North Coast Journal, Nov 10-17, 2011

If you want to know how much of an active ingredient is in that pill you’re about to pop in your mouth, or whether it will do you any good, or even whether it’s safe, then move on out of the supplement aisle. The U.S. health food industry has fought hard to stay free of safety restrictions that hobble its counterparts in Europe, Japan and much of such the rest of the developed world. As a result, America has two systems for overseeing the countless products we take to try to cure our ills or keep ourselves well. The systems are separate, and they are unequal.

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In 2000, Yale medical scientists published a study linking a common ingredient of over-the-counter cold medicines and diet aids to a small risk of stroke in young women. The Food and Drug Administration asked manufacturers to voluntarily pull products from store shelves and stop production, in a move toward reclassifying phenylpropanolamine as “not generally recognized as safe and effective.” That action effectively produced a recall of a key ingredient in popular products such as Robitussin CF, Triaminic, Dimetapp, Dexatrim and Acutrim.

Around the same time, doctors were reporting rare cases of liver failure associated with another over-the-counter product, the herbal sedative kava-kava. Though the FDA issued a consumer advisory in 2002, kava-kava products are still available.

“I can buy it off the shelf today,” said Amitava Dasgupta, a professor of pathology at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. “Some people use kava for sleep. But if you use it for more than three or four months, it can cause liver problems.”

Dasgupta thinks this is information that consumers need to know. But manufacturers are not required to warn users of the risk, or to label products with the amount of active ingredient in a dose.

Why we can still buy kava-kava but not phenylpropanolamine? Read the rest of the article at the North Coast Journal.

Summer with stem cells — four students earn the challenge

Rex Reyes traveled four hours daily this summer between a lab at the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures in Sacramento and his home in Vallejo.

The commute by train and bus was well worth it for the experience of participating in stem cell research, the incoming Vallejo High School senior said.

Reyes was one of four area teens interning this summer at the institute as part of a pilot program sponsored by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The other three were Thomas Gepts and Kalani Ratnasiri of Davis High and Jaskaran Dhillon of Sheldon High.

They received certificates Wednesday for successfully meeting requirements for ultraclean preparation of stem cells.

Program directors selected the students based on their award-winning presentations of biotechnology concepts on websites they designed for UCD’s 2011 Teen Biotech Challenge.

The four took a course in the procedures and techniques of stem cell production with master’s-degree students from California State University, Sacramento, and worked on individual projects with scientist mentors.

The Good Manufacturing Practice lab was a highlight for Reyes.

“It was challenging for us kids because we were so nervous,” said Reyes, describing the head-to-toe sterile gowns and exacting cleanliness of the facility. “When you get it right, it feels really good, like you’ve really accomplished something.”

Reyes completed construction of a custom-designed DNA tool for stem cell research with his mentor, Karen Pepper. The tool helps researchers identify cells with desired traits by making the cells glow green.

The students presented their summer work with posters and oral explanations at a conference in Oakland last week.

Gepts, who will be a senior this fall, was impressed by the chance to meet scientists in non-traditional careers at the conference.

The son of a UC Davis biologist, Gepts would like to combine his enthusiasm for biology with his interests in foreign policy and politics.

Ratnasiri, entering her junior year, is considering whether there will be more research in her future. This summer, she learned to respect the precision and repetition required for stem cell research.

“It takes a lot time and a lot of monotony, but the end result is pretty cool,” she said.

Ratnasiri’s mentor, Whitney Cary, has a personal interest in Huntington’s disease, a degenerative dementia that results, in part, from the destruction of spiny neurons in the brain.

Ratnasiri helped Cary grow embryonic stem cells and coax them to become spiny neurons, and got to see video of her neuron charges moving and connecting with each other under a microscope.

Ratnasiri said her interest in biology leans toward sports medicine.

Encouraging proper healing of athletes’ broken bones, or helping people with fragile bones build the strength to play games like soccer, are distant applications of the research Dhillon worked on this summer.

An incoming senior, Dhillon digested a large volume of scientific literature to help plan his summer experiment. This was Dhillon’s second summer in biological research.

In 2010, he worked at the UC Davis Center for Biophotonics, and the combined experience has made him turn from a direct path to medicine to aim instead at a career in clinical research.

But that’s in the future. As for Reyes, he said he’s looking forward to senior outings and college applications – and the prom.

By Liza Lester
elester@sacbee.com

Published: Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011 – 12:00 am | Page 1B

A southern sea otter off Moss Landing CA, captured by UCSC "sea otter tracker" Nichole LaRoche last fall.

Off the coast of Monterey, the cuddly sea otter is a top predator. The effects of its presence and dietary preferences reverberate down the food chain to the kelp forests it dwells in and the other creatures harbored there.

Such cascades down the “trophic levels” of ecosystems were once thought to be special cases in ecological theory. In the July 15 issue of the journal Science, 24 ecologists say the outsized influences of top consumers such as sea otters, mountain lions, wolves, and big herbivores like elephants, are universal and should be considered the rule, not the exception.

“We wanted to point out to the general public that there are major ecological consequences to the removal of these large animals, in addition to aesthetic losses,” said author Thomas Schoener, professor of biology at the University of California, Davis.

To make their case for a human-caused “Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth,” as the Science piece is titled, the authors rally examples from around the world, from wildebeast and buffalo in East Africa to coyotes in the chaparral canyons of San Diego.

“What they’ve done is bring together a lot of studies that aren’t very well replicated,” said Dan Gruner, a professor of entomology at the University of Maryland.

On the basis of individual reports, the case for cascading effects of top consumers is easily challenged. But collectively “you start to see commonalities. I think the studies are starting to pile up,” Gruner said.

The irony, the authors say, is that the effects of the loss of top consumers are often overlooked, because many large animals, like the California grizzly bear, disappeared long ago, pushed out by another top consumer: humans.

“This has been going on for thousands of years,” said author Michael Soule, emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a well-known figure in conservation biology. “Hunters and ranchers don’t like competition. That’s a natural human response. And they try to get rid of the competition.”

But the loss of large competitors has consequences for people, the authors say.

“Trophic downgrading doesn’t end at the bottom of the food web,” said lead author James Estes of UC Santa Cruz.

Effects spread, from loss of diversity to changes in wildfire behavior, water quality, erosion, greenhouse gases, disease prevalence, and invasive species – all leading to economic and health losses for human communities.

But measuring the influence of large animals has been challenging.

“You can’t put them in a bottle and study them in a lab,” Gruner said.

Gruner studies spiders in Hawaii. He said small species can have big impacts too, but often “the scale of (influence) changes with the scale of the animals and their home ranges.”

Gruner can blanket small corners of forest under netting to observe what happens when spiders aren’t there. Studying the ecosystem effects of large animals is harder because they occupy large territories, and the cascading effects of a vacancy at the top emerge over decades, not a single season.

Cristina Eisenberg, an Oregon State University graduate student, tracks wolves and their influence on the forests of the northern Rockies.

“You can’t experiment ethically with large animals such as wolves and elk. You can’t remove all of them,” she said.

So ecologists have turned to observations of inadvertent “natural experiments.”

Estes studies sea otters on the Central Coast of California and up the Pacific Coast in Alaska. Sea otters live in coastal kelp forests and dine on sea urchins, which are voracious and undiscriminating consumers of small invertebrates and seaweed, and will chew through the holdfasts of kelp.

“The question is whether the sea otter is going to recover, or go extinct,” said Estes. “If we lose otters, we are going to lose kelp forests” and the vibrant ecosystem they support.

Following the disappearance of sea otters from patches of Alaskan coast, sea urchins boomed and the kelp forests died, with repercussions for the many inhabitants, including commercially valuable salmon and herring, as well as seabirds. With the return of otters, kelp recovers, as it did in parts of Alaska.

Researchers have seen similar cascading effects of the loss and return of wolves on aspen in Yellowstone National Park, and of dwindling mountain lions on the cottonwoods of Zion National Park. Fear drives deer and elk to graze cautiously and move frequently, said Eisenberg. In the absence of predators, deer browse “like domesticated animals” chewing saplings to the ground.

Steve Torres, supervisor of wildlife investigations for the California Department of Fish and Game, is not entirely persuaded.

“I’m a tiny bit skeptical of the cascade effect in terrestrial environments because there are other major, possibly superseding, factors,” he said. “I think the trophic cascades are interesting and important, but we have some other very large stressors.”

Timbers harvests and fragmentation of habitat – physical consequences of the overwhelming imprint of human industry and civilization on landscape – concern Torres. As a wildlife manager, he thinks of the loss of predators as a red flag, warning of deeper problems in the complicated balance of human needs and wilderness health.

In California, “we’re blessed to still have viable predator-prey systems like mountain lions and deer,” he said. “We’re blessed to have range.

“You look back east – mountain lions no longer occur back there. What were the consequences of losing mountain lions? I don’t know.”

What we don’t know, the Science report argues, may be hurting us.

Robert Paine’s original papers developing his keystone species hypothesis in The American Naturalist:

• Food web complexity and species diversity (1966)
• A note on trophic complexity and community stability (1969)

Credit: Bugscope, Imaging Technology Group, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Atta cephalotes up close:  A leafcutter ant soldier, its alien surface contours picked out by the electron beam of Bugscope’s environmental scanning electron microscope. The width of the field is about 2 millimeters. The ESEM is capable of resolving features as close as 2 nanometers. (about the width of the DNA double helix).  Workers have large serrated jaws. Leafcutters do not eat leaves. They cultivate fugus, carrying leave pieces home to the hive to feed their fungal farms.

• http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/ The homepage for Bugscope, a program that helps K-12 kids drive an electron microscope remotely, from computers in their home schools. The program won an award for online science educational tools, which will be announced in the journal Science tomorrow.
• http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/spore/ A list of the (free and open to the public) websites of the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) winners, including a periodic table of youtube videos, an arctic-literacy project “beyond penguins and polar bears,” and The Universe Online.
• http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/members/2011-060/ An archived session from Grayslake Middle School, quoted in the story, demonstrates some of the strengths and weakness of the program. And has some nice pictures.
• http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/archives.php The portal to the archives has a Google map showing the locations of over 400 participating schools

OUTTAKES

“It’s just really cool to see these kids who won’t do anything really take ownership,” said Nicole Schneider, a language arts teacher at Grayslake Middle school in Illinois. Schneider likes to include science in the summer school curriculum for students that have failed a grade during the regular school year.

Summer students do not bring much enthusiasm to class. Much of the time “it feels like I’m pulling tricks out of a hat to keep their attention.” She said having the Beckman scientists on live chat is essential because science is not her area of expertise. But driving the microscope is “very easy. It’s like navigating any website. You click a button and zoom an image. Click a button and it goes to different part of the bug. It’s idiot-proof.”

“It was a very smooth process from start to finish,” said Joe Finn, Jr., who teaches science as part of his 6^th grade curriculum at Horizon Middle Elementary in Pewaukee, WI. Both teachers said the kids brought their new bug intelligence into writing and art projects, though the bug inspiration did not necessarily carry over into further science interests for most students.

Inspiration and ease of use were big goals for Thakkar, a research scientist in education and information technology at UI, and now a policy fellow putting his experience in computer interfacing to work at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC.  He began work on the program in 1999, building on his experience with Chickscope, which followed the development of chicken embryos by MRI.

“But the MRI, as you probably guessed, is a very expensive instrument,” said Thakkar. Doctors told him “we can’t have you guys running around with kids using the MRI all day,” so Thakkar looked for a more sustainable system that would be fun for kids, and accessible remotely.

“How do you create an interface that can appeal to a second grader, a sixth grader, a twelfth grader?” He asked. You keep it simple. “You don’t want to confuse the user, and more importantly you don’t want to waste the instrument time.”

Beckman purchased the electron microscope with help from National Science Foundation funds designated for K-12 education. Bugscope uses it for about 4-6 hours per week, and the rest of the time it is available for research on bendable silicon, self-healing paint and plastics, drug delivery systems, and the shapes of bacteria.

“The whole idea is allowing a classroom to be like research investigators,” said Thakkar. “Each session is unique. The teacher has the power. The kids are the main actors. We are just support.” Students and teachers get out the program what they bring to it. “If they want to make the session successful, it’s up to them.”

Rich Hedman, director of the Center for Mathematics and Science Education at Sacramento State thinks Bugscope looks like a great opportunity for teachers and students, “but it will take some creative thinking and planning time by the teacher to ensure that using the Bugscope is not just “fun” but allows students to deepen their understanding of an important idea (or two) in science,” he wrote, by email.

“Pure inquiry lessons are purely student-driven, and as you might imagine, this can have very positive results (students can get very engaged in their work, etc.), and very negative results (students investigating things with little connection to important science ideas and/or the state science content standards).“

With savvy teacher guidance, Bugscope provides broad scope for youthful investigations into the tiny world of insects and the big world of science.

UCD researcher thrilled to win big grant

Plant biologist Simon Chan looks forward to releasing his imagination in the laboratory.

Chan and fellow UC Davis plant scientist Jorge Dubcovsky on Thursday won a new award funded jointly by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gordon and Betty^* Moore Foundation. The grant will support their research and salaries for five years.

Chan says the no-strings funding will allow him to take his research in “more risky, creative directions that have the potential to really pay off.”

The Hughes Institute and the Moore Foundation created the partnership to advance fundamental plant research, which they feel is an underfunded U.S. sector, accounting for just 2 percent of spending on the life sciences. They selected 15 scientists nationwide for the inaugural class of HHMI-GBMF Investigators. Hughes President Robert Tjian, a former chairman of the science advisory board at the Moore Foundation, proposed the alliance.

Most funding organizations attach grant money to specific research proposals that must win the approval of scientific review committees. Funders prefer discrete research goals that researchers can achieve in one to two years.

Government funding agencies favor research with immediate applications. Investigations into basic plant biology – how plants time flowering, fend off bacterial invaders or package their genes for the next generation – is a harder sell.

Chan and Dubcovsky will have the same freedom to pursue “curiosity-driven” research granted to traditional Hughes Investigators, which have been funded previously through the Hughes Institute.

Chan has been working on genetic mechanisms in inbred plants, using the laboratory-friendly weed Arabidopsis. He’s taking advantage of the wealth of plant science expertise at Davis to test his method in tomato and cabbage plants, commercial crops that are slower to grow and more challenging to manipulate.

“We have wonderful collaborators here at UC Davis. It’s a great place to work on plants.”

He plans to use his five years of freedom to go after a risky, long-range goal: hybrid plants that self-propagate through seeds. Many of the most popular, high-yield crops are hybrids, which do not breed true.

Dubcovsky studies wheat, and through his genetic investigations has found ways to boost the protein and mineral content of the cereal staple. Wheat is difficult to work with because of the large size and repetitive nature of its genome, which is not yet completely sequenced.

Dubcovsky’s lab is focusing on understanding the genetic mechanisms of wheat’s life cycle in order to better adapt crops to localized growing conditions.

He could not be reached for comment.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Image credit (via Chan’s website): Janet Isawa, Onemicron Illustration

The print title read: “UCD researcher thrilled to gain new science grant.”

Read the result: “Walking? Spicy foods? Both among bids to bring on labor.” at sacbee.com. Published: Saturday, Jul. 23, 2011 – 12:00 am | Page 1B

***

In the last week of her pregnancy, Natalie Miller tried everything to persuade her son Sam to leave the comforts of the womb. She had book with a list of labor triggers, and she tried them all, from nipple stimulation to spicy food.

“Played with my nipples while having sex–after getting a foot massage and acupuncture–while eating green curry and walking,” she said, laughing, as she strolled with her son through McKinley Park seven months later.

Miller is not alone. About fifty percent of the new moms surveyed at a Midwestern hospital reported trying at least one nonmedical technique to bring on labor, according to a paper in the current issue of the medical journal Birth. Walking was the most popular, and first-time moms the most likely to try to influence the onset of childbirth–possibly due to fear of the unknown, speculated senior author Jonathan Schaffir, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Ohio State University College of Medicine.

“In our experience, some women take it on themselves to hasten labor, merely to alleviate typical discomfort,” Schaffir wrote, but over the phone, commented that it may have more to do with excitement, anxiety, and a wish for control at time when women’s bodies may feel very much out of their control.

In nurse practitioner and midwife Ruth Cummings’ experience, her clients are anxious about delivering on time, “especially being here at the Birth Center, because this is where they’ve chosen to be. They don’t want to be at the hospital. It’s important to them to get into labor because normal full term is 37 to 42 weeks. I can give a little fudge in my protocol to go a little earlier or a little bit later, but not much.”

Standard due dates are calculated at 40 weeks past the first day of the mother’s last menstrual cycle. After 42 weeks, the aging placenta can begin to fail. Babies may pass merconium, the first poop, which can lead to pneumonia if it gets into their lungs. And every day, the baby grows larger.

Miller feared that her large baby would be enormous by 42 weeks. But Sam arrived on time, on Thanksgiving Day, after a hot curry and a long labor. “He’s my little green curry baby and he made it out.”

For Cummings’ clients, the risk of complications after 42 weeks means they cannot labor at her clinic in the Foothill Farms neighborhood of Sacramento. They need the extra monitoring and emergency preparations of a hospital, where staff can induce labor with synthetic hormones such as Pitocin or dinoprostone.

Autumn Nguyen wanted to avoid a Pitocin boost. She was expecting a Valentine’s baby, but Samuel was a week overdue. At Kaiser hospital in Roseville, she continued walking and yoga exercises to encourage labor after her water broke, well in advance of contractions and true labor. Fear of infection impels doctors to favor intervention in such cases. Doctors don’t like women to labor for much more than 24 hours after the membranes surrounding the baby break, releasing their buffering liquid.

But even after Pitocin, Nguyen progressed slowly. More than thirty hours into labor, “he was stuck, sunny side up. I had a cesarean. After all the work I had done for a natural birth, I ended up with a cesarean!”

Many women believe that induction with Pitocin increases their chances of requiring a caesarean section, adding to the pressure to enter labor spontaneously. The connection is unclear in medical literature, and complicated by the age of the fetus and status of the mother’s cervix.

Medicine knows little about the effectiveness of many popular “folk” methods for labor induction. Most have not been shown to work in scientific studies, but have not been conclusively shown not to work, either. Advice often rests on the speculation, or anecdotal experience, of practitioners.

Sex, for instance, has been hypothesized to hasten labor through the application of hormones in semen to the cervix.

“We use something called prostagladins to induce labor, and we first isolated them from the prostate gland,” said William Gilbert, an obstetrician at Sutter-Davis and regional director for women’s services at Sutter in the Sacramento region. Prostaglandin E2 acts during the onset of labor to soften the cervix and start contractions in the uterus. Doctors may apply dinoprostone, synthetic prostaglandin E2, to the cervix to induce labor.

The muscle contractions of orgasm have also been proposed to bring on sympathetic contractions of labor.

“Whether it brings on labor or not, it does help ripen the cervix. I’m all about ripening the cervix,” said Cummings. “It’s just an easier birth.” She said that when the cervix feels like butter sitting out on the counter in summer, she expects a speedy delivery.

“The day before, on the 24th, we had intercourse–because I figured that that was going to be the last time, in a while, that it was actually going to happen!” said Emily Wilke. Though she had talked about walking and sex inducements to labor with her doctor at Kaiser Roseville, she wasn’t intentionally hurrying the process. It was just for fun.

Schaffir recommends that women walk, eat spicy food, or have sex if they enjoy the activities and would do them anyway. He believes that most rumored labor triggers are ineffective, but harmless. Nipple stimulation, however, can start labor, and he worries that it can cause too many contractions, too fast.

“The placental flow is impeded during the contraction, and during the relaxation is when the baby gets its blood flow. So you can get a baby that can be distressed, whether it be from nipple stimulation, or from women who are having just a bang-up labor” if the contractions come to close together Cummings said.  “That’s why Pitocin is given through the IV–because it’s really short acting and they’ve got control over it. If you set it up so that you have too rapid a contraction pattern–not infrequently will you see babies who don’t tolerate that.”

The suckling sensation of a breastfeeding baby instructs the mother’s brain to release the hormone oxytocin, which causes the breasts to release milk. Oxytocin also contributes to contractions and the opening of the cervix during labor. Pitocin is synthetic oxytocin.

The one method that Miller did not attempt was drinking castor oil. Her midwife at Kaiser said Miller could try it after 40 weeks, but that “in her experience it makes people more sick and doesn’t actually induce labor. And the thought of being sick–you know, was not something that I was into!”

The stimulatory effect of castor oil on the bowels was thought to spread to the uterus, Gilbert said, but there is no evidence that the old remedy works. What are the downsides? “It tastes bad and makes you go to the bathroom.”

That isn’t always a bad thing, said Cummings, because some women are blocked up during pregnancy, and whatever is in the rectum has to come out first. Messiness is a fact of childbirth. “We kind of lovingly call it the poop sign because we know there’s a head pushing that. Women are always ‘Oh, I’m so sorry’–it’s great! We know there’s a baby coming, it’s good!”

Women will endure many discomforts for their children, but spicy food usually goes down easier than castor oil. Mikes Mountain Pizza has labor inducing powers in Sacramento legend. “Their maranara sauce is supposed to help things along,” said Stephanie Gonzales.

Gonzales delivered at the Birth Center, right on schedule. She had heard advice about spicy food and sex from books, other moms, and her hypnobirthing instructor, but had not really thought about hurrying her labor. “I was trying to be all, like–calm. Zen.” At her last appointment, she said Cummings reminded her, “you realize, if you go past, you can’t give birth here–I was like, oh, really?” She said that Cummings told her “next week if you’re still, you know, pregnant, we’ll figure out ways to help that baby out.”

Erin Sadler had heard of the baby-evicting pizza as well. “I was actually ten days late and I was ready for her to come.” But though the anxiety of a possible induction or c-section weighed on her mind, she did not try to hurry the process, resigning herself to waiting for baby Bailey to make her move.

“From everyone that I’ve talked to, and everything that I’ve read, it doesn’t seem like it really helps. Like the chances aren’t increased that much, you just kinda end up being in labor anyways at some point.”

The real answer is there’s really not much you can do to hasten labor, said Gilbert. “In a normal pregnancy, being active, having intercourse, and doing these things are good.” If you are high risk, carrying twins or triplets, the concern is that too much uterine activity could send you into preterm labor. “You want to consult your doctor.”

If the baby’s not ready to come out–short of being induced in the hospital with the aggressive medicines–babies won’t come out. They really do come when they’re ready,” said Cummings.

The onset of labor is a delicate conversation between maternal and fetal systems, and the signals that control it remain a mystery. If he knew what started labor, Gilbert said, “I’d have a Nobel Prize in Medicine!”

Cummings has a list of “gentle nudges for hesitant fetuses,” but doesn’t give it to her clients until they pass 38 weeks. She doesn’t want them worrying, or trying to labor early. She thinks that state of mind affects the experience profoundly.

“If you’re all worried that you’re not going to have your baby in time, you’ve got this stress going on already. You’ve gotta give it up. If you end up having to go to the hospital, you’ve got to go to the hospital. But let’s not make that so in advance because you’re worried about where you have to go.” And each mother, and each labor, is different. Women should not judge their experience.

By nine days past her due date, Sarah Ikemire was anxious, and speed-walking around McKinley Park daily. Her labor did not run according to plan. But in the end, she said, “I’m glad he’s healthy. Period.”

In the end, Cummings reminds her clients, you won’t be pregnant forever. You just may feel that way.

***

<USNEWS>[BY]By Liza Lester

<MC>elester@sacbee.com

[TEXT]In the last week of her pregnancy, Natalie Miller tried everything to persuade her son Sam to leave the comforts of the womb. She had a book with a list of labor triggers, and she tried them all.

She had sex “ after getting a foot massage and acupuncture – while eating green curry and walking,” she said, laughing, as she strolled with her son through McKinley Park seven months later.

<NO1><NO>According to an article in the current issue of the medical journal Birth, about 50 percent of new moms surveyed at a Midwestern hospital reported trying at least one nonmedical technique to start labor. Walking was the most popular, and first-time moms were the most likely to try to influence the onset of childbirth – possibly due to fear of the unknown, speculated senior author Jonathan Schaffir, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Ohio State University College of Medicine.

“In our experience, some women take it on themselves to hasten labor, merely to alleviate typical discomfort,” Schaffir wrote. But in a phone interview, he said it may have more to do with excitement, anxiety, and a wish to regain control of a body that may feel very much out of control.

Whatever the reason for trying popular “folk” methods for inducing labor, there’s awareness, and use, of them among Sacramento’s expectant mothers and childbirth professionals,.

Most of the methods have not been shown to work in scientific studies, but have not been conclusively shown not to work, either. Advice often rests on the speculation, or anecdotal experience, of practitioners.

Nurse practitioner and midwife Ruth Cummings is owner and director of the Sacramento Birth Center, which is dedicated to the idea that childbirth and pregnancy are normal life processes.

She said many of her clients are anxious about delivering on time, “especially being here at the Birth Center, because this is where they’ve chosen to be. They don’t want to be at the hospital.”

Some moms-to-be get particularly concerned as their pregnancy term lengthens.

Cummings has a list of “gentle nudges for hesitant fetuses,” but doesn’t give them to clients until they pass 38 weeks of pregnancy. She doesn’t want them worrying, or trying to labor early.

“If you’re all worried that you’re not going to have your baby in time,” she said, “you’ve got this stress going on already. You’ve gotta give it up.”

Because of increased risk of complications, Cummings does not let clients labor at her clinic in the Foothill Farms neighborhood of Sacramento after 42 weeks. She said those women need extra monitoring and emergency preparations of a hospital, where Ceasarian section can be performed or staff can induce labor with synthetic hormones such as Pitocin.

Many women believe that induction with Pitocin increases their chances of requiring a c-section, adding to the pressure to enter labor spontaneously. The connection is unclear in medical literature.

Methods that naturally stimulate hormones are used by many women to induce labor.

Sex, for instance, has been hypothesized to hasten labor through the application of hormones in semen to the cervix.

“We use something called prostagladins to induce labor, and we first isolated them from the prostate gland,” said William Gilbert, an obstetrician at Sutter-Davis and regional director for women’s services at Sutter in the Sacramento region.

The muscle contractions of orgasm have also been proposed to bring on sympathetic contractions of labor.

One method that has been shown in trials to have an effect on starting labor is stimulation of the nipples. Though the argument for the labor-inducing properties of sex rests on ideas, not evidence, stimulation of the nipples has shown potency in clinical trials.

The suckling sensation of a breastfeeding baby instructs the mother’s brain to release the hormone oxytocin, which causes the breasts to release milk. Oxytocin also contributes to contractions and the opening of the cervix during labor. The Pitocin used to induce labor in hospitals is synthetic oxytocin.

Schaffir, the study author, said he worries that nipple stimulation can cause too many contractions, too fast. He recommends that women walk, eat spicy food, or have sex if they enjoy the activities and would do them anyway. He believes that most rumored labor triggers are ineffective, but harmless.

One reputed labor-inducing method that Miller did not attempt was drinking castor oil. Her midwife at Kaiser said Miller could try it after 40 weeks, but that “in her experience it makes people more sick and doesn’t actually induce labor.”

Women will endure many discomforts for their children, but spicy food usually goes down easier than castor oil. Mikes Mountain Pizza has labor-inducing powers in Sacramento legend.

“Their marinara sauce is supposed to help things along,” said Stephanie Gonzales, who delivered at the Birth Center, right on schedule. She had heard advice about spicy food and sex from books, other moms, and her hypnobirthing instructor, but had not really thought about hurrying her labor.

“I was trying to be all, like – calm. Zen,” she said.

The real answer is there’s not much you can do to hasten labor, said Dr. Gilbert. “In a normal pregnancy, being active, having intercourse, and doing these things are good.”

The onset of labor is a delicate conversation between maternal and fetal systems, and the signals that control it remain a mystery. If he knew what started labor, Gilbert said, “I’d have a Nobel Prize in Medicine.”

<USNEWS>[TAGLINE]<IP0><CJ3><HR70,0.3,5.1,100>

<CJ1><CF501>Call The Bee’s Liza Lester, (916)<TH>321-1067.

<NO1>

***

By nine days past her baby’s due date, Sarah Ikemire was anxious, and speed-walking daily around Sacramento’s McKinley Park. She wanted baby Mason to emerge on his own, without urging from drugs or, worse, a Cesarean section. She asked her doctor what she could do to encourage her baby to leave the comforts of the womb.

“Have sex, do a lot of walking, and just–think positive and you know, talk to you baby, and maybe he’ll be ready to come out,” she recalled. Hence the walking, relieving anxiety with speed.

In a survey of new moms at a Midwestern hospital, about 50 percent of respondents had tried at least one nonmedical technique to bring on labor in the week before childbirth, according to a report in the current issue of the medical journal Birth.

Walking was the most popular, and first-time moms the most likely to try to influence the onset of childbirth.–possibly due to fear of the unknown, speculated senior author Jonathan Schaffir, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Ohio State University College of Medicine.

The report says, “In our experience, some women take it on themselves to hasten labor, merely to alleviate typical discomfort,” Schaffir wrote, but over the phone, commented that it may have more to do with excitement, anxiety, and a wish to regain control of a body that may feel very much out of their control. but a number of Sacramento women interviewed by The Bee say they wanted to avoid the complications and medical interventions of an overlong pregnancy.

Natalie Miller, worried that her big baby would grow too big to escape by the natural route, said she tried everything, running down a list in a childbirth text: walking, spicy green curry, acupuncture, sex, and stimulation of her nipples.

Everything but drinking castor oil, that is. Her midwife at Kaiser Roseville said it was safe, but “in her experience it makes people more sick and doesn’t actually induce labor. And the thought of being sick–that was not something I was into!”

Nurse practitioner and midwife Ruth Cummings is owner and director of the Sacramento Birth Center, a clinic for women in low-risk pregnancies who want natural deliveries, outside the hospital.

She said, for many of her clients worry about delivering on time. “It’s important to them to get into labor because normal full term is 37 to 42 weeks. I can give a little fudge in my protocol to go a little earlier or a little bit later, but not much.”

After 42 weeks, Cummings’ clients need the services of refers clients to a hospital, where doctors can induce labor with drugs like Pitocin, and cope with emergent complications.

Many women believe that medical induction with Pitocin increases their chances of requiring a Caesarean section, adding to the pressure to enter labor spontaneously. The connection is unclear in medical literature.

Popular “folk” methods for labor induction have not received much medical scrutiny. Most have not been shown to work in scientific studies — but have not been conclusively shown not to work, either. Advice often rests on the speculation, or anecdotal experience, of practitioners.

Sex, for instance, has been hypothesized to hasten labor through the application of hormones in semen to the cervix.

“We use something called prostagladins to induce labor, and we first isolated them from the prostate gland,” said William Gilbert, an obstetrician at Sutter-Davis and regional director for women’s services at Sutter in the Sacramento region

The muscle contractions of orgasm have also been proposed to bring on sympathetic contractions of labor.

Though the arguments for the for the labor-inducing properties of sex, spicy food, or castor oil rest on ideas, not evidence, stimulation of the nipples has shown potency has had success in clinical trials.

The suckling sensation of a breastfeeding baby instructs the mother’s brain to release the hormone oxytocin, which causes the breasts to release milk. Oxytocin also contributes to contractions and the opening of the cervix during labor. Stimulating the breasts before childbirth is believed to trigger this process.

Pitocin, a popular drug for labor induction, is synthetic oxytocin.

Schaffir, the study author, worries that nipple stimulation could cause too many contractions, too fast, without supervision. He The study authors and Sacramento practitioners recommends that women walk, eat spicy food, or have sex if they enjoy the activities and would do them anyway. He believes that most rumored labor triggers are ineffective, but harmless.

The real answer is there’s really not much you can do to hasten labor, said Gilbert. “In a normal pregnancy, being active, having intercourse, and doing these things are good.” The onset of labor is a delicate conversation between maternal and fetal systems, and the signals that control it remain a mystery. If he knew what started labor, Gilbert said, “I’d have a Nobel Prize in Medicine!”

Cummings has a list of “gentle nudges for hesitant fetuses,” but says the most important thing for her clients is to stay calm. She thinks that state of mind affects the experience profoundly.

“If you’re all worried that you’re not going to have your baby in time, you’ve got this stress going on already. You’ve gotta give it up,” she said. “If the baby’s not ready to come out–short of being induced in the hospital with the aggressive medicines–babies won’t come out. They really do come when they’re ready.”

The real answer is there’s really not much you can do to hasten labor, said Gilbert. “In a normal pregnancy, being active, having intercourse, and doing these things are good.” The onset of labor is a delicate conversation between maternal and fetal systems, and the signals that control it remain a mystery. If he knew what started labor, Gilbert said, “I’d have a Nobel Prize in Medicine!”

Despite spicy food and vigorous walking, labor had still not begun for Ikemire when her water broke. Wary of infection, her doctor helped nature along with Pitocin. Ikemire soldiered through 37 hours of labor and four failed epidurals, stoically warding off doctors’ suggestions of a C-section.

Ikemire’s labor did not run Things may not have gone according to plan. But in the end, she said, “I’m glad he’s healthy. Period.”

In the end, Cummings reminds her clients, you won’t be pregnant forever. You just may feel that way.

110723_B01_METR_baby.pdf

CARBON MONOXIDE AT A GLANCE

Carbon monoxide gas is odorless, colorless, tasteless and extremely toxic. Small amounts can kill you by starving your body of oxygen, though your lungs are working and drawing normal amounts of oxygen with every breath.

Carbon monoxide clogs the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood, interfering with hemoglobin, a major constituent of red blood cells and the protein that makes blood red. Hemoglobin ferries oxygen from your lungs through your bloodstream to your tissues, and picks up carbon dioxide on its way back.

The properties that allow hemoglobin to carry oxygen and carbon dioxide – and let them go – make it vulnerable to carbon monoxide. And once carbon monoxide gets on board, it doesn’t leave. Its presence makes oxygen stick to hemoglobin longer too, holding oxygen back from the tissues that need it, and exacerbating the problem.

Hemoglobin’s affinity for carbon monoxide is 230 times its affinity for oxygen, so when carbon monoxide is around, it outcompetes oxygen for seats on the hemoglobin ride. Breathing 100 parts carbon monoxide per million parts room air will make you ill.

Headache, nausea, dizziness and confusion are all early consequences of carbon monoxide poisoning. Because symptoms are not distinctive, poisoning can easily become deadly before you are aware of the cause.

Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Mayo Clinic; National Libraries of Medicine

– Liza Lester

Reach her at llester@sacbee.com

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/12/3763012/carbon-monoxide-law-goes-into.html#ixzz1S8XMBZC3

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/02/3742854/concrete-map-park-capture-scope.html#ixzz1QwEh7g6e

What got cut: the science, unfortunately. The Bee has been very generous with column inches, but this article grew overfat. I had too much great detail from too many sources, so even these two short graphs on the history and research at Big Break had to go:

The lagoon, a former asparagus farm, formed in 1928 when high water from heavy rains forced a “big break” in the levee.  Water monitoring at the site reveals huge swings in dissolved oxygen and pH, caused in part by a recent incursion of non-native algae. Salinity varies with rain, snowmelt, and dam releases, as well as the daily tides.

“What we have here are dramatic changes, seasonally, and even daily,” said Moran, which makes Big Break an interesting spot for scientists, and a difficult nut to crack for conservationists. In the Delta, everything is interconnected, and nothing is simple. It’s a message he’s happy to share with visitors.

As well as a graph about designing of educational programs and a rather boring summary of wildlife and activities at the park. Nevertheless, I think we covered quite a bit of ground for a news article!

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/21/3715229/gecko-honors-university-of-the.html#ixzz1QMPt43Qe

Visit Steve Anderson’s website swasiazoology

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