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Following reduction of public health and social measures concurrent with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron emergence in late 2021 in Australia, COVID-19 case notification rates rose rapidly. As rates of direct viral testing and reporting dropped, true infection rates were most likely to be underestimated.
In mid-2018, the Australian childhood 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine schedule changed from 3+0 to 2+1, moving the third dose to 12 months of age, to address increasing breakthrough cases of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), predominantly in children aged >12 months. This study assessed the impact of this change using national IPD surveillance data.
Today, on World Down Syndrome Day, we celebrate the lives, achievements, and invaluable contributions of people with Down syndrome.
Congratulations to four outstanding early-career researchers from The Kids Research Institute Australia, who have been awarded BrightSpark Foundation fellowships and project funding for 2026.
Western Australia’s biggest and only medical research institute dedicated to improving kids’ health and wellbeing has rebranded to The Kids Research Institute Australia.
Irritability is a transdiagnostic indicator of child and adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems that is measurable from early life. The objective of this systematic review was to determine the strength of the association between irritability measured from 0 to 5 years and later internalizing and externalizing problems, to identify mediators and moderators of these relationships, and to explore whether the strength of the association varied according to irritability operationalization.
There are conflicting suggestions concerning the developmental trend of trust beliefs during middle childhood. Across three studies, the current research developed a brief measure of child general trust beliefs, as well as child measures of trust in peers and online, and examined age-related differences in these beliefs.
Children with early-stage (pre-symptomatic) type 1 diabetes are currently identified primarily via research-based screening programmes in Australia. Once identified, families live with the knowledge that their child has an increased chance of developing symptomatic, lifelong, insulin-requiring type 1 diabetes but have no specific clinical pathway available to them in Western Australia for accessing tailored support or education. This project aimed to co-design a new clinical pathway to address this unmet need.
Severe microcephaly, or head circumference at least 3 standard deviations below the mean for age and sex, is a rare condition with diverse etiology, making diagnosis challenging. Following the 2015 to 2016 Zika virus outbreak, surveillance studies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and Ireland were conducted to monitor severe microcephaly. We describe the etiology, clinical features, and diagnostic investigations of severe microcephaly among children aged younger than 1 year.
While international evidence suggests seasonal variations may influence outcomes of interventions for pediatric obesity, data for Aotearoa New Zealand are limited. We examined seasonal variations in changes in body mass index standard deviation score (BMI SDS) in young people with obesity enrolled in an intervention programme.