Legion of Angels News Archive

Diabetes is on the rise among pregnant women, posing the risk of serious health problems for mothers-to-be and their unborn children, according to one of the first and largest studies of the issue.

The rate of type 1 or type 2 diabetes among expectant mothers more than doubled between 1999 and 2005, according to research that examined more than 175,000 women in California during the seven-year period.

Diabetes can be a dangerous complication during pregnancy, endangering the mother and also raising the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth or birth defects, said Jean M. Lawrence, lead author of the study published in the May issue of the journal Diabetes Care.

It also can lead to bigger babies and to children who are at risk of developing diabetes and obesity later in life, said Lawrence, who is also a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, Calif.

“Having diabetes during pregnancy has implications for the baby,” she said.

The rise in diabetes in pregnant women is “a big problem” because it’s probably a nationwide trend occurring hand-in-hand with obesity, which also carries other risk factors for birth complications, said Dr. Raul Artal, chairman of the department of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at St. Louis University’s School of Medicine in Missouri.

Artal noted that in addition to diabetes, obese women often develop high blood pressure, which can lead to pregnancy complications. Also, some birth defects, such as neural tube defects –in which the brain or spinal fail to develop normally — are more common among infants born to obese moms.

The researchers partially attributed the spike in diabetes to rising rates of obesity among  younger and younger women.

That was the problem faced by Sandy Kaplan, a 36-year-old new mother in Fremont, Calif., who struggled to become pregnant until she got her weight and diabetes under control.

Kaplan weighed 300 pounds when she became pregnant 10 years ago, but lost the child after only three months. She’s not certain that diabetes led to the miscarriage, but she wasn’t able to conceive again until last year, after she dropped 65 pounds through diet and exercise.

“After I got pregnant, that totally changed everything because I realized I was not only doing this for me but also for my baby,” Kaplan said.

Four months ago, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Mia Marie Kaplan.

More young people diagnosed

In the study, Lawrence’s team used medical records to ascertain the diabetes status of 175,249 southern California women between ages 13 and 58 who gave birth between 1999 and 2005. Among the women, 2,784 had either type 1 or type 2 diabetes before getting pregnant and 15,121 developed gestational diabetes, which occurs during pregnancy but usually resolves after birth.

In 1999, 10 percent of all the diabetes cases consisted of pre-existing type 1 or type 2 diabetes, with gestational diabetes accounting for the rest. By 2005, the pre-existing diabetes cases had more than doubled, accounting for 21 percent of the total diabetes cases.

The researchers did not have access to information on the patient’s weights or the particular type of diabetes they had, but both type 1 and type 2 pose risks to the developing baby.

Highest spike among teens

Pre-existing diabetes cases increased for all age groups, but the biggest jump was in teens, where rates of the disease rose five-fold. For women between 20 and 39 years of age, rates of diabetes doubled. In women 40 and older, diabetes cases rose 40 percent.

Getting the disease under control is crucial for women who hope to become pregnant, experts said.

Those who already have type 2 diabetes should ensure their disease is kept in check by consuming a healthy diet and exercising, Lawrence recommended. Type 1 diabetes can’t be prevented, but it can be managed with diet, exercise and medications, such as insulin shots.

Women who are overweight or obese should see a doctor before becoming pregnant to make sure they don’t have diabetes, Lawrence said. They should also work to shed a few pounds before becoming pregnant to reduce the risks to their babies.

Don’t wait for pregnancy to act

But women shouldn’t delay getting their weight or diabetes under control, Lawrence stressed.

“In the U.S., up to half of all pregnancies are unplanned or unintended, so young women with diabetes shouldn’t wait to become pregnant to take care of this,” she said.

Artal said a healthy diet and exercise, such as walking 30 minutes per day, has been shown to reduce by half the risk of gestational diabetes in obese pregnant women. He suspects the same would hold true for type 2 diabetes.

In general, he added, obese women should not gain any weight during their pregnancy, or at least keep it to less than 10 pounds, to help keep their diabetes in check. However, he stressed that women attempting to limit their weight gain during pregnancy should only do under strict medical supervision to ensure they are getting adequate nutrition for themselves and the developing fetus.

While there’s no way to know for sure, Kaplan attributes her successful pregnancy to adopting a healthy diet and frequent exercise, including long walks, which helped her shed dozens of pounds and gain control of her diabetes.

Mia Marie has become an inspiration for Kaplan, who is still exercising, eating right and continuing to lose weight. Kaplan lost her mother eight years ago to diabetes and doesn’t want to repeat the pattern.

“I want to be there for my own daughter,” she said.

  Source — MSNBC

AMSTETTEN, Austria - A man has confessed to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years in windowless cell with a soundproofed door and fathering seven children with her, police said Monday.

Josef Fritzl, now 73, also told investigators that he tossed the body of one of the children in an incinerator when the infant died shortly after birth, said Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs.

“We are being confronted with an unfathomable crime,” Interior Minister Guenther Platter said.

Authorities said three of the surviving children — aged 19, 18 and 5 — were confined during their entire lives to the darkness of their cell by the suspect, who Polzer said “managed to deceive everyone” until he allegedly confessed in police custody Monday.

Police released Fritzl’s full name and photograph at a news conference Monday, after his identity was widely reported by media in Austria and elsewhere in Europe.

The daughter, who is now 42, had been missing since 1984 and was found by police in the town of Amstetten on Saturday evening after police received a tip.

Police on Monday released several photos showing parts of the cramped basement cell, with a small bathroom and a narrow passageway leading to a tiny bedroom. Investigators said an electronic keyless-entry system apparently kept the daughter from escaping from the cell, which was made of solid reinforced concrete.

Fritzl appeared briefly in court Monday in the city of St. Poelten, where he was to be held in pretrial detention. He faces up to 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses under Austrian law, officials said.

He was an authoritarian who took care never to allow anyone near the cellar, Polzer told reporters.

“He admitted that he locked his daughter, who was 18 at the time, in the cellar, that he repeatedly had sex with her, and that he is the father of her seven children,” Polzer told The Associated Press.

Three of the surviving children lived with the grandparents and were registered with authorities. The other three apparently were held captive in the cellar with their mother, Polzer told reporters.

Wife had ‘no idea’

Hans-Heinz Lenze, a senior local official, said the suspect’s wife apparently had “no idea” of what went on and was devastated. Authorities said the victims and Fritzl’s wife were under psychiatric care in an undisclosed location.

“You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell apart,” he said.

Austrians — still scandalized by a 2006 case involving a young woman who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a basement cell outside Vienna for more than eight years — expressed disbelief at the latest case.

“The entire nation must ask itself just what is fundamentally going wrong,” the newspaper Der Standard said Monday in a commentary.

Guenter Pramreiter, who owns a bakery just down the street, told The Associated Press that the suspect and his wife would regularly buy bread and rolls, though never in large quantities.

“They appeared normal, just like any other family,” Pramreiter said. “I’m totally shocked, this was next door. It’s terrible.”

The case unfolded after a gravely ill teenager was found unconscious on April 19 in the building where her grandparents live, and taken to a hospital in the town of Amstetten, about 75 miles west of Vienna. Authorities publicly appealed for the mother to come forward to help diagnose the young woman’s condition.

After receiving a tip, police picked up the 42-year-old woman — identified as Elisabeth F. — and her father on Saturday close to the hospital.

Police said Elisabeth F. appeared “greatly disturbed” during questioning. She agreed to talk only after authorities assured her she would no longer have to have contact with her father and that her children would be cared for.

Abuse began at age 11

On Sunday evening, police said investigators had found the area where Elisabeth and three of the children were held captive. Investigators said the rooms were at most 5 feet 6 inches high. The area had a TV and small hotplates for cooking.

In a chronology of events outlined in a police statement, authorities said Elisabeth F. told them her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11. She told police that some years later in 1984, he sedated her, handcuffed her and locked her in the cellar.

Police said a letter written by Elisabeth had apparently surfaced a month after her disappearance, asking her parents not to search for her.

The Austria Press Agency reported that the surviving children are three boys and three girls, the youngest of whom is 5. DNA tests were expected to determine whether Josef F. is the father of the children.

Sunday’s developments recalled another case that shocked Austrians in the summer of 2006, when a young woman escaped after being largely confined to a tiny underground dungeon in a quiet Vienna suburb for more than eight years.

Natascha Kampusch was 10 years old when she was kidnapped in Vienna on her way to school in March 1998. Her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, threw himself in front of a train just hours after her dramatic escape.

Kampusch, now 20, issued a statement Monday saying she wanted to contact Elisabeth to offer emotional and financial help.

  Source — MSNBC

An Arizona developer is offering housing to poor Mexicans–if they agree to a few conditions.

Ana Maria Camacho Zavala, a factory worker, and her husband and two children used to live in a two-room cinder block shack without plumbing or electricity on the outskirts of Agua Prieta, a dusty Mexican desert town 50 miles south of Tucson, Ariz. “Everything was dirty, and it was difficult to eat some days,” Camacho recalls.

But in 2000 a sleek, master-planned community arose out of the sand, a manicured island in a sea of makeshift homes of cardboard and scrap metal. Powell (Gil) Gillenwater, a Scottsdale, Ariz. real estate investor, raised $1 million to build 42 two-bedroom, 700-square-foot duplexes. Painted in desert hues, the homes face a spacious courtyard with a grill and playground, encouraging neighbors to socialize. Camacho’s family was selected from among 700 applicants to get one of the houses. She pays $75 a month, or 12% of her income.

Gillenwater’s aim is in part to stem the flow of illegal immigrants across the border to Arizona, which happens to be home to a large chapter of the Minutemen, a vigilante group. His project, called Vecinos Dignos Sin Fronteras–or Dignified Neighbors Without Borders–is also an experiment in social engineering. He has set down a series of conditions residents must meet. Kids must remain in school and earn a high school diploma, while adults must hold down a job, take courses in health and nutrition, including birth control, and devote 250 hours a year to volunteer work. Three families who couldn’t come up with the time for volunteer work or to attend adult education classes have been asked to leave. “These people are prisoners of their own poverty,” says Gillenwater. “But writing a check is disastrous. It’s only through education that they can change their lives.”

A Mexican government-funded child care center provides a paycheck for 35 people, 10 of them Vecinos residents, and watches 165 children whose mothers would otherwise not be able to work. Gillenwater’s nonprofit, Rancho Feliz, will build a $350,000 education center this year to offer computer classes to anyone in Agua Prieta.

A student of Buddhism, Gillenwater, 54, made his fortune as a land speculator in Phoenix. His Century 21 real estate agency in Phoenix was the highest-producing in the Southwest. In 1981 Gillenwater and two partners started buying up land outside Phoenix. Their portfolio swelled to 10,000 acres, but now they are selling off the last parcels, at $70,000 an acre.

Gillenwater courts adventure. He smuggled a raft onto Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo River and walked in sandals across the snow-peaked Himalayas. In 1987 on Thanksgiving Day, on a whim, he and his brother Troy left the dinner table, bought $2,000 worth of groceries and headed to Nogales, Mexico. Recalls Gillenwater, “We were going to drink Tecates and hand out food to people and get to be heroes for a day.” They made a wrong turn and ended up in Agua Prieta, a dirty border town where abandoned children were living in cars and warming food over burning tires. For several years Gillenwater informally supported a small orphanage called Rancho Feliz, then established the nonprofit named for the orphanage in 1992.

He raised $1.5 million from fundraising events like the Frijole 500, a 519-mile bike ride from Santa Fe, N.M. through the Rocky Mountains to Telluride, Colo. Most of the $5.2 million in donations since 2000 has come from Gillenwater’s well-to-do friends, like Campbell Soup (nyse: CPB - news - people ) heir and Arizona developer Bennett Dorrance and JDA Software founder James Armstrong.

For Gillenwater and his friends volunteering in Agua Prieta is part recreation and part do-gooding. “Working down here has liberated me from my own ego,” Gillenwater says outside a small bodega, a cold six-pack in hand. “It has allowed me to throw off the shackles of this narcissistic ego and open myself up to the world around me.”

Most residents of Agua Prieta hail from distant Mexican cities and Central America. Many hoped to cross the border but were robbed along the way, were too poor to continue north or to return home, or were stopped by U.S. border agents. The floater population requires housing and other services the city of Agua Prieta is not equipped to provide. So in 2000 Gillenwater asked executives in Arizona’s home building industry to re-create their work on a cheaper scale.

Armstrong pays $128,000 a year for the tuition of 58 students at a bilingual private school. He and his wife, Jo-Ann, fly into Agua Prieta aboard their private plane several times a year. They have been supporting college-bound high school student Nayeli Ruiz since she was 9.

When people ask Gillenwater why he doesn’t operate a charity in the U.S., he says he does a service for overprivileged Americans by exposing them to how the other half lives. Americans come down to build houses and “to feed their souls,” he says. They pay $10 a night to stay in the nonprofit’s dormitory.

Source — Forbes

(CNN) — If you were a zebra, how would you spend your days?

Daniel Rubenstein, director of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, has been pursuing this question for years.

He and collaborators spend their summers in Kenya trying to figure out how endangered zebras form social networks, avoid predators, and interact with the livestock and herders in the area.

ZebraNet, a collaborative project that Rubenstein co-founded with Princeton engineering professor Margaret Martonosi, studies zebra behavior through data from GPS locators on collars around zebras’ necks.

Just like the positioning systems in cars, the collars collect information about the whereabouts of the zebras, as well as their velocities and turning angles.

The team is particularly interested in the Grevy’s zebra, an endangered species whose numbers have dropped to only about 2,000. Data from the GPS collars have given Rubenstein and associates an unprecedented view of how Grevy’s zebras balance the opportunities for acquiring food and water with the risks of being killed by lions.

The ability to gather data about nocturnal animals has always been limited, but with GPS collars recording data every eight minutes, the researchers learned a lot about zebra behavior at night.

The team, which includes several graduate students, found that zebras graze in the open plains during the day, moving slowly in straight lines, while lions rest under trees in wooded areas.

“They’re like grass vacuum cleaners, chip-clipping away at the vegetation as they move,” Rubenstein said of the zebras.

When night falls, the lions leave the woodlands to go hunting in the plains, and the zebras move into the woodlands, moving deliberately and quietly. They spend about 60 percent of the night in the woodlands, and the rest of the time in the plains, moving quickly and erratically while the lions hunt there.

“By using this remote sensing ability, we’ve been able to show the zebras change behavior markedly when they use the plains at night to minimize the risk of being preyed upon by lions,” Rubenstein said.

In the past, when collared zebras got close to one another, ZebraNet’s GPS technology transferred data between them. Eventually, all the data percolated back to the researchers’ cars, which serve as mobile base stations. First getting information about interacting zebras was a thrill for Rubenstein.

“It was way cool to see the location and movements of many individuals from the data downloaded from only one!” he said.

Now, the project uses a similar technology that was recently developed by a German startup company. The new collars have improved battery power, but they don’t have the peer-to-peer data swapping feature. They also sample every 15 minutes to an hour instead of every eight minutes, but can collect information over a longer period of time.

With these more power-efficient collars, researchers must track down each individual zebra and download its data. The second generation of these collars will debut this summer.

As a doctoral student at Duke University, Rubenstein was fascinated with how animals make decisions and why their societies form the way they do. He started studying equids — a family of mammals that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras — because they form associations among strangers.

He has also examined how the Grevy’s zebra social network — and he doesn’t mean Facebook or MySpace — may contribute to its endangerment. Associations between Grevy’s zebras are less close-knit than those of the Plains zebra, whose core societies consist of closed-membership harem-groups and bachelor groups.

In a harem, several females choose to live with one male that protects them against harassment in exchange for sex. Female Grevy’s zebras, on the other hand, don’t stay with one male for long periods of time, meaning they don’t have the benefit of a larger male watching out for them.

With food and water so scattered, female Grevy’s zebras with young foals must stay near water to drink every day, while females without young foals wander more. Males, in turn, set up territories on access routes to water to gain mating opportunities with both the wandering females and ones that stay near water.

Lions, which prefer to eat Grevy’s zebras, are a major source of endangerment as well. Rubenstein also plans to put collars on them to better understand their interactions with zebras and learn how best to intervene for the sake of zebra conservation.

ZebraNet also pays locals to gather data, which generates income for the communities, Rubenstein said. They put collars on livestock so researchers can examine the relationships between herds and herders, a topic that they will further investigate this summer.

The project also increases awareness, as people come to understand that wildlife and livestock are not necessarily antagonistic.

“No longer are [zebras] necessarily vermin that are viewed negatively by the community,” Rubenstein said. “They now have some economic worth.”

Source — CNN

New York - February 28, 2008 - When it comes to attending church, praying and reading the Bible, the apple does not fall far from the tree.  A recent poll of teens and their parents overwhelmingly confirms that parents have the most influence on their children’s religious activity.

A survey — the first to examine teens’ and their parents’ views of the Bible — commissioned by the American Bible Society and conducted by Weekly Reader Research, found that almost 80 percent of America’s 30.2 million 12-18 year olds think the Bible is important and 87 percent of parents think the Bible is important.  However, the results show that parents still have work to do.  Of the 47 percent of teens who think the Bible is very important, only 11 percent read the Bible daily.

Ten percent of America’s 12-18 year-olds participate in daily Bible reading, a higher level then reported in a June 2006 survey done by the Bible Society.  In that measurement, six percent of teens said they read the Bible daily.  A third of teens attend weekly worship services and more than 80 percent believe their prayers are answered some or all the time.

Children mirror their parents’ behavior.  Parents who attend church weekly tend to have teens who worship weekly, while 78 percent of parents who never attend worship services have teens who never attend.  The same correlation applies to Bible reading and prayer habits.  Parents who responded positively to the question of whether it is important to raise children with religious or spiritual values had children who were significantly involved with faith.

This survey corroborates one of the findings of June 2006 The Bible Society/Weekly Reader Research poll of teens about their heroes.  That poll revealed that 67.7% of 12-18-year-olds believe parents are the most important role models in today’s society.

This survey mirrored the U.S. population with reference to geography, age and race.  The survey of 3095 participants has a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percent.

Source — Religion News Service