.  Often you can tell because your baby has a white coating in its mouth that is not easily removed.  However, you can also tell that your baby's acne is actually thrush if you see small white pustules on the skin, often on the face and neck, and around the anus.   Thrush grows in warm, wet environments, so one clue that it's thrush is if you find collections of white pimples behind the ears, under the neck and in folds of skin.  That doesn't mean that collection of zits on his cheeks are baby acne instead of thrush however.  It may still be, especially if your baby's a spitter (those cheeks get wetter more often than you think). 

How to treat this version of "baby acne?"  With probiotic capsules, available at most health food stores and often now in grocery stories as well.  Take a probiotic capsule, break it open and mix a little water with the powder in a small cup.  Then put the paste on the "baby acne" and let it sit.  Do this a few times over a few days and the "baby acne" should go away.  Often babies do have true baby acne caused by the hormones passed to the baby in your breast milk, so don't expect 100% of your baby's pimples to vanish, but those caused by the yeast on his skin will go in 24-48 hours. 

Probiotics are entirely safe for newborn babies and have been shown in studies when ingested daily to improve ezcema with long-term use.  Don't be afraid to put probiotics on your baby's skin.

U.S. vaccine court denies family's autism case and some research you can read to understand why

The Vaccine Court Omnibus proceeding has ruled against three families that claimed a connection between their children's unfortunate development of autism, thimerosal and the MMR vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella).    Two Institute of Medicine Reports dated 2001 and 2004 found no link between the three. What does more recent research on autism and vaccines say?

The most recent research on the link conducted at Columbia University by Dr. Mady Hornig published in October 2008 looked at bowel tissue in 25 autistic children and 13 control children to see if measles, mumps and rubella viral cells were present.  All of the children had GI tract problems and all had been vaccinated.  A 2002 study found traces of the measles virus in the bowel tissue of autistic children.  The 2002 study hypothesized that the live virus from MMR would grow in the intestinal tract and cause damage there, and possibly inflame and damage the central nervous system as well, causing autism.  If this was true, then all the autistic children should have measles in their bowels in the 2008 study as well, and the non-autistic kids should not. 

The researchers found no signficiant differences in the biopsies from autistic children and non-autistic children.  Only one autistic child had measles remnants in the bowel, as did one non-autistic child.

The conclusion: having the measles virus in your body doesn't have any correlation to developing autism, even if you have GI problems. 

REFERENCE:  Splete, Heidi.  Biopsy data refute MMR vaccine and autism link.(Infectious Diseases).

Author(s):Heidi Splete. Pediatric News. 42.10 (October 2008):p18(1).

Editorial Rant: Not Vaccinating Your Kid Is Privilege Not a Right

I have a friend who has a deadly stomach illness that is kept alive by medication not approved by the FDA which relatives ship her from overseas.  Taking medication not approved by the FDA isn't an issue for me: we clearly don't have a omniscient medical society.  However the FDA is there to protect us and we should at least review medications that haven't been approved to see why before we use them.  Desperate situations may take desperate measures.

But I am very perturbed by people falsifying data and also by the recreation of an environment full of preventable but possibly deadly and disabling diseases.  My father lost a lot of his eyesight due to "routine" childhood mumps before there was a vaccine, and I'm not able to say "oh it's just a risk I'll take with my children."  The part that really kills me is babies are the ones who can't get MMR until they're a year, and especially those old enough to not survive solely on breast milk.  They're the ones who are going to be most adversely affected by other people not vaccinating because of autism fear and yet infants have the greatest mortality rate from measles because their little bodies can't handle all the symptoms. And the only treatment is to wait it out and hope.  It's also one thing for wealthy people to "opt out" when the impact of the illnesses on their lives are ameliorated by their good health benefits and access to health care, but they can easily impact the poor who may not have any health care or limited capacity to take time off from work to nurse ailing children or elderly.

This is an issue of an equitable society.  When you don't vaccinate your children, you're making it clear that you and your children are more worthy than other people. 

Extra extra: Data falsified in vaccine scare

From the London Times.  "In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated."

There are two major problems with his data: 1) only one case was discovered after the vaccines, the rest were already known prior to having he vaccines, therefore there cannot be a link between the vaccine and autism in those children. 2) 12 cases is not statistically significant.  The likelihood of random chance in only 12 cases is extremely high, even if there hadn't been data fraud. 

Get your kids vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella.  There is now a measles outbreak in my own city.