An Australian teen is fighting hard against Barth Syndrome, which has only been diagnosed 16 other times. It’s a debilitating and fatal illness that seems to only affect boys.

Growth and motor skills are reduced, the immune system is weakened and muscles around the heart slowly suffocate it.

Last year Robert [Chaiban], of Chintin, survived five heart attacks.

A conference in July in Florida, US, with other Barth syndrome sufferers offers hope for Robert and his family, who run a panelbeating business in Coburg.

“It will be really good to talk to someone that understands what its like,” he said.

A body pulled from Otter Creek in Vermont is believed to be Nicholas Garza, a college student who vanished in February.

Some here believed the melting of snow at winter’s end would yield clues or a body, but it didn’t, nor did several searches of Otter Creek, including one last month after aerial imaging showed an unidentified object in the water.

Mrs. Garza had been living on the Middlebury College campus since shortly after the disappearance and enrolled her 9-year-old son in school here.

“The remains have been in the water for a long time. They are not in good shape,” said Hanley.

The autopsy is scheduled for 9 a.m. Wednesday at the office of the chief medical examiner in Burlington, he said.

Could this be the work of the Smiley Face Killers?

A girl trying to make her way onto a boys sports team is the stuff of after school specials and Lifetime movies. But usually the girl isn’t wanted because she’s viewed as a weak link on the team. But for Jaime Nared, a 6 foot tall 12-year-old in Oregon, it would appear that the parents don’t want her to play because she’s kicking their sons’ collective asses.

“If she were 4-feet-9 and no good, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” said the coach, Michael Abraham. “To appease a small minority of parents, in this day and age, is stupid. This is a decision that really targets her. She’s a well-adjusted kid who happens to be great.”

Neal Franzer, the Hoop’s director of operations, said the parents were “adamant” that it wasn’t because Nared was too good.

“They said the problem was the boys were playing differently against her because she was a girl,” he said. “They’d been taught to not push a girl, so they weren’t fouling her hard, and the focus had shifted from playing basketball to noticing a girl was on the floor with them.”

Also, it’s believed there was great concern about cooties.

We’ve heard of cougars before, but this is taking it a little far.

A 41-year-old woman accused of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy was charged Tuesday with three felony counts of sexual assault of a child.

Authorities discovered the relationship after Teresa M. Cantrall of Oshkosh let the boy drive a car and he was pulled over for speeding, police said.

A Wisconsin State Patrol trooper stopped a vehicle May 11 that was traveling about 80 mph on a Neenah highway. Cantrall told the trooper she was the boy’s mother and was teaching him to drive, police said. Cantrall and the boy were arrested.

Perhaps the more amazing part, he’s done it before. And how did he get to the airport?

A 10-year-old boy apprehended last year after a flying to Texas as a stowaway was caught Tuesday trying to board another flight out of Sea-Tac Airport.

Semaj Booker was a short stroll away from a departing Southwest Airlines flight when, just after 6:30 a.m., a gate agent stopped the boy. Airport authorities returned the boy to his mother’s home in Tacoma, from where he’d been reported missing.

Transportation Security Administration officials are looking into how Semaj made it through a TSA checkpoint without a boarding pass just before 5 a.m., agency spokesman Dwayne Baird said.

The parents of a Michigan toddler that drowned have been sentenced to 400 hours of community service after a judge ruled their neglect was responsible for the drowning. Seems like a rather light sentence…

Misty Harvey, 29, and Jamie Harvey, 33, will serve that sentence and spend three years on probation under an order fashioned by county and state authorities as punishment for Grandon Harvey’s death.

The couple pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after they found their boy inside their home on Sept. 25. A charge of marijuana possession was dropped as part of the plea deal. They could have faced up to 15 years in prison.

It seems like every day we keep hearing about a new place scientists can grab stem cells that may lead to “miracle cures”. Experts are skeptical baby teeth stem cells are the answer, but hey, can’t hurt to look into it further.

To parents, it might sound like the best kind of health insurance — a personal bank of stem cells, obtained from a baby tooth, that would be available for the taking should their child develop a life-threatening illness years down the road.

The catch: The therapies that would use these stem cells have not yet been developed. Stem cell experts say such advances are years or decades away — if they ever come to pass.

And considering the cost of extracting and storing these stem cells — an initial price tag of $590, plus an annual fee of $100 — some experts say the slim chance that such stem cells would ever come in handy is not worth the expense.

A woman in Taunton, Massachusetts has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for abusing her infant boy while she was drunk.

Judge David Turcotte reduced the charge, which carries up to five years of jail time, to assault and battery during Tuesday’s proceedings.

[Suleidy] Lugo, who pleaded not guilty at her arraignment, was arrested after her neighbors told police she was drunk and putting her son in danger.

Police reports said that Lugo at one point slapped her baby across the face and grabbed him by the neck.

Why the hell did the judge reduce the charges?

The parents of an infant boy that was found dead are being considered the main suspects by police.

Police thought they were responding to a domestic call on the west side, but when they arrived at the home on West Poplar near Colorado they found the father walking out of the home with the dead baby in his arms. The mother bolted out the back door.

Police say the baby boy had visible injuries; trauma to his back, nose and mouth area.

When asked what happened, the father refused to cooperate with police.

Hundreds of parents of autistic children are outraged over the report that a kindergarten teacher in Florida allegedly allowed the other children in class to vote an autistic boy out of their classroom, Survivor-style.

Morningside Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, Fla., recently alerted Melissa Barton that her son, Alex, suffers from a high-functioning form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome, WPEC News reported.

Barton claims that Alex was punished for symptoms of his disability, such as humming and eating his homework. She says Portillo went too far last week when she kicked Alex out of class, and then allowed the other students to vote on whether he should be allowed back in.

Each student was also allowed to say what he or she did not like about Alex. By a 14-to-2 margin, the students voted Alex out of class, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

“She said this was her way of correcting his behavior,” Barton told WPEC. “I asked him how that made him feel and he said, ‘I feel sad.’”

An infant girl was left in a dumpster in McPherson, Kansas, and fortunately someone found her alive and well.

The 18-year-old mother of an infant found alive Tuesday in a McPherson trash Dumpster has become the focus of a police investigation into the girl’s disappearance.

The 6-week-old baby was discovered shortly after 1 p.m. on some plastic bags in a Dumpster in an alley two blocks from where she lives. The alley is between Maple and Walnut streets and between Hill and Woodside streets, McPherson Police Chief Dennis Shaw said.

Her cries were heard by officers and Emergency Medical Service workers searching the area in northwest McPherson.

“It appeared some care had been taken to place the baby in the Dumpster,” Shaw said.

Let’s hope this report is accurate, as it’s very good news. Hopefully next we will see a downward trend.

There was no significant increase in the prevalence of obese children and teens in the U.S. between 1999 and 2006, in contrast to the increase that had been reported in prior years, according to a new study.

“In the United States, the prevalence of overweight among children increased between 1980 and 2004, and the heaviest children have been getting heavier,” the authors write.

Cynthia L. Ogden, Ph.D., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Hyattsville, Md., and colleagues updated the most recent national estimates of the prevalence of pediatric high body mass index (BMI). Height and weight measurements were obtained from 8,165 children and adolescents as part of the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which are nationally representative surveys of the U.S. population.

No statistically significant change in high BMI for age was found between 2003-2004 and 2005-2006. No statistically significant trend in high BMI was found over the time periods 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2003-2004, and 2005-2006.

Another reason for us to not shop at Wal-Mart. A 12-year-old girl was stung by a scorpion while shopping in her local Wal-Mart’s produce section.

Megan Templeton, of Barboursville, was taken to the hospital as a precaution but later released. Her father, William Templeton, said the pain was a little worse than a bee sting.

He initially didn’t believe his daughter when she said she had been stung by a scorpion, but then he saw the critter scurry underneath a box. It was captured by Wal-Mart employees.

Most of the nearly 2,000 kinds of scorpions are not dangerous to humans.

An 11-year-old boy was hiking through the woods in Manistee County, Michigan, when an eagle came out of nowhere and attacked him. On later reflection he realized that wearing his mouse costume wasn’t such a good idea.

Radio station WKLA reported Alex Birch was attacked by the eagle about 9 p.m. Sunday in Copemish. He was treated at a local hospital for numerous cuts and scratches to his back, head and neck.

It was not clear what led to the attack.

Copemish is located in the northern portion of the Lower Peninsula about 25 miles southwest of Traverse City and 105 miles north of Grand Rapids.

Becky D’Aoust, the mother whose teen was charged with attacking her with a hammer has died from her injuries.

The death has shaken neighbors and brought tears to the eyes of friends close to the D’Aoust family.

“It’s horrible what has happened to this family,” said neighbor Lori Erlenbach. “They were a good, close family. That’s all that needs to be said right now.”

Neighbor Arthur Moreau, who earlier said he would be acting as the D’Aoust family spokesman, hung up on a reporter yesterday when asked to talk about the D’Aousts.

Officers were called to the home on Canyon Lake Drive near Pinetree Drive just before 9 a.m. and found Becky D’Aoust on the kitchen floor with a serious head injury.