According to a new study, a group of compounds that are used in a variety of products, from microwave popcorn to water-resistant clothing, may actually prevent childhood vaccinations from working properly.

The study found that children who had higher concentrations of the compounds called perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) in their blood had lower immune responses to diphtheria and tetanus vaccinations. An insufficient immune response to a vaccine can mean that the child is more vulnerable to catching a disease despite the fact that they've been vaccinated against it.

In fact, the levels of antibodies in the blood of some children exposed to PFCs showed that they were no longer protected against these diseases by age 7.

Dr. Philippe Grandien of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, who led the study, said:

"When we take our kids to the doctor's office to get their shots, we expect that the vaccines are going to work. What we found was that there was an increasing risk that they didn’t work if the kids had been exposed to the PFCs."

Most pregnant women are able to find out the gender of their unborn baby between 18 and 22 weeks during a routine, mid-pregnancy ultrasound, and invasive testing can reveal gender even earlier at around 11 weeks. But women may soon be able to find out whether they are carrying a boy or a girl as early as five weeks, after scientists have developed a pioneering, new non-invasive test.

A team at Chenil General Hospital in Seoul, South Korea, found that various ratios of two enzymes, which can be extracted from a pregnant mother's blood, indicate the baby's gender as early as five or six weeks.

Dr. Hyun Mee Ryu, the study's lead author, said that knowing the sex early is important if the mother is a carrier of a X-chromosome gene that can cause a disease such as hemophilia or muscular dystrophy. Female fetuses are either carriers of the disease or are free from it, but a male fetus has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease and parents could choose to abort the pregnancy.

The researchers also warn:

"This method might promote the potential for sex selection. Therefore, there should be careful consideration about the use of this analytical tool in clinical situations."

While drinking regularly during pregnancy is known to increase the odds of children having fetal alcohol syndrom, scientists have now discovered that the risk to a woman's baby is highest if they consume alcohol in the seventh to 12th week of pregnancy.

Haruna Sawada Feldman from the University of California, San Diego, lead a research team studying nearly 1,000 women during their pregnancies over three decades. They found that drinking during the second half of their first trimester was linked to growth deficiencies in weight and height, as well as facial deformities that are the tell-tale signs of fetal alcohol syndrom disorders (FASD).

For each daily drink, a woman's baby was found to be 25 percent more likely to have an abnormally shaped lip, 12 percent more likely to have a smaller-than-normal head, and 16 percent more likely to have a low birth weight.

Study co-author Professor Philip May of the University of North Carolina said:

According to new research, IVF babies born from frozen embryos are heavier and result in longer pregnancies than those born from fresh embryos.

The act of freezing embryos allows couples to have several cycles of IVF with eggs that have been collected during one round of treatment. Couples can then use up their fresh embryos before moving on to frozen ones at a later time.

But research now shows that frozen embryo transfer in IVF may lead to healthier babies because they're more lightly to have a better birth weight and not be born prematurely.

The study involved measuring the weight and length of gestation for 384 babies born after a fresh embryo transfer and 108 born after frozen embryo transfer. All of the babies were single births, and no twin or triplet births were included in the study. Babies born from frozen embryos were on average 253g heavier than those born from fresh embryos.

The proportion of low birth weight babies was also lower among those born from frozen embryos (3.7 percent compared to 10.7 percent born from fresh embryos). Furthermore, the frozen embryo babies tended to have a longer gestation period (.65 weeks longer).

You're not imagining things: there are more twin babies born each year than ever before. In the United States, one out of every 30 babies born is a twin.

The U.S. twin birth rate rose by 76 percent in 2009 since 1980, when just one in 53 babies was a twin. Experts attribute the climb to older mothers and fertility treatments.

Joyce Martin, an epidemiologist who co-authored the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that was released on Wednesday, says:

'When people say it seems like you see more twins nowadays, they're right."

Some increase was expected as more women than ever are waiting until they are over the age of 30 to have babies, and for some unknown reason, mothers in their 30s are more likely to have twins than younger or older women. Martin said that as much as one-third of the increase can be attributed to that. The rest of the rise is said to be due to fertility drugs and treatments.

Martin said:

'You have a double whammy going on. There are more older moms and more widespread use of fertility-enhancing therapies."

More than half of children aged three to five years old in the United States attend daycare centers, nursery schools or preschools, but due to pressures from both the state and parents to focus on pre-academic learning, those children aren't getting enough physical activity, say Ohio daycare providers. A survey of staff at daycare centers in Ohio revealed that possible playground hazards, boring play equipment, and a focus on classroom learning have children spending too little time being involved in physical activity while in daycare.

Researchers surveyed 49 child care providers in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area about potential barriers to kids' physical activity.

Kristen Copeland, a professor at Cincinnati Children's Hopsital Medical Center who led the study, says that physical activity is important for the 3 to 5-year-old age group to help fight obesity and promote normal development. She says children are "still learning how to skip, how to play with balls, how to share and take turns. But the teachers were saying they were pressured by the parents and somewhat by state early learning standards to emphasize classroom learning."

According to the results of new research, babies born to mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), a type of diabetes brought on by pregnancy, and who is poor is at a much greater risk for eventually developing childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children of mothers who had GDM during pregnancy were found to be at 14 times greater risk of developing childhood ADHD than to children exposed to neither poverty nor GDM.

Researchers compared the offspring of mothers both with and without GDM in an economically diverse sample of 212 parents of either "at risk" children or "typically developing" children. At the time of the study, the children were between 3 and 4 years of age. Comparisons were done using an ADHD rating scale.

What the researchers found was that "at risk" children had at least six inattention or six hyperactive and impulsive symptoms as rated by parents, teachers, or both. The "typically developing" children had less than three symptoms in each domain.

Children exposed to both gestational diabetes mellitus and low socioeconomic status showed compromised neurobehavioral functioning, including lower IQ, poorer language abilities and diminished behavioral and emotional functioning

An eight-year-old Ohio boy who weighs more than 200 pounds, was taken from his family home and placed into foster care after county social workers determined that his mother was not doing enough to help control his weight.

The third-grader is considered to be severely obese. At such a high weight, the boy is at risk for diseases like hypertension and diabetes.

Lawyers for the mother say that the county overreached when they took her son last week, and that the medical problems he is now at risk for are not an imminent danger.

A spokesperson says that the country took the child into foster care after caseworkers saw his mother's inability to reduce his weight as medical neglect.

The average American woman can expect to have 2.1 children, right? That's what we've been told for the past few years, but in 2010, the U.S. birth rate declined and now 1.9 children what U.S. women are expected to have, if current birth rates continue. Teens and women in their 20s experienced the most dramatic dip in birth rates, having the lowest birth rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s. This is the third straight year that U.S. births have dropped, and experts believe that the economy and financial worries are to blame.

Experts suggest that the economy helped discourage Americans from procreating, driving down birth rates in 2008 and 2009 as women put off having children. It had been suspected that money was the reason behind the decline, but with 2010's figures coming in even lower, there's little doubt that financial worries have impacted birth rates in the U.S.

U.S. births hit an all-time high in 2007 at more than 4.3 million. The number dropped to 4.2 million over the next two years, and then dropped further to 4.1 million. In 2010, it dropped to just slightly over 4 million, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A simple new method of detecting Down syndrome in a fetus could make the condition virtually extinct, say experts, but it won't be without controversy.

In October, San Diego-based Sequenom released a test that will allow doctors to screen for the most common type of Down syndrome with just a blood test from the mother. The screening is currently available in 20 cities. Two other companies are planning to release similar tests in 2012, so it is likely the test will become much more widely available.

In the past, amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling were needed to find out whether a fetus had Down syndrome. Currently, just 2 percent of pregnant women undergo screening for Down syndrome due to the methods' risks of inducing miscarriage. Now that fetuses can be screened for Down syndrome without invasive, risky tests, more women are likely to undergo the prenatal screening and more are likely to terminate their pregnancies.

92 percent of mothers who get a definitive diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to abort. That number could increase dramatically, making the eventual birth of live babies with Down syndrome in the U.S. relatively rare in the future.