WEDNESDAY, Feb. 6 (HealthDay News) -- The antiretroviral drug nevirapine greatly reduces the risk that HIV-infected mothers will pass the virus to their babies during breast-feeding, according to a study conducted in Africa and India.

Nevirapine is already in widespread use in developing countries to prevent HIV-positive women from infecting their newborns during childbirth, note researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

In this study, the Hopkins team and colleagues in Ethiopia, India and Uganda gave daily doses of the drug to breast-feeding infants when they were 8 to 42 days old.

By the time they reached 6 weeks of age, the rate of HIV infection among infants who received the drug daily was about half that of infants who received a single dose of nevirapine at birth, which is the current standard of care.

After six months, the infants who'd received the six-week drug treatment were almost a third less likely to suffer HIV infection or death than those given the single dose at birth.

The study included about 2,000 infants and was conducted from 2001 to 2007. It's one of the first randomized controlled trials to show that a drug can prevent HIV transmission in infants being breast-fed by HIV-infected mothers.

The findings were presented Monday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, in Boston.

Breast-feeding is a major cause of HIV infection in the developing world. Each year, about 150,000 infants are infected with HIV through breast-feeding, according to the World Health Organization.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has more about HIV infections in infants and children.

MONDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- A groundbreaking study reports that most very low birth-weight babies born to low-income women failed to get critical follow-up care within their first two years of life.

The study illustrates how these premature infants, who are vulnerable to vision, hearing and speech impairments, are falling through the cracks of the U.S. health-care system, the researchers said.

Only 20 percent of the babies with hearing problems returned for specialized care within their first six months of life, while fewer than one in four underwent recommended vision tests between 1 and 2 years of age.

On average, it costs $250,000 to treat an extremely premature baby in the hospital, said study author Dr. C. Jason Wang, an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health at Boston University's Schools of Medicine and Public Health. "When they go home, the least we could do is make sure they can see and they can hear, to make sure they can be successful."

At issue are babies born at less than 3.3 pounds, typically because they are extremely premature. According to Wang, babies can now survive being born as early as after six months of gestation, although the infants often suffer from a variety of serious health problems.

"If they're earlier, their lungs aren't really developed, so they will have trouble breathing, taking in oxygen, and a lot of them will develop something called chronic lung disease," he said. "And there will be trouble in the brain because they don't get enough oxygen to the brain. If it's severe, that could have some consequences later on in terms of cognitive and other functions."

Wang and his colleagues chose to look at babies from poor families on Medicaid in South Carolina because the state has especially good records. Also, Wang said, poor and black women are prone to having very low-birth-weight babies.

The researchers reviewed the medical records of 2,182 very low-birth-weight children born between 1996 and 1998. Among those with hearing loss, just 20 percent received hearing "rehabilitation" by the time they were 6 months old, as guidelines recommend. And only 23 percent received eye exams between 1 and 2 years of age, the study found.

The findings are published in the February issue of Pediatrics.

"People have suspected for a long time that very low-birth-weight infants weren't getting the care that they need," Wang said. "We show for the first time that there's a significant gap in providing needed services."

There are some caveats to the findings, Wang said: The study only looked at one state, and it's not clear whether parents or the medical system contribute to the problem.

Whatever the case, "we need to improve the coordination of care for kids with complex conditions," he said.

Some families, especially those with several children, can be overwhelmed by many different doctors' appointments in different places, Wang explained. "They need a support system," he said.

The findings seemed valid to Dr. Maureen Hack, a professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, who believes the health-care system's lack of organization is to blame.

"It [the study] does express what is happening in this country with respect to indigent population," she said. "But I don't think it's just a problem with preemies. It's depressing."

Another study in the same issue of Pediatrics found other signs of disparities in health care based on race. Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reported that children in five minority groups were less likely than whites to have recently visited a doctor or been given medical prescriptions.

More information

Learn more about premature babies from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

MONDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- This is the story of a little boy who swallowed a magnet and wound up in the hospital.

Actually, Braden Eberle, 4, of San Jose, Calif., swallowed two tiny magnets from his older brother's construction kit on two successive days last spring.

After the first ingestion, he confessed to his mom, Jill Eberle, whose first reaction was that the magnet would pass through her son's system without a problem. "People swallow pennies of the same size every day," she said. "They're smaller than an eraser."

But by dinnertime on the day after Braden swallowed the second magnet, he developed stomach pains. His mother thought it was either the flu or the magnets. "The magnets never left my mind," she said.

The next morning, with Braden still in pain, the family's doctor told them to go straight to the emergency room where an X-ray revealed the two magnets were stuck together.

But not stuck together the way you would think. Each had been ingested separately and both were in different segments of the intestine.

"They were attracted to each other with the wall of each segment they were in stuck together," said Dr. Sanjeev Dutta, the pediatric surgeon at Good Samaritan Hospital who would operate on Braden later that day. "Because they were so powerful, the wall of the intestine was getting squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, and then it just necrosed, or kind of rotted away, and created a hole between the two."

Dutta, who is also an assistant professor of surgery and pediatrics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital of Stanford University (which provides pediatric surgical services to Good Samaritan), has co-authored an article on the episode, which is published in the February issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), there has been at least one death attributed to magnet ingestion, and at least 19 children required surgery after they swallowed magnets or pieces of metal (that can get stuck to the magnet).

"It's a serious thing," Dutta said.

Using minimally invasive laparoscopy, Dutta removed both magnets with three small incisions during a procedure that lasted two hours. Braden went home three days after the operation.

About two weeks later, the CPSC updated an earlier warning about magnet-containing toys. Several construction sets, similar to the one Braden played with, have since been recalled.

Many of today's toys contain rare-earth magnets, which are much more powerful than the magnets of yesteryear. "It's a new type of magnet that's extremely powerful, much more powerful than the magnets that we used to play with," Dutta explained.

Dutta wants to make sure that parents are aware of this risk. "It seems like such a benign thing," he said. "[But] these things look like candy to a 3-year-old."

"It all happened because of a toy," Eberle added. "I didn't comprehend it. It was surreal. . . He knew to run to us. That probably saved him. He knew to tell us that, thank God, or I would've thought it was the flu. It makes me so angry."

For her part, Jill Eberle started getting rid of all magnetic toys in her house, even the huge ones. But 10 months later, she is still finding the little pieces.

They're stuck to the side of a wall or a computer table," she said. "They're not gone yet."

More information

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has a safety warning on magnets.

MONDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- About one-third of hit songs -- including three-quarters of rap songs -- have some form of explicit reference to drug, alcohol or tobacco use, a new study found.

"Overall, 116 of the 279 unique songs (41.6 percent) had a substance use reference of any kind. Ninety-three songs (33.3 percent) contained explicit substance use references," wrote the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers.

Just under 3 percent of the songs mentioned smoking, but almost 24 percent touched on alcohol use, close to 14 percent depicted marijuana use and 11.5 percent depicted other or unspecified substance use, the researchers noted.

The researchers did their study by analyzing Billboard magazine's 279 most popular songs of 2005.

The overall rate of references varied widely by musical genre. One or more references to substance use were found in 48 of 62 rap songs (77 percent); 22 of 61 country songs (36 percent); 11 of 55 R&B/hip-hop songs (20 percent); nine of 66 rock songs (14 percent); and three of 35 pop songs (9 percent).

Of the 93 songs with explicit substance use references, the behaviors were frequently associated with partying (54 percent), sex (46 percent), violence (29 percent) and/or humor (24 percent). In these songs, substance use was most often motivated by peer/social pressure (48 percent) or sex (30 percent).

"Only four songs (4 percent) contained explicit anti-use messages, and none portrayed substance refusal," the study authors wrote. "Most songs with substance use (68 percent) portrayed more positive than negative consequences; these positive consequences were most commonly social, sexual, financial or emotional."

The study is published in the February issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The research was first presented in November at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

"Children and adolescents are heavily exposed to substance use in popular music, and this exposure varies widely by genre. Substance use in music is frequently motivated by peer acceptance and sex, and it has highly positive associations and consequences," the study authors concluded.

More information

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has more about children and substance abuse.