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For generations, parents and families have relied on home cures for everything from colds to tummy aches and sleepless nights. Chicken soup, popsicles and warm milk have proven themselves over decades of use, and now they have company — grape juice. At least, that’s what the internet says. In recent months, tales of grape juice curing stomach flu have cropped up on parenting blogs all over the web. Here’s the idea: If you find yourself (or one of your family members) exposed to the stomach flu, but haven’t experienced symptoms yet, downing three glasses of grape juice will ward off the illness. Multiple sites claim that the grape juice can change the pH in the stomach, making it uninhabitable to stomach viruses. They also claim that the skins of the grapes have anti-viral properties. Is it true? Can grape juice really stop puke in its tracks? Is this the fix […]

Vaccines don’t just protect your kids from illnesses — they protect them from passing the germs on to high-risk populations, like the elderly, babies who are too young to get immunized, kids still in need of their booster shots, children whose immune systems aren’t working well (like those with cancer). As a parent, vaccinating your kids is the safest option for them, your family, and your community. How do vaccines work? Getting vaccinated is a way of creating immunity to certain diseases by using small amounts of killed or weakened bacteria (such as pneumococcus) or viruses (like measles) that cause the particular disease. Vaccines cause the immune system to react as if there were a real infection — it fends off the “infection” and remembers the organism so that it can fight it quickly should it enter the body later. What is community immunity? Community immunity, or “herd immunity,” is when […]

As your kiddo’s sniffling and sneezing like crazy, it can be hard to decipher whether it’s just a common cold (or other upper respiratory virus) that will soon pass, or if it’s the product of seasonal allergies (sometimes called “hay fever” or “seasonal allergic rhinitis”) that may need treatment. Seasonal allergies can start at almost any time (although kids usually develop them by 10 years old and experience the worst symptoms in their early 20s, with symptoms often going away later in adulthood). But even kids who’ve never had seasonal allergies before can suddenly develop them out of the blue. So here are some clues to help you and your child’s doctor figure out what’s going on. The symptoms Symptoms for both allergies and the common cold can include a runny or stuffy nose, sneezing, fatigue and coughing, so it’s easy to confuse the two. In addition to those other […]