Child Deaths

CITRONELLE, Ala. — A court ordered the woman accused of torturing two young children who were later killed and dumped in rural Mississippi and Alabama to be extradited to Alabama to face charges. Heather Leavell-Keaton, who had been held in Kentucky, was returning to Mobile yesterday, a day after search teams found remains that police believe belong to one of the children. Police said search teams found the skeletal remains near a county road in Citronelle, about 30 miles north of Mobile.

A nationwide survey to be released Tuesday that ranks how states report the deaths and near-deaths of children due to abuse and neglect gave Massachusetts a letter grade of C, saying the state could do more to make public how the tragedies occurred, to help combat the problem. The report, "State Secrecy and Child Deaths in the US," to be released at a congressional briefing, found that Massachusetts made only minor improvements since a similar study was done in 2008, after new reporting requirements went into effect.

WASHINGTON --The number of children drowning in inflatable pools has increased as the pools have gotten bigger, according to safety officials who warn that inflatable pools pose the same dangers as other types. Because inflatable pools have become larger, owners do not empty them every night, increasing the risk, explained Julie Vallese, Consumer Product Safety Commission spokeswoman. The pools -- ranging in size from small wading pools to 4-foot-deep 18-foot-wide above-ground pools -- appear to have grown more popular over the past several years, the commission says.

An Illinois coroner says a baby girl's recent death doesn't appear to be linked to an investigation into infant formula given to a Missouri newborn who apparently died of a rare bacterial infection. But he's seeking more tests. Madison County Coroner Steve Nunn said Friday that an autopsy revealed no physical evidence of infection in the Illinois child. But he wants additional lab tests "in view of recent public health reports concerning the possibility of infant formula contamination.

CHICAGO - An antibiotic widely used in Africa to treat eyesight-robbing infections seems to help prevent Ethiopian children from dying of other diseases. A study in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association suggests an unintended benefit from efforts to wipe out trachoma, the world’s leading preventable cause of blindness. The World Health Organization has set 2020 as the target for eliminating trachoma. The United States has been free of the disease since the 1970s, but it persists in 48 countries.

NEW YORK - America uses flawed methods to tally and analyze the deaths of children who have been maltreated, and the latest annual estimate of 1,770 such fatalities is probably too low, the Government Accountability Office says in a new report to Congress. Better data, the GAO says, would aid in developing strategies that could save many children’s lives in the future. The GAO report, the subject of a House Human Resources subcommittee hearing yesterday, says that state agencies and the Department of Health and Human Services...

LONDON — Child deaths worldwide seem to have fallen faster than officials thought, as a new study estimates that far fewer children are dying every year than previously guessed by the United Nations. Using more data and an improved modeling technique, scientists predicted that about 7.7 million children under 5 would die this year, down from nearly 12 million in 1990. The study was published online today in the British medical journal, Lancet. The new estimate is substantially lower than UNICEF’s last estimate of child...

CONCORD, N.H. - Eight years ago, 21-month old Kassidy Bortner died after being horrifically beaten, including being thrown into a closet door, by her mother's boyfriend, Chad Evans. Evans and the mother went to prison. He was convicted of second-degree murder; she of child endangerment. But the story did not end there. Four years after the toddler's death, lawmakers passed the Bortner Law, which requires the state to disclose what it knew about fatal or near-fatal child abuse cases in which state agencies had some oversight over the family.

LONDON — Giving young women an education resulted in saving the lives of more than 4 million children worldwide in 2009, a study says. American researchers analyzed 915 censuses and surveys from 175 countries tracking education, economic growth, HIV rates, and child deaths from 1970 to 2009. By using statistical models, the researchers found that for every extra year of education women had, the death rate for children under 5 dropped by almost 10 percent. In 2009, they estimated that 4.2 million fewer children died because women of childbearing age in...

A nationwide survey to be released Tuesday that ranks how states report the deaths and near-deaths of children due to abuse and neglect gave Massachusetts a letter grade of C, saying the state could do more to make public how the tragedies occurred, to help combat the problem. The report, "State Secrecy and Child Deaths in the US," to be released at a congressional briefing, found that Massachusetts made only minor improvements since a similar study was done in 2008, after new reporting requirements went into effect.

FAIRFAX, Va. - A Virginia grandmother was convicted yesterday of first-degree murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison for tossing her 2-year-old granddaughter from a pedestrian bridge at a shopping mall. Carmela dela Rosa threw Angelyn Ogdoc off a 45-foot-high skywalk like a "piece of trash" at Tysons Corner Center, the state's largest mall, last November during the holiday season, prosecutors said. Dela Rosa was upset that her son-in-law had gotten her daughter pregnant out of wedlock, prosecutors said.

At the risk of sounding morbid, I've recently been privy to several very encouraging conversations about death. Can you put the words "encouraging" and "death" in the same sentence? Is that actually allowed, especially in regard to children? I think so. In fact, I think it has to be that way. Let me explain why. As a mother and a pediatrician, I know the healthy babies we all dream of when planning our families are not what every parent gets. So, as much as my years of medical training were filled with children who were sick but got better, filled with cases that reassured rather than terrified,...

NEW YORK - America uses flawed methods to tally and analyze the deaths of children who have been maltreated, and the latest annual estimate of 1,770 such fatalities is probably too low, the Government Accountability Office says in a new report to Congress. Better data, the GAO says, would aid in developing strategies that could save many children’s lives in the future. The GAO report, the subject of a House Human Resources subcommittee hearing yesterday, says that state agencies and the Department of Health and Human Services should...

ORLANDO - Casey Anthony briefly broke down crying yesterday as prosecutors told jurors during closing arguments that she murdered her 2-year-old daughter Caylee because the child prevented her from having a relationship with a club promoter. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton said Anthony wanted a relationship with her boyfriend, to go out with her friends, and to live the carefree life she had before Caylee’s birth. “Something needed to be sacrificed, that something was either the life she wanted or the life thrust upon her,’’ Ashton said...

In the wake of his successful first novel, “Salt,’’ scriptwriter Jeremy Page returns to the South English coast to fiddle with the boundaries of time. Once again, in “Sea Change,’’ he teases readers’ distinctions between fantasy and reality. After a dramatic flashback, the new novel opens with Guy, a sometime piano teacher and full-time romantic, marking his fifth year on a barge, bobbing between sea and shore, past and present, despair and hopefulness. “The Flood is a ninety-foot Dutch coastal barge, built in Voorhaven yard in Scheveningen in 1926,...

CITRONELLE, Ala. — A court ordered the woman accused of torturing two young children who were later killed and dumped in rural Mississippi and Alabama to be extradited to Alabama to face charges. Heather Leavell-Keaton, who had been held in Kentucky, was returning to Mobile yesterday, a day after search teams found remains that police believe belong to one of the children. Police said search teams found the skeletal remains near a county road in Citronelle, about 30 miles north of Mobile.

WASHINGTON -- In an effort to prevent child deaths, the government is requiring automakers to install safer switches on power windows by 2008. Officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced the requirement yesterday in Columbus, Ohio, with Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, who pushed for the change. The regulation aims to help prevent a child's head or limb from being caught in a power window, said Dr. Jeffrey Runge, NHTSA chief. "Although these incidents are infrequent, a simple, inexpensive remedy is available and should be standard practice," he said.

At the risk of sounding morbid, I've recently been privy to several very encouraging conversations about death. Can you put the words "encouraging" and "death" in the same sentence? Is that actually allowed, especially in regard to children? I think so. In fact, I think it has to be that way. Let me explain why. As a mother and a pediatrician, I know the healthy babies we all dream of when planning our families are not what every parent gets. So, as much as my years of medical training were filled with children who were sick but got better, filled with cases that reassured rather than terrified,...

LONDON — Giving young women an education resulted in saving the lives of more than 4 million children worldwide in 2009, a study says. American researchers analyzed 915 censuses and surveys from 175 countries tracking education, economic growth, HIV rates, and child deaths from 1970 to 2009. By using statistical models, the researchers found that for every extra year of education women had, the death rate for children under 5 dropped by almost 10 percent. In 2009, they estimated that 4.2 million fewer children died because women of childbearing age in developing countries were more...

NAIROBI — Ten African countries have halved their poverty rates over the past two decades, but child mortality rates have increased in six sub-Saharan nations, a report on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals released yesterday found. The countries that halved their poverty rates since 1990 include relatively populous countries such as Ethiopia and Egypt and postconflict countries such as Angola. However, in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has risen.