FDA Stops Benzocaine in Products for Teething Pain

Like most people I know, I get lots of updates from various organizations, news agencies, etc. I also get daily and weekly science updates from different agencies and online sources. 

Today I received an update from the Food and Drug Administration that over-the-counter (OTC) teething products containing benzocaine are going to be taken off the market. The FDA news release builds on previous warnings about risks connected with benzocaine products for methemoglobinemia. This dangerous condition is the result of elevated levels of methemoglobin in the blood, which causes the amount of oxygen carried through the blood to be greatly reduced and lead to death. 

So spread the word! All those teething and throat pain products sold as gels, sprays, ointments, solutions and lozenges under the OTC brand names Anbesol, Baby Orajel, Cepacol, Chloraseptic, Hurricaine, Orabase, Orajel and Topex, as well as store brands and generics are out. Companies can voluntarily remove the products or they will be required by the FDA to stop producing them. 

To decrease gum pain from newly erupting teeth, parents are asked to go back to the basics of rubbing inflamed gums and offering cold teethers. Go science!

Emotional Contagion

I learned a new expression today, emotional contagion. I thought it sounded like a "misery loves company" kind of thing, but it turns out it is more related to unconsciously picking up on emotional cues via the eyes.

Officially, Emotional contagion is the tendency for two individuals to emotionally converge. 

Still a bit confused? Me too, until I read research done by Univ. of Tennessee, Assistant Professor, Garriy Shteynberg, Ph.D. on the "psychological impact shared attention (also referred to as shared experience) has on culture and the mind." They basically study how shared attention affects another person's memory, emotion, and goals.

Christine Fawcett, Ph.D., of Uppsala University, Sweden studies emotional contagion by recording the changing a person's pupil size in response to seeing another person’s pupils dilate or contract. Working with 6-9 month-old babies, Fawcett's team showed infants black circles of different sizes designed to look like pupils. They recorded how the infants’ own pupil sizes reacted to these. and also showed the infants images of black squares as a control.

Their results were not super surprising (i.e. babies pick up on your mood), but the fact that they did not respond to the different sized black squares was interesting. 

So if you subscibe to the old saying, "the eyes are windows of the soul" you might be closer to correct than you thought. Go science!