No parent holds a new baby and thinks that within a year they will have seriously injured or even killed that child. Or that the violence could be sparked by something as common as a baby's cry.

But each year, more than 4,000 young children are hospitalized because they've been seriously injured, usually by a parent, and about 300 die. Babies under age 1 are the most likely victims, according to a study in the journal Pediatrics.

"We'd like the number to be 20, or 10 or zero," says John Leventhal, a professor of pediatrics at the Yale's medical school and lead author of the study. "Figuring out how to do that is one of the challenges we face as a nation."

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Sitting in a car with a smoker is about as close to lighting up as a nonsmoker can get.

And quite a few schoolchildren get exposed to secondhand smoke this way, according to an estimate by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 1 in 5 nonsmoking kids in middle and high school reported sharing a car with a smoker who had lit up within a week of answering a survey in 2009. The researchers say the survey, which included responses from thousands of students, gives an accurate snapshot of what's happening across the country.

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When Lisa Rentz decided she'd had enough of birth control pills, she walked into her local drug store and picked up something different: a vaginal contraceptive film that contains the spermicide nonoxynol-9, or N-9.

She admits that she didn't read the instructions all that closely but simply assumed any over-the-counter product was safe. Though N-9 was once thought to protect against HIV, public health officials now know that it can actually increase a person's HIV risk. Even so, people who use these products may not be fully informed.

"I was not aware of the increased chances of HIV transmission, which is alarming," Rentz says. "That does seem to me something that should be printed larger on the box."

Dozens of condoms, vaginal films, jellies, foams and sponges containing the N-9 spermicide are available online or at local pharmacies without a doctor's prescription. Medical professionals say they are perfectly safe as long as they are used as directed: not used more than once a day, and not used for anal intercourse, with multiple partners or with a partner who has HIV.

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Access to emergency contraception has swirled at the center of a recent flurry of debate over insurance coverage. It's a pill women can take if their birth control fails or they forget to use it.

The most popular brand of emergency contraception is called "Plan B One-Step." You might better know it as the "morning after" pill. Today, about 10 percent of sexually active women say they've used it.

Katie Wilcox, a 20-something college graduate, is a typical example of who uses it. She's working now and has a boyfriend. She's used Plan B twice. The first time she was still in college.

"We kind of got caught up in the moment," she says. "[We] woke up in the morning and decided that we needed to go get Plan B, because neither of us were ready for any sort of pregnancy."

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Just three days after announcing it would no longer fund cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood, the pink-ribboned breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure abruptly reversed course today. But the Komen foundation's actions still leave many questions unanswered — not to mention a public relations challenge.

In a brief statement posted on the group's website, Komen founder and CEO Nancy Brinker apologized "for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives." She explained that Komen would revise the criteria that earlier in the week appeared to disqualify Planned Parenthood from receiving almost $700,000 in grants for breast cancer screening.

Komen's original justification for excluding Planned Parenthood from future funding was that the group was the subject of a congressional investigation. But in a conference call Thursday, Brinker insisted that the foundation's new funding guidelines had less to do with that and more to do with the fact that Planned Parenthood doesn't perform mammograms.

"Wherever possible, we want to grant to the provider that is actually providing lifesaving mammograms," she said.

The statement reversing course doesn't actually address the question of what kind of services Planned Parenthood provides; the women's health service does about 700,000 breast exams each year.

But Komen has backed down on how it defines an investigation. Now organizations can only be excluded from funding if those investigations are "criminal and conclusive in nature and not political," the statement said.

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High school football players have changes in their brain function long before they have recognizable signs of a concussion, according to a new study.

The more hits a player got, the more brain function changed. The findings support the growing belief that a concussion comes as the result of a succession of insults, not just one bad hit.

"I think what you're seeing here is the sum total of what happens throughout the season," says Eric Nauman, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University and lead author of the study.

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After days of controversy, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has said it will continue funding for Planned Parenthood.

Earlier this week, the foundation moved to discontinue funding of breast cancer screening by Planned Parenthood. The Associated Press reported the change came because of a new Komen policy forbidding grants to organizations under official investigation.

Subsequently, Komen said the change wasn't driven by politics but was instead an efficiency move.

Founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker explained the latest decision and the changes in a statement attributed to her and the group's board. Here's an excerpt (with original emphasis in bold):

"We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities."

Komen's decision to halt funding led to an outpouring of support for Planned Parenthood, including a jump in donations. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for one, pledged up to $250,000 of his own money to the organization to help make up for a drop in funding for breast cancer screening.

Update 12:23 p.m. EST: Planned Parenthood released a statement from Cecile Richards, president of the group, saying, "We are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership" with Komen. "We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers."

Despite more than 20 years of recommendations that health workers get flu shots, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show more than a third don't comply.

The voluntary approach to reducing the risk that workers will transmit flu to patients has fallen short.

So consumer and business groups met in Washington Thursday to show their support for a recommendation from the National Business Group on Health that hospitals require all health care workers to be vaccinated annually against the flu.

"We believe that patients have the right to assume that health care personnel, themselves, will take all reasonable measures to reduce and avoid transmission of preventable diseases including the flu," said Helen Darling, president and CEO of the NBGH. "I think we, as people, assume that after all, they're our caretakers and we look to them for care and treatment."

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Many addicts inherit a brain that has trouble just saying no to drugs.

A study in Science finds that cocaine addicts have abnormalities in areas of the brain involved in self-control. And these abnormalities appear to predate any drug abuse.

The study, done by a team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., looked at 50 pairs of siblings. One member of each pair was a cocaine addict. The other had no history of drug abuse.

But brain scans showed that both siblings had brains unlike those of typical people, says Karen Ersche, the study's lead author.

"The fibers that connect the different parts of the brain were less efficient in both," she says.

These fibers connect areas involved in emotion with areas that tell us when to stop doing something, Ersche says. When the fibers aren't working efficiently, she says, it takes longer for a "stop" message to get through.

And sure enough, another experiment done by Ersche's team showed that both siblings took longer than a typical person to respond to a signal telling them to stop performing a task. In other words, they had less self-control.

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