Friday, August 3, 2007

Today's Globe: breast-feeding, toddler word spurts, doctors' license raid, Antigenics in Russia, Jean Arsenian

Nearly three-quarters of new mothers in the United States are breast-feeding their babies, but they are quitting too soon and resorting to infant formula too often, federal health officials said yesterday.

It is called the "word spurt," that magical time when a toddler's vocabulary explodes, seemingly overnight. New research offers a decidedly unmagical explanation: Babies start really jabbering after they have mastered enough easy words to tackle more of the harder ones.

Federal agents arrested dozens of doctors (including Pablo Valentin, left, a former executive director of Puerto Rico's medical licensing board) accused of obtaining medical licenses through fraud or bribery, carrying out sweeping raids across Puerto Rico yesterday.

Antigenics Inc., the developer of an immune-stimulating drug against kidney cancer, asked Russian regulators to approve its therapy, after a study failed to meet the statistical standard in the United States.

Jean MacDonald Arsenian (right), a psychologist whose 1940s research into children's attachments to their mothers influenced top researchers, traded the comforts of academia to treat drug addicts at Boston State Hospital in the 1960s. Dr. Arsenian, who scaled back her career to bring up two sons and support her husband's pioneering work in group therapy at Boston State, died July 23 at her seaside Rockport home. She was 93.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:52 AM

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