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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending December 8, 2019. 

Being born is weird

Many people are anxious about their deaths, while not many people give much thought to their births. But the fact that we are all born at some point–that we weren’t in the world, and then all of a sudden we were–and that we can’t remember our birth, infancy, or much of early childhood can be kind of disconcerting when you stop to consider it. Read more here.

This is important for you because it’s just something to ruminate over during that 3am feeding.

Baby reindeer

According to Carin Anne Bondar, a biologist in Britsh Columbia, “Newborn reindeer immediately follow their mother after birth. Baby reindeer must remain in very close contact for protection. If they can’t keep up, they die.” Read more of what she has to say about baby animals here, and about the new film A Reindeer’s Journey here.

This is important for you because A Reindeer’s Journey and Frozen 2 could make for quite the wintry double feature. 

Vaccinate your baby (and yourself)

Yet again, any link between vaccines and autism has been soundly disproven. Such a shame that researchers’ limited time and money is still being spent on this. Read more here.

This is important for you because people who refuse vaccinations, in spite of all of the evidence demonstrating how essential they are to public health, have caused a dangerous global measles outbreak. Vaccinate your kids and yourself.

More atrazine (and chlorpyrifos and pyrethroids)

The Environmental Protection Agency has just increased the allowable level of the herbicide/endocrine disruptor atrazine in our water–by fifty percent. It is the third herbicide/pesticide whose use the agency has deregulated under President Trump. It is harmful to aquatic wildlife, and has been linked to reproductive disorders and birth defects in humans. Read more here

This is important for you because it is in our power to dictate how our government treats our planet, our country, our bodies: make sure to vote.

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was What You Must Know About Bassinets and Cribs. Read it here.

Diana Gitig
Dr. Diana Gitig has a Ph.D. in cell biology and genetics from Cornell University, and has been writing about issues in biology – from molecular biology to cancer to immunology to neuroscience to nutrition to agriculture - for the past fifteen years. She has three teenaged children.

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