Pediatrics
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Historical Article
Forty years in partnership: the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Indian Health Service.
Fifty years ago, American Indian and Alaska Native children faced an overwhelming burden of disease, especially infectious diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, hepatitis A and B, and gastrointestinal disease. Death rates of American Indian/Alaska Native infants between 1 month and 1 year were much higher than in the US population as a whole, largely because of these infectious diseases. The health care of American Indian/Alaska Native patients was transferred to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1955 and placed under the administration of an agency soon to be known as the Indian Health Service. ⋯ The Indian Health Service and tribal health programs, authorized by the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1976 (Pub L. 93-638), continue to seek American Academy of Pediatrics review and assistance through the Committee on Native American Child Health to find and implement interventions for emerging child health problems related to pervasive poverty of many American Indian/Alaska Native communities. Acute infectious diseases that once were responsible for excess morbidity and mortality now are replaced by excess rates resulting from harmful behaviors, substance use, obesity, and injuries (unintentional and intentional). Through strong working partnerships such as that of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Indian Health Service, progress hopefully will occur to address this "new morbidity." In this article we document the history of the Indian Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics committees that have worked with it and present certain statistics related to American Indian/Alaska Native child health that show the severity of the health-status disparities challenging American Indian/Alaska Native children and youth.
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Buprenorphine in sublingual formulation was recently introduced to the American market for treatment of opioid dependence. We report a series of 5 toddlers with respiratory and mental-status depression after unintentional buprenorphine exposure. ⋯ Confirmatory testing was sent for 1 child and returned with a positive result. The increasing use of buprenorphine as a home-based therapy for opioid addiction in the United States raises public health concerns for the pediatric population.
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A member of the Tennessee state legislature recently proposed a bill that would mandate all newborn infants to undergo pulse oximetry screening for the purpose of identifying those with critical structural heart disease before discharge home. The Tennessee Task Force on Screening Newborn Infants for Critical Congenital Heart Defects was convened on September 29, 2005. This group reviewed the current medical literature on this topic, as well as data obtained from the Tennessee Department of Health, and debated the merits and potential detriments of a statewide screening program. ⋯ Because of this variability and other considerations, a meaningful cost/benefit analysis could not be performed. It was the consensus of the task force to provide a recommendation to the legislature that mandatory screening not be implemented at this time. In addition, we determined that a very large, prospective, perhaps multistate study is needed to define the sensitivity and false-positive rates of lower-limb pulse oximetry screening in the asymptomatic newborn population and that there needs to be continued partnering between the medical community, parents, and local, state, and national governments in decisions regarding mandated medical care.