Science

'I don't want him to go': An autistic teen and his family face stark choices

Published

4 months ago

August 27, 2024

'I don't want him to go': An autistic teen and his family face stark choices

Christine LyBurtus was aching and fearful of what might happen when her 13-year-old son returned home.

Noah had been sent to Children’s Hospital of Orange County for a psychiatric hold lasting up to 72 hours after he punched at walls, flipped over a table, ripped out a chunk of his mother’s hair and tried to break a car window.

“There’s nothing else to call it except a psychotic episode,” LyBurtus said.

The clock was ticking on that August day in 2022. The single mother wanted help to prevent such an episode from happening again, maybe with a different medication. Hospital staff were waiting for a psychiatric bed, possibly at another hospital with a dedicated unit for patients with autism or other developmental disabilities.

But as the hours ran out on the hold, it became clear that wasn’t happening. LyBurtus brought Noah home to their Fullerton apartment.

“When he came back home, it kind of broke my heart,” said his sister, Karissa, who is two years older. “He looked like, ‘What the heck did you guys put me into?’”

Christine LyBurtus makes a snack for Noah.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The next night, Noah was back in the ER after smashing a television and attacking his mother. This time, he was transferred to a different hospital for three weeks, prescribed medications for psychosis, and then sent to a residential facility in Garden Grove.

LyBurtus said she was told it would be a stopgap measure — just for three weeks — until she could line up more help at home. But when she phoned to ask about visiting her son, LyBurtus said she was told she couldn’t see him for a month.

“He lives here now,” someone told her, she said, and the staff needed time to “break him in.”

LyBurtus felt like she was being pushed to give up her son, instead of getting the help her family needed. She insisted on bringing him home.

Autism is a developmental condition that can shape how people think, communicate, move and process sensory information. When Noah was 3, a doctor noted he was a “very cute little boy” who played alone, rocked back and forth, and sometimes bit himself. Noah’s eye contact was “fleeting.” He could speak about 20 words, but often cried or pulled his mother’s hand to communicate.

The physician summed up his behavior as “characteristic of a DSM-IV diagnosis of autistic disorder.”

When he was in elementary school, LyBurtus stopped working full time outside the home and enrolled in a state program that paid her as his caregiver. She relies on Medi-Cal for his medical care, and much of his schooling has been in Orange County-run programs for children with moderate to severe disabilities.

Noah does not speak but sometimes uses pictures, an app on a tablet, or some sign language to communicate. When a reporter visited their home last year, Noah bobbed his head and shoulders as he listened to music on his iPad. He flapped his hands as LyBurtus made him a peanut-butter-and-banana smoothie, and then dutifully followed her instructions to chuck the peel and put the almond milk away. It was a good day, LyBurtus said with relief.

But on other days, LyBurtus said her son could be rigid; his demands, unpredictable. “Some days he’s fixated on having three pairs of pants on … Some days he wants to take seven showers. The next day, I can’t get him to take showers.”

Christine LyBurtus greets son Noah as he arrives home on a bus

When frustrated, Noah might erupt, banging his head against walls and trying to jump out the windows of their apartment. He had kicked and bitten his mother when she tried to redirect him. In the worst instances, LyBurtus had resorted to hiding in the bathroom — her “safe room” — and urged Karissa to lock herself in the bedroom.

As Noah grew taller and stronger, LyBurtus stripped bare the walls of her apartment to try to make it safe, installed shatterproof windows and removed a knob from a closet door to prevent Noah from using it as a foothold to scale over the top of the closet door. She made sure to flag her address for the Fullerton Police Department so it knew her son was developmentally disabled.

“I’m just so grateful that my son never got shot,” LyBurtus said.

Each of the 911 calls was the start of a Sisyphean routine. Noah “has been challenging to place in [a] mental health facility due to behavioral care needs with severe autism,” a doctor wrote when he was back at Children’s Hospital of Orange County yet again.

Noah leaps into the air while inside his home in Fullerton

As the family tried to get through each crisis, LyBurtus was also facing a common struggle among parents of California children with disabilities: not getting the help they were supposed to receive from the state.

LyBurtus was getting assistance through a local regional center, one of the nonprofit agencies contracted by the California Department of Developmental Services. She said she’d been authorized to receive 40 hours weekly of respite care — meant to relieve families of children with disabilities for short periods — but was sometimes receiving only 12 to 16 hours.

She was also supposed to have two workers at a time, LyBurtus said, but caregivers were so scarce that she was scheduling one at a time in order to cover as many hours as she could.

In the meantime, Noah wasn’t sleeping and she was going through so much laundry detergent and quarters that her grocery budget was drained. At one point, she wanted to go to a food bank, but there would be no one to watch him.

“I could not be anymore tired and frustrated!!!!” she wrote to her regional center coordinator. “Is the only way Noah is going to get help [is] if I abandoned him and surrender him to the State!?!?”

Across the country, surging numbers of young people have landed in emergency rooms in the throes of a mental health crisis amid a shortage of needed care. Children in need of psychiatric care are routinely held in emergency departments for hours or even days. Even amid COVID, as people tried to avoid emergency rooms, mental health-related visits continued to rise among teens in 2021 and 2022.

Among those hit hardest by the crisis are autistic youth, who turn up in emergency rooms at higher rates than other kids — and are much more likely to do so for psychiatric issues. Many have overlapping conditions such as anxiety, and researchers have also found they face a higher risk of abuse and trauma.

“We’re a misunderstood, marginalized population of people” at higher risk of suicide, Lisa Morgan, founder of the Autism and Suicide Prevention Workgroup, said at a national meeting.

Yet the available assistance is “not designed for us.”

According to the National Autism Indicators Report, more than half of parents of autistic youth who were surveyed had trouble getting the mental health services their autistic kids needed, with 22% saying it was “very difficult” or “impossible.” A report commissioned by L.A. County found autistic youth were especially likely to languish in ERs amid few options for ongoing psychiatric treatment.

Karissa left, interacts with brother Noah on a couch

In decades past, many psychiatrists were unwilling to diagnose mental health disorders in autistic people, believing “it was either part of the autism or for other reasons it was undiagnosable,” said Jessica Rast, an assistant research professor affiliated with the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute. Much more is now known about both autism and mental health treatment, but experts say the two fields aren’t consistently linked in practice.

Mental health providers may focus on an autism diagnosis for a prospective patient and say, “‘Well, that’s not in our wheelhouse. We’re treating things like depression or anxiety,’” said Brenna Maddox, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Yet patients or their families “weren’t asking for autism treatment. They were asking for depression or anxiety or other mental health treatment,” Maddox said.

In the meantime, the system that serves children with developmental disabilities has faltered.

“Never have I seen that we can’t staff the needed things on so many cases,” Larry Landauer, executive director of the Regional Center of Orange County, said last year. Statewide, “there’s thousands and thousands of cases that are struggling.”

“If I’m a respite worker and I get called on to provide help to families … who am I going to select?” Landauer asked. “The [person] that watches TV and plays on his iPad and I just sit and monitor him? Or do I take someone that is significantly behaviorally challenged — that pulls my hair, that scares me all the time, that tries to run out the door? … Those are the ones getting left out.”

The fall and winter of 2022 were so trying that LyBurtus eventually took matters into her own hands. Noah bit his mother and smashed a bathroom window and tried to climb out before the Fullerton Fire Department arrived. Weeks later, LyBurtus had to dial 911 again after he bit his sister’s finger badly enough to draw blood.

Caregiver Terrence Morris, left, keeps a watchful eye on Noah

He ended up in a hold at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, which searched for another facility that might help him, but “all placement options declined patient placement,” according to his medical records.

Noah was again sent home with his mother, but the next day, he was back at Children’s Hospital of Orange County after slamming his head against a tile floor.

LyBurtus, frantic and bruised, made call after call and finally used her credit card to pay for an ambulance to take him to UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, where he was admitted.

Week by week, psychiatrists there said Noah seemed to be making some strides as they adjusted his alphabet soup of medications. But hospital staff struggled to understand what would set him off.

Once, while playing cards, Noah suddenly started knocking the cards off the table and struck another patient in the face. Another day, he appeared suddenly to be frightened after using the bathroom, and then charged at a computer plugged in nearby.

But there were also days when he danced to a Michael Jackson song, or played Giant Jenga outside on the deck. One day, a doctor wrote, “He made eye contact for a few seconds. I waved to him, and he looked at his hand, as though he was wondering what to do with it in return.”

Christine LyBurtus washes the face of son Noah

LyBurtus was straining to find more help at home so UCLA held off on discharging him, but at the end of January 2023 Noah was sent home. With no changes in medication planned, “and the strong possibility that Noah grew tired of the inpatient setting, the ward no longer was deemed therapeutic or necessary,” a doctor wrote.

Less than a month later, he was back in the emergency room at Children’s Hospital of Orange County after biting and attacking his mother.

A psychiatrist at the pediatric hospital wrote that because he had limited ability to communicate, another round of psychiatric hospitalization would do little unless it was specialized for “individuals with neurodevelopmental needs.” When the 72-hour hold at children’s hospital ran out, LyBurtus asked for an ambulance to take Noah home, fearful of driving him herself.

In May, the month Noah turned 14, LyBurtus heard the regional center had found a place for Noah: a four-bed facility in Rio Linda, a tiny town near Sacramento that she’d never heard of. He could live there for more than a year, she was told, and then hopefully return home with the right support.

Christine LyBurtus shows photographs to son Noah

But LyBurtus fretted about what she would do if something happened to him so far away. She felt, she said, like she had failed her child. Months passed as they waited for a spot there; LyBurtus said she was told they were trying to hire the needed staff.

“I don’t want him to go,” she said, “but I don’t want to continue going on the way that we’re going on.”

Then in August, LyBurtus was told the regional center had found a spot at a facility much closer to home: the state-run South STAR facility in Costa Mesa, about 20 miles from their apartment. Noah would occupy one of only 15 STAR beds across the state for developmentally disabled adolescents in “acute crisis.”

On a bright September morning, LyBurtus pulled up at an unassuming gray house with a “Home Sweet Home” sign by the door. The three teens living there were gone for the morning while an administrator and South STAR program director Kim Hamilton-Royse showed LyBurtus around the house.

Minutes into the tour, LyBurtus found herself crying. Hamilton-Royse stopped her explanation of the daily schedule. “I know this is super hard for you,” she said gently.

But LyBurtus brightened at the sight of the sensory room outfitted with crash pads and a mesmerizing, colorful cylinder of bubbling water. Hamilton-Royse pointed out a vibrating chair and added that they had a projector that would fill the room with illuminated stars.

LyBurtus took photos on her smartphone to show Noah. “You’re not going to be able to get him out of here,” she said.

As they rounded the rest of the house — bedrooms with dressers secured to the wall, a living room with paintings of sailboats, a fish tank — Hamilton-Royse asked if LyBurtus felt any better.

Christine LyBurtus reacts while boxing up items for son Noah

“I do,” she said. “I just hope that he can behave.”

Hamilton-Royse reassured her that South STAR had never kicked anyone out. “And we’ve had some really challenging folks,” she said.

“I promise you we’ll take very good care of him.”

As she returned to her car, LyBurtus took a deep breath. “It’s hard not to feel like I’m betraying him,” she said, her voice shaking. “But I can’t keep living like this, you know?”

Christine Lyburtus visiting a care facility

2 Christine LyBurtus in a hallway of a care facility

3 Christine LyBurtus standing at the front gate of a residential care facility

1. Christine Lyburtus tours a residential care facility in Costa Mesa, about 20 minutes from her home. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) 2. At the South STAR facility, LyBurtus was told, Noah would occupy one of only 15 STAR beds across the state for developmentally disabled adolescents in “acute crisis.” (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) 3. “I just hope that he can behave,” LyBurtus said of son Noah. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Three days later, Noah went back to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County on another psychiatric hold. He came home, then was back in the emergency department a week and a half later.

The October night before Noah left home, LyBurtus had brought home sushi for him, one of his favorite foods. He fell asleep around 6:30 p.m, and woke up again at 1 a.m. LyBurtus gave him his medication and as he drifted back to sleep, his mother held him, enjoying the peace.

When he woke up in the morning, she could tell he knew something was up. His clothes had been packed. She’d already shown him photos of the Costa Mesa home and told him, “This is where you’re going. I’m still your mom. I’m still going to go and see you.”

Noah, 14, embraces his mother Christine LyBurtus

When the black SUV arrived, LyBurtus offered Oreos to coax him into the unfamiliar car. She followed the SUV in her car, staying far enough behind to avoid having Noah see her when he arrived. LyBurtus had been told it would ease the transition.

Back at home, she sank into the bathtub, utterly spent. “I’m going to have to just go with trusting this process as much as I can,” she said, “because I don’t have another choice right now.”

The next day, she met with the South STAR staff to tell them more about Noah. What he likes to eat. What triggers him. His favorite things to do. The Costa Mesa home called whenever staff had physically restrained Noah, but when a weekend passed without a call, she felt some relief.

Lyburtus smiled at the photos and videos sent home: putting together an elaborate stacking toy, washing dishes. It felt like things were going well, LyBurtus said. The staff had scaled back the amount of psychiatric medication he was taking.

But more than a month later, when she first went to visit Noah, he excitedly took her to the front door, as if to say, “Let’s go,” she recalled. She gently told him she was just visiting.

Christine LyBurtus is comforted by Schahara Zad, left, and Terrence Morris, caregivers for her son Noah

He led her to the side door instead. She steered him away again. They stepped into the courtyard, and Noah immediately went to the gate to exit.

LyBurtus fell into a funk. As she worried about Noah, she was also figuring out how to make ends meet. With Noah in the Costa Mesa home, Lyburtus was no longer being paid more than $4,000 a month as his caregiver, her sole source of income for years. She tried a number of jobs but ultimately found the work that suited her: caregiving for an elderly woman and children with disabilities.

Her second and third visits with Noah were easier. She snapped photos — Mother and son nestled together on the couch. Noah touching her forehead.

The STAR program runs up to 13 months. As time passed, the regional center had started talking to her about where Noah would go next. LyBurtus was startled.

Wasn’t the plan for him to come home, she asked?

Christine Lyburtus, left, is briefed by Kim Hamilton-Royse while touring a residential care facility

That was still on the table, LyBurtus said she was told. But if he wasn’t ready, they didn’t want to wait until the last minute to find somewhere else for Noah, who turned 15 in May.

LyBurtus wanted to block out the idea of him going to another facility.

“I never want to live the way we were living again,” she said.

“But is that worse than him being hours away? I don’t know.”

Science

How to protect yourself from the smoke caused by L.A. wildfires

Published

5 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

How to protect yourself from the smoke caused by L.A. wildfires

You don’t have to live close to a wildfire to be affected by its smoke. With severe winds fanning the fires in and around Pacific Palisades, the Pasadena foothills and Simi Valley, huge swaths of the Southland are contending with dangerous air quality.

Wildfire smoke can irritate your eyes, nose, throat and lungs. The soot may contain all kinds of dangerous pollutants, including some that may cause cancer. The tiniest particles in smoke can travel deep into your lungs or even enter your bloodstream.

Conditions like these aren’t good for anyone, but they’re particularly bad for people in vulnerable groups, including children, those with asthma or other respiratory conditions, people with heart disease and those who are pregnant.

Here’s what you should know to keep yourself safe.

Stay indoors

Minimize your exposure to unhealthy air by staying inside and keeping your doors and windows shut.

If you have a central heating and air conditioning system, you can keep your indoor air clean by turning it on and keeping it running. Make sure the fresh-air intake is closed so that you’re not drawing in outdoor air.

Keep your pets inside

They shouldn’t breathe the unhealthy air either.

Check your air filters

Clean filters work better than dirty ones, and high-efficiency filters work better than regular ones. The California Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District recommend filters with a MERV rating of 13 or higher.

You might consider using portable high-efficiency air cleaner in a room where you spend the most time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has information about them here, and CARB has a list of certified cleaning devices here.

Don’t pollute your indoor air

That means no burning candles or incense. If your power is out and you need to see in the dark, you’re much better off with a flashlight or headlamp.

If you’re cold, bundle up. This is not the time to start a cozy fire in the fireplace. Don’t use a gas stove or wood-fired appliances, since these will make your indoor air quality worse, not better, the AQMD says.

The CDC also advises against vacuuming, since it can stir up dust and release fine particles into the air.

Take care when cleaning up

You don’t want your skin to come into contact with wildfire ash. That means you should wear long sleeves, pants, gloves, socks and shoes. The AQMD even wants you to wear goggles.

If you’re sweeping up ash outdoors, get a hose and mist it with water first. That will keep it from flying up in the air as you move it around. Once the ash is wet, sweep it up gently with a broom or mop. Bag it up in a plastic bag and throw it away.

It’s a good idea to wash your vehicles and outdoor toys if they’re covered in ash. Try not to send ashy water into storm drains. Direct the dirty water into ground areas instead, the AQMD advises.

Those with lung or heart problems should avoid clean-up activities.

Discard spoiled food…

If you lost power for a significant length of time, the food in your refrigerator or freezer may be spoiled.

Food kept in a fridge should stay safe for up to four hours if you’ve kept the door closed. If you’ve been without power for longer than that, you’ll need to toss all perishable items, including meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk and cut fruits and vegetables. Anything with “an unusual smell, color, or texture” should be thrown out as well, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control Prevention.

Refrigerated medicines should be OK unless the power was out for more than a day. Check the label to make sure.

…even if it was in the freezer

Your freezer may be in better shape, especially if it’s well-stocked. Items in a full freezer may be safe for up to 48 hours if it’s been kept shut, and a half-full freezer may be OK for up to 24 hours. (The frozen items help keep each other cold, so the more the better.)

If items have remained below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) or you can still see ice crystals in them, they may be OK to use or refreeze, according to the federal government’s food safety website.

Ice cream and frozen yogurt should be thrown out if the power goes out for any amount of time. Meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, milk and most other dairy products need to go if they were exposed to temperatures above 40 degrees F for two hours or longer. The same goes for frozen meals, casseroles, soups, stews and cakes, pies and pastries with custard or cheese fillings.

Fruit and fruit juices that have started to thaw can be refrozen unless they’ve started to get moldy, slimy or smell like yeast. Vegetables and vegetable juices should be discarded if they’ve been above 40 degrees F for six hours or more, even if they look and smell fine.

Breakfast items like waffles and bagels can be refrozen, as can breads, rolls, muffins and other baked goods without custard fillings.

Consider alternative shelter

If you’ve done everything you can but your eyes are still watering, you can’t stop coughing, or you just don’t feel well, seek alternative shelter where the air quality is better.

Hold off on vigorous exercise

Doing anything that would cause you to breathe in more deeply is a bad idea right now.

Mask up outdoors

If you need to be outside for an extended time, be sure to wear a high-quality mask. A surgical mask or cloth mask won’t cut it — health authorities agree that you should reach for an N95 or P-100 respirator with a tight seal.

Are young children at greater risk of wildfire smoke?

Very young children are especially vulnerable to the effects of wildfire smoke because their lungs are still rapidly developing. And because they breathe much faster than adults, they are taking in more toxic particulate matter relative to their tiny bodies, which can trigger inflammation, coughing and wheezing.

Any kind of air pollution can be dangerous to young children, but wildfire smoke is about 10 times as toxic for children compared to air pollution from burning fossil fuels, said Dr. Lisa Patel, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Children’s Health. Young children with preexisting respiratory problems like asthma are at even greater risk.

Patel advises parents to keep their young children indoors as much as possible, create a safe room in their home with an air purifier, and try to avoid using gas stoves to avoid polluting the indoor air.

Children over the age of 2 should also wear a well-fitting KN95 mask if they will be outdoors for a long period of time. Infants and toddlers younger than that don’t need to mask up because it can be a suffocation risk, Patel said.

What are the risks for pregnant people?

Pregnant people should also take extra precautions around wildfire smoke, which can cross the placenta and affect a developing fetus. Studies have found that exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy can increase the risk of premature birth and low birth weight. Researchers have also linked the toxic chemicals in smoke with maternal health complications including hypertension and preeclampsia.

What about other high-risk populations?

Certain chronic diseases including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or other respiratory conditions can also make you particularly vulnerable to wildfire smoke. People with heart disease, diabetes and chronic kidney disease should take extra care to breathe clean air, the CDC says. The tiny particles in wildfire smoke can aggravate existing health problems, and may make heart attacks or strokes more likely, CARB warns.

Get ready for the next emergency

Living in Southern California means another wildfire is coming sooner or later. To prepare for the bad air, you can:

Stock up on disposable respirators, like N95 or P-100s.
Have clean filters ready for your A/C system and change them out when things get smoky.
Know how to check the air quality where you live and work. The AQMD has an interactive map that’s updated hourly. Just type in an address and it will zoom in on the location. You can also sign up to get air quality alerts by email or on your smartphone.
Know where your fire extinguisher is and keep it handy.
If you have a heart or lung condition, keep at least five days’ worth of medication on hand.

Times staff writer Karen Garcia contributed to this report.

Science

Punk and Emo Fossils Are a Hot Topic in Paleontology

Published

12 hours ago

January 8, 2025

Press Room

Punk and Emo Fossils Are a Hot Topic in Paleontology

Mark Sutton, an Imperial College London paleontologist, is not a punk.

“I’m more of a folk and country person,” he said.

But when Dr. Sutton pieced together 3-D renderings of a tiny fossil mollusk, he was struck by the spikes that covered its wormlike body. “This is like a classic punk hairstyle, the way it’s sticking up,” he thought. He called the fossil “Punk.” Then he found a similar fossil with downward-tipped spines reminiscent of long, side-swept “emo” bangs. He nicknamed that specimen after the emotional alt-rock genre.

On Wednesday, Dr. Sutton and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Nature formally naming the creatures as the species Punk ferox and Emo vorticaudum. True to their names, these worm-mollusks are behind something of an upset (if not quite “anarchy in the U.K.”) over scientists’ understanding of the origins of one of the biggest groups of animals on Earth.

In terms of sheer number of species, mollusks are second only to arthropods (the group that contains insects, spiders and crustaceans). The better-known half of the mollusk family tree, conchiferans, contains animals like snails, clams and octopuses. “The other half is this weird and wacky group of spiny things,” Dr. Sutton said. Some animals in this branch, the aculiferans, resemble armored marine slugs, while others are “obscure, weird molluscan worms,” he said.

Punk and Emo, the forerunners of today’s worm-mollusks, lived on the dark seafloor amid gardens of sponges, nearly 200 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged on land. Today, their ancient seafloor is a fossil site at the border between England and Wales.

The site is littered with rounded rocky nodules that “look a bit like potatoes,” Dr. Sutton said. “And then you crack them open, and some of them have got these fossils inside. But the thing is, they don’t really look like much at first.”

While the nodules can preserve an entire animal’s body in 3-D, the cross-section that becomes visible when a nodule is cracked open can be difficult to interpret “because you’re not seeing the full anatomy,” Dr. Sutton said.

Paleontologists can use CT scans to see parts of fossils still hidden in rock, essentially taking thousands of X-rays of the fossil and then stitching those X-ray slices together into one digital 3-D image. But in these nodules, the fossilized creatures and the rock surrounding them are too similar in density to be easily differentiated by X-rays. Instead, Dr. Sutton essentially recreated this process of slicing and imaging by hand.

“We grind away a slice at a time, take a photo, repeat at 20-micron intervals or so, and basically destroy but digitize the fossil as we go,” Dr. Sutton said. At the end of the process, the original fossil nodule is “a sad-looking pile of dust,” but the thousands of images, when painstakingly digitally combined, provide a remarkable picture of the fossil animal.

Punk and Emo’s Hot Topic-worthy spikes set them apart from other fossils from the aculiferan branch of the mollusk family. “We don’t know much about aculiferans, and it’s unusual to find out we’ve suddenly got two,” Dr. Sutton said.

Stewart Edie, the curator of fossil bivalves at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, said that Punk and Emo’s bizarre appearances shook up a long-held understanding of how mollusks evolved. Traditionally, scientists thought that the group of mollusks containing snails, clams and cephalopods “saw all of the evolutionary action,” said Dr. Edie, who was not involved with the new discovery. “And the other major group, the aculiferans, were considerably less adventurous.” But Punk and Emo “buck that trend,” he said.

The new alt-rock aculiferans reveal the hidden diversity of their group in the distant past and raise questions about why their descendants make up such a small part of the mollusk class today. “This is really giving us an almost unprecedented window into the sorts of things that were actually around when mollusks were getting going,” Dr. Sutton said. “It’s just this little weird, unexpected, really clear view of what was going on in the early history of one of the most important groups of animals.”

Science

FDA sets limits for lead in many baby foods as California disclosure law takes effect

Published

21 hours ago

January 8, 2025

Press Room

FDA sets limits for lead in many baby foods as California disclosure law takes effect

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week set maximum levels for lead in baby foods such as jarred fruits and vegetables, yogurts and dry cereal, part of an effort to cut young kids’ exposure to the toxic metal that causes developmental and neurological problems.

The agency issued final guidance that it estimated could reduce lead exposure from processed baby foods by about 20% to 30%. The limits are voluntary, not mandatory, for food manufacturers, but they allow the FDA to take enforcement action if foods exceed the levels.

It’s part of the FDA’s ongoing effort to “reduce dietary exposure to contaminants, including lead, in foods to as low as possible over time, while maintaining access to nutritious foods,” the agency said in a statement.

Consumer advocates, who have long sought limits on lead in children’s foods, welcomed the guidance first proposed two years ago, but said it didn’t go far enough.

“FDA’s actions today are a step forward and will help protect children,” said Thomas Galligan, a scientist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “However, the agency took too long to act and ignored important public input that could have strengthened these standards.”

The new limits on lead for children younger than 2 don’t cover grain-based snacks such as puffs and teething biscuits, which some research has shown contain higher levels of lead. And they don’t limit other metals such as cadmium that have been detected in baby foods.

The FDA’s announcement comes just one week after a new California law took effect that requires baby food makers selling products in California to provide a QR code on their packaging to take consumers to monthly test results for the presence in their product of four heavy metals: lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium.

The change, required under a law passed by the California Legislature in 2023, will affect consumers nationwide. Because companies are unlikely to create separate packaging for the California market, QR codes are likely to appear on products sold across the country, and consumers everywhere will be able to view the heavy metal concentrations.

Although companies are required to start printing new packaging and publishing test results of products manufactured beginning in January, it may take time for the products to hit grocery shelves.

The law was inspired by a 2021 congressional investigation that found dangerously high levels of heavy metals in packaged foods marketed for babies and toddlers. Baby foods and their ingredients had up to 91 times the arsenic level, up to 177 times the lead level, up to 69 times the cadmium level, and up to five times the mercury level that the U.S. allows to be present in bottled or drinking water, the investigation found.

There’s no safe level of lead exposure for children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The metal causes “well-documented health effects,” including brain and nervous system damage and slowed growth and development. However, lead occurs naturally in some foods and comes from pollutants in air, water and soil, which can make it impossible to eliminate entirely.

The FDA guidance sets a lead limit of 10 parts per billion for fruits, most vegetables, grain and meat mixtures, yogurts, custards and puddings and single-ingredient meats. It sets a limit of 20 parts per billion for single-ingredient root vegetables and for dry infant cereals. The guidance covers packaged processed foods sold in jars, pouches, tubs or boxes.

Jaclyn Bowen, executive director of the Clean Label Project, an organization that certifies baby foods as having low levels of toxic substances, said consumers can use the new FDA guidance in tandem with the new California law: The FDA, she said, has provided parents a “hard and fast number” to consider a benchmark when looking at the new monthly test results.

But Brian Ronholm, director of food policy for Consumer Reports, called the FDA limits “virtually meaningless because they’re based more on industry feasibility and not on what would best protect public health.” A product with a lead level of 10 parts per billion is “still too high for baby food. What we’ve heard from a lot of these manufacturers is they are testing well below that number.”

The new FDA guidance comes more than a year after lead-tainted pouches of apple cinnamon puree sickened more than 560 children in the U.S. between October 2023 and April 2024, according to the CDC.

The levels of lead detected in those products were more than 2,000 times higher than the FDA’s maximum. Officials stressed that the agency doesn’t need guidance to take action on foods that violate the law.

Aleccia writes for the Associated Press. Gold reports for The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.