A 5-year-old Kentucky girl with a rare disease was refused by two airlines to board a plane from Canada to China for her treatment, saying she was too sick to fly. The girl was to receive stem cell treatments for a rare fatal disease at a Beijing hospital.

After being treated at a Vancouver hospital for seizures, Miranda Goranflo and her daughter Hailey were forced to fly home to Shepherdsville, KY, when the airlines, Air China and Air Canada, decided during a layover in Vancouver, British Columbia, that she was not fit to fly for 11-hour trip

The U.S. government has recommended adding GlaxoSmithKline Plc's Rotarix vaccine to the choices for immunizing infants against the deadly intestinal virus that causes diarrhea and vomiting in children. Rotarix is a liquid and given in a two-dose series to infants from 6 to 24 weeks of age.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has already endorsed Merck and Co Inc's RotaTeq saying both are equally effective. There are many different strains of rotavirus. The vaccine protects against rotavirus gastroenteritis caused by the G1, G3, G4, and G9 strains

First time parents should think twice about owning a cat if they have relatives with eczema, a skin disease, a new study finds. A gene mutation and exposure to cats at birth may increase a child's risk of developing eczema during their first year, researchers from the UK and Denmark say.

Other than environmental causes, eczema runs in families and is linked to functional faults in the gene that produces filaggrin (FLG), a protective protein in the skin. Having the mutant FLG gene increased the risk of eczema in a baby's first year twofold. Adding exposure to a cat quadrupled that risk, researchers say

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a vaccine that treats five childhood ailments in a single dose. Pentacel would reduce the number of injections children get before they are 18 months old by as many as one-third.

It is the first 5-in-1 pediatric combination for immunization against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib). The vaccine is approved for administration as a four-dose series at two, four, six and 15 to 18 months of age. The first dose may be given as early as six weeks of age

The use of a pacifier or 'dummy' by babies has been identified as a risk factor for acute otitis media (AOM), a type of common ear infection, new study says.

The researchers from University Medical Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands studied almost 500 Dutch children who used dummies or pacifiers. The study spanning five years found that the pacifiers almost double the risk of recurrent ear infections in those who used it as compared to the non-users