Prince Harry and Meghan start Aussie tour with baby gifts

SYDNEY — A beaming Duke and Duchess of Sussex thrilled thousands of fans outside the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday during their first meeting with the general public since the former Meghan Markle’s newly announced pregnancy.

Prince Harry and Meghan spent longer than the 20 minutes allocated in their schedule to speak to and shake hands with as many well-wishers as possible. Meghan, wearing a beige trench coat over a sleeveless cream dress by Australian designer Karen Gee, accepted cards and flowers from an enthusiastic crowd.


The news of the pregnancy was announced after the couple arrived in Sydney on Monday and 15 hours before their first public appearance. The two are on a 16-day tour of Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand that their Kensington Palace staff said would not be altered despite confirmation that the American former actress is pregnant.

Among those taken by surprise by the announcement were their Sydney hosts, Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove and Lady Lynne Cosgrove. The governor-general, who represents Queen Elizabeth II, Australia’s head of state and Harry’s grandmother, sent staff to hastily buy a toy kangaroo with a joey in its pouch and a tiny pair of Australian sheep skin boots for their pregnant guest.

“Here’s your first gift for the nursery,” the governor-general told the couple during a welcome ceremony at his official residence, Admiralty House.

“Thank you, that’s so sweet,” Meghan said as she received the toy.

The pregnancy has made front-page news across Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran the headline: “A smooth ride to Sydney, but royals reveal bump on the way.”

Darwin’s irreverent NT News chose the headline: “Ginger Pregs” — a play on a long-running Australian comic strip about a mischievous red-head boy called “Ginger Meggs.”

Outside the Opera House on Tuesday, Harry lingered longest with war widow Daphne Dunne, 98, whom he hugged as they chatted.

It was the third time that they had met since Harry’s eye caught sight of a Victoria Cross medal on her chest during a Sydney visit in 2015. She explained that her first husband Albert Chowne had been given the highest award in the British honors system after he died in Papua New Guinea in 1945.

This time, Meghan joined Harry in greeting the Dunne, who admires the prince’s work with veterans.
“Oh my goodness, is this Daphne?” Meghan asked.

Dunne later said Meghan told her “she had heard all about me; she’s so beautiful.”

“I wished them well with the baby on the way and said this is what Harry has been waiting for so long,” Dunne added.
Before Megan donned her coat, her tight-fitting dress barely revealed a bump as they were welcomed at the first event of the day at the Sydney Harbor-side mansion where the two are staying.

The main focus of that engagement was to meet Invictus Games representatives from the 18 countries competing in the event that starts Saturday. The sporting event, founded by Harry in 2014, gives sick and injured military personnel and veterans the opportunity to compete in sports such as wheelchair basketball.

Several of the representatives congratulated the couple on their baby news. Meghan replied: “Thank you so much. We are very excited.”

The couple later traveled by boat to Taronga Park Zoo where they opened a research center and met two 10-month old koalas that had been named after them.

They watched an indigenous dance company rehearse inside the Opera House before meeting the public.

The announcement of the pregnancy confirms weeks of speculation from royal watchers about why Meghan was not joining Harry on his Sydney Harbor Bridge climb set for Friday.

Harry, 34, and Meghan, 37 — along with Prince William and his wife, Kate, the duchess of Cambridge — have stepped to the fore in the last year as the 92-year-old queen slightly reduces her public schedule. MKH

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

Carrie Underwood preggy again

Carrie Underwood is pregnant with her second baby.

In a recent Instagram video, the country singer revealed to her fans that she and husband, Mike Fisher, are expecting a new child.

“We’re excited to be adding another little fish to our pond,” said Carrie, who already has a 3-year-old son, Isaiah.

“This has been a dream come true with album and with baby news,” added the “American Idol” Season 4 winner, who’s also about to release her latest album, “Cry Pretty.” “We’re just so excited you guys can share in this with us.”—ALLAN POLICARPIO

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Portable ultrasound device addresses healthcare for moms in rural areas

Thirteen Filipino mothers die every day due to complications in child birth.

That’s exactly what statistics will tell you. But what the figure doesn’t tell you is this: Mothers remain unaware of the nature of their pregnancies due to the lack of proper neonatal care, with complications only revealing itself during child birth, leaving less time for mothers and newborns from being saved.

They say maternal death due to complications is easily preventable when diagnosed early. But in places where even clean water and electricity are luxuries, maternal healthcare remains to be a dream.

Most often, majority of expectant mothers at risk live in places hard to find on the map. From the main road, sometimes one has to trek up mountains or sail through rivers to reach these rural communities—a shared odyssey of both health officers and pregnant women.

The nearest provincial hospital is often 20-30 kilometers away from the main road. Barrios are lucky if a midwife comes by at least once a week.

“In the province, I think we only have three hospitals. The nearest to my town is 40 kilometers away,” Banna, Ilocos Norte Mayor Carlito Abadilla says.  “Maternal death in the eastern towns of Ilocos Norte is one of the highest with five to seven deaths a year.”

The entire region of Ilocos Norte, despite the contribution of its rich dwellers like Vigan and Paoay, has about 115 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births.

Abadilla wants his municipality to focus on maternal healthcare, noting about 130 pregnant women are currently residing in Banna.

The municipality’s goal is in line with that of GE Philippines, which recently launched a portable ultrasound machine, the VScan Access. The portable ultrasound machine has a simple touchscreen interface, allowing it to scan 20-35 patients with its more than one-hour battery capacity.

It was designed with far-flung areas in mind—lightweight, battery-operated, shock-resistant and dust-proof. It also has a built-in manual to guide local healthcare workers.

One distinct feature of the VScan Access is the device’s capability to store up to 10,000 unique patient profiles, making it easier to monitor the health of many mothers and their children.

GE segment leader Rajan Kalidindi says healthcare workers have been trained to “tag” at-risk patients and be able to closely monitor their progress and safety.

He says the machine makes it easier for midwives and local health officials to refer patients to provincial doctors once complications have been identified. The scans made by the machine can easily be sent to mobile phones using a Bluetooth capability feature. It also has a USB port allowing files to be easily transferred to computers and other devices.

The VScan Access also boasts of a multimedia feature that allows the Department of Health or local government units to produce educational materials, which could then be shown to patients during an ultrasound procedure and checkup. These videos are ideally centered on patient education and nutrition or family planning or pregnancy care, depending on what the government or institution deems essential.

In the town of Banna, midwives and nurses were trained for two days to familiarize themselves with the machine. Around 132 patients, most on their 20th week of pregnancy, underwent scanning by local healthcare workers.

According to Dr. Godofreda Dalmacion, one of the leaders of GE Healthcare’s training program, the participants were trained to identify the position of the fetus, the placenta and the orientation of the head of the baby, details which could easily determine future pregnancy complications.

Kalidindi says the volunteers’ readings improved to 80 percent when they used the ultrasound machine and underwent the training program.

Apart from knowing the health of the pregnant mothers, workers can finally “tell government to give the proper support needed by these women, because not all them planned their pregnancies. Most of them are unplanned, unwanted, untimed,” Dalmacion says.

GE Healthcare plans to extend the program to other provinces, noting this is a comprehensive local program that implements a customizable deployment system, periodic training and years of service support for the ultrasound device.

“The vision was for every barangay to have a VScan Access ultrasound system. We will be taking it one step at a time and try to get a hundred units into the localities and move on from there,” GE Healthcare Philippines country manager Ivan Arota says.

source: business.inquirer.net

No need to avoid ‘happy baby pose’ in prenatal yoga?

Even though women are often advised to steer clear of certain yoga poses late in pregnancy, many of these moves might not be a problem for women or their babies, a small US study suggests.

Yoga can have many benefits during pregnancy, including helping women maintain flexibility and muscle tone and develop breathing techniques that may be useful during labor. But late in pregnancy women are often warned against poses that require them to lie on their backs, such as "happy baby pose" or "corpse pose," and inversions such as "downward facing dog" that might reduce circulation to the fetus and contribute to a spike in fetal heart rate.

To see how much caution might be warranted, researchers monitored fetal heart rate while a group of 25 healthy women in the final weeks of pregnancy tried 26 common yoga poses.

Fetal heart rate remained normal through all of the poses, and none of the women reported decreased fetal movement, contractions, fluid leakage or vaginal bleeding in the 24 hours after their yoga sessions, researchers report in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

"Though this is a preliminary study, I found there were no adverse changes in maternal or fetal wellbeing in the 26 studied poses," said lead author Rachael Polis, who conducted the research at Jersey Shore University Medical Center and is currently with Kosair Children's Hospital Gynecology Specialists in Louisville, Kentucky.

"Postures suspected to be contraindicated—e.g. downward facing dog, child's pose, happy baby and corpse pose—were also well tolerated," Polis added by email.

None of the women in the study had a history of hypertension or other complications during pregnancy, and none of them had any medical conditions that required them to avoid exercise.

The women were near the end of their third trimester, at about 35 to 37 weeks pregnant. Ten of the 25 participants did yoga regularly, while eight were familiar with yoga and seven had never done it before.

Each woman completed a one-on-one yoga session with a certified yoga instructor, with an obstetrician and a medical resident in the room. They had stress tests before going through the poses and again afterward.

Given the size of their bellies, they didn't do any yoga poses lying on their stomachs. They also avoided complete inverted poses such as hand stands or head stands. To avoid falls or other injuries, they could modify poses by using blocks, chairs or the wall for support.

Beyond the small size of the study, other limitations include yoga sessions that might not match the duration or intensity of a typical community yoga class, the authors concede. The women in the study were typically of a normal healthy weight, too, while more than half of pregnant women tend to be overweight or obese.

It's also possible that women might encounter poses not covered by this experiment that could cause problems during pregnancy, noted Kathryn Curtis, a researcher at York University in Toronto who wasn't involved in the study.

"I encourage pregnant women to seek out studios that offer specialized prenatal yoga classes that are taught by teachers who have prenatal yoga training," Curtis said by email.

"Women should practice hatha based, restorative practices with breath awareness components, rather than heated or strength focused practices, for safety precautions for both the mother and baby," Curtis added.

In a separate study reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 52 pregnant women who had never tried yoga were randomly assigned to either participate in a one-time, one-hour yoga class, or to attend a one-time, one-hour PowerPoint presentation about exercise, nutrition, and obesity in pregnancy.

In this study too, there was no significant change in fetal blood flow immediately after the moms did yoga, according to Dr. Shilpa Babbar of the University of Missouri Kansas City and colleagues.

"Yoga can be recommended for low risk women to begin during pregnancy," Babbar's team concluded. —Reuters

Stress in pregnancy linked to children's asthma risk

NEW YORK - Stress during pregnancy brought on by events like divorce, job loss or death of a loved one appears to be linked to an increased risk of asthma and eczema among children.

These findings, Dr. Petra Arck told Reuters Health in an email, could "allow clinicians to evaluate future asthma risk in unborn children using a simple life event assessment questionnaire."

Arck, of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, and her colleagues note that although there are strong genetic components to asthma and related conditions, these alone do not help explain the unprecedented increase in such diseases in recent years.

Over the same period as that increase, they add, stress levels have been on the rise. But there hasn't been much evidence to connect stress in pregnancy to asthma and eczema.

To investigate further, the researchers examined data from 1,587 children and their mothers who took part in an Australian pregnancy study. The original purpose of the study was to determine the effects of intensive fetal monitoring on pregnancy outcomes.

Mothers-to-be were asked about recent stressful life events halfway through their pregnancy and again toward the end of pregnancy. Their children were evaluated for asthma, eczema and other allergy-related conditions at age six and 14.

Complete data were available for 994 children and their mothers.

The researchers calculated that the likelihood of having asthma or eczema as a teenager was substantially higher among children of mothers who experienced stressful life events during the second half of their pregnancies.

Specifically, kids were about twice as likely to have asthma as 14-year-olds if their mothers had been through a single stressful life event, once other factors known to influence asthma were taken into account. Risks were similar when mothers had experienced multiple life stressors.

When the researchers looked closer, they found that pattern only held among children whose mothers did not have asthma themselves.

There was no link between stressful events in pregnancy and a child's chance of having asthma or eczema at age six, according to findings published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The authors note that they did not have information on how mothers-to-be coped with stressful life events or the types of social support they had available.

And they point out that factors other than stress in pregnancy might have been responsible for the increased risk of disease in certain children.

One researcher not involved in the study said it was well designed and addressed an important topic, but urged caution when interpreting the findings.

Alet H. Wijga, from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, echoed the warning that stress, itself, may not have been what caused kids' asthma and eczema.

"Life events like money problems, job loss and residential move associated with separation or divorce during pregnancy may well have lasting impact on the socio-economic position of the mother and her child and may, for example, be associated with unfavorable indoor and outdoor exposures throughout the child's life course up to adolescence," Wijga told Reuters Health in an email.

"I do think the study provides evidence for an association between prenatal adverse life events and the risk for allergic disease in childhood," Wijga said. The challenge in the future will be to sort out the possible effects of stress during pregnancy from a child's environment growing up, the researcher added. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Teen births in US hit record lows in 2011 — study

The number of U.S. babies born to teen mothers dropped to record lows in 2011, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fewer women gave birth in their 20s as well than in prior years, the researchers said in findings published in Pediatrics - but the birth rate increased for those in their late 30s and early 40s.

"The economy has declined, and that certainly is a factor that goes into people's decisions about having a child," said CDC statistician Brady Hamilton, lead author of the report.

"Women may say to themselves, 'It's not a particularly good time right now... let's wait a little bit.'"

Older women, however, are typically more secure in their employment, and understand that they don't have as long to wait if they want to get pregnant, he said.

The new data showed an eight percent drop in teen births between 2010 and 2011, with just over three percent of 15- to 19-year-olds having babies during that period.

Hamilton and his colleagues calculated that 3.6 million more babies would have been born to women in that age group over the last two decades had the teen birth rate not been falling since a peak in 1991.

On the other end of the spectrum, the birth rate among 35- to 39-year-olds increased by three percent over 2010 figures. In 2011, 4.7 percent of women in their late 30s and just over one percent in their early 40s had a baby.

Other results from the report showed a continued decline in babies born prematurely or small, and an unchanged rate of infant deaths.

Black and Hispanic mothers continued to be more likely to have a premature baby than white women, but rates declined among all races. Infant mortality was more than twice as high among babies born to black mothers as in babies of white mothers, death records showed.

Hamilton said the decline in teen births, in particular, is especially welcome news and reflects the efforts of programs and policies targeting that age group.

"It's definitely consistent with the trends that we've seen, and it's obviously good news overall," said Krishna Upadhya, who studies teen pregnancy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

"I think the main thing behind this is increased contraceptive use, and better contraceptive use," added Upadhya, who wasn't involved in the new research.

However, she added that there are still some parts of the country where both condoms and long-acting forms of contraception, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) are harder for teens to access. - Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Prince Harry 'Thrilled' Over Royal Pregnancy

Prince Harry is on his way home from the war zone and says he "can't wait" to become an uncle.

"Obviously I'm thrilled for both of them," Harry, 28, says of his brother Prince William and sister-in-law Kate, joking, "It's about time."

In an interview in Afghanistan, where he served since September, the prince says he had chatted to the couple – and didn’t text or send them a letter, despite reports he had done so – when their news was released in early December.

"I spoke to my brother and her, and they're both very well and both very happy obviously," he says. "I think it's very unfair that they were forced to publicize it when they were, but that's just the media for you."

The royal couple revealed the pregnancy prematurely because of Kate's hospitalization due to severe morning sickness.

Harry, in charge of the weaponry on his crew's Apache attack helicopter, was interviewed about 10 days after the pregnancy was revealed, but his remarks were kept under wraps for security reasons, released now because he's returning to the U.K.

"I literally am very, very happy for them," he says, "but I just only hope that she and him – but mainly Catherine – hopefully that she gets the necessary protection to allow her as a mother-to-be to enjoy the privacy that that comes with. I seriously hope that's going to be able to happen."

Now that he's back from his tour of duty, is there some pressure on him to follow his brother and find a wife?

"I don't think you can ever be urged to settle down," he says. " If you find the right person and everything feels right, then it takes time, especially for myself and my brother."

But, as he has hinted before, it is hard to find the right kind of woman who isn’t going to be scared off by everything else that goes with being with a royal.

"You ain't ever going to find someone who's going to jump into the position that it would hold," he says. "Simple as that."

source: people.com