A baby formula shortage has added to the woes of American parents already confronted with the pressures of raising an infant during a pandemic in a country ranked low for family-friendly policies.

Media reports have highlighted the plight of mothers, fathers and caregivers across the U.S. who have scrambled to find scarce supplies, or driven long distances to buy formula.

But what is behind the shortage? And how can it be prevented from happening again? The Conversation asked Dr. Steven Abrams, a leading expert on pediatric health at the University of Texas who has advised both the formula industry and government on infant nutrition, these questions along with what advice he could give parents facing problems getting adequate supplies of infant formula.

1. Why there is a shortage of formula now?

There are really two factors that have driven the current shortage. First, we have the supply chain problem, which has affected all manner of goods since the onset of the pandemic. It eased off a little, but then at the beginning of 2022 it became worse.

Then in February a major baby formula manufacturing plant in U.S. went down. The FDA shut down Abbott Nutrition’s factory in Michigan. The closure came after Abbott’s nationwide recall of multiple brands of formula, including routine Similac cow milk-based formulas such as Similac Advance and several specialty formulas for allergic babies, including Similac Alimentum and and Similac EleCare.

Closing the factory had to be done amid an investigation into bacterial infections in connection to powdered formula produced at the plant, and the deaths of at least two babies. The problem is there just isn’t much redundancy in U.S. infant formula production. In other words, there aren’t enough other factories to pick up the slack when one goes down. The Michigan plant is the largest producer in the country, so when it goes down, it put added strain on the entire U.S. formula distribution system, especially for certain formulas for babies with high-risk allergic diseases and metabolic disorders.

Over the last couple of weeks the shortage has gotten worse. I can’t say for sure why this has happened. But I suspect there has been some hoarding going on as parents get anxious. Stores can limit the amount of formula that people can buy, but that doesn’t stop people going online to buy more.

On top of that, the shortage has gained wide publicity in newspapers, on TV and in political speeches. All that publicity feeds into public sense that the system is failing, prompting more panic buying and hoarding.

2. Who is the shortage affecting?

A majority of parents will feed babies with formula at some point to meet their nutritional needs, especially older infants. At birth and in days immediately after, around 80% of babies receive all their nutrition through breast milk. But by the age of 6 months, the majority of babies get at least some formula. The proportion of year-old babies receiving formula is even higher. This is largely the result of social dynamics and pressures - mothers going back to work after giving birth, but not receiving sufficient support to produce and store sufficient amounts of breast milk.

But the shortage will affect some parents more than others. Not surprisingly, the most affected parents are those on the lowest income. The federal food program for poorer women, infants and children, called WIC, provides formula for a majority of babies in low-income families. But costs have gone up and formula has become scarcer.

I’m hearing of some families driving two hours to find stores selling formula. Obviously that will be harder to do for poorer families as there are costs involved. Likewise, more affluent parents may be able to buy more expensive, so-called elite brand formulas.

The other thing to note is that the shortage is affecting both regular infant formula, and specialized versions. Regular or standard formula is the type most families are familiar with, and around 95% of formula-fed babies get the standard type. Specialized formula is for babies with unusual requirements, due to allergies, damaged intestines or special nutritional needs. Before the Michigan factory closed, it made most of the specialized infant formula used in the U.S. So it is an absolute crisis for families needing that type of formula.

3. What are the potential consequences of the shortage?

In the first six months, babies should only have breast milk or formula – anything else fed to them will be nutritionally incomplete. So there is a risk that a shortage will mean that babies will not be getting the nutrition they need to develop. That could lead to a range of health problems affecting their physical growth and brain development.

Then there are concerns that parents may be using unsafe alternatives, like watering down their baby’s formula. People have been known to try and make their own by mixing powdered milk or vegan milk with vitamins. Not only are these alternatives not nutritionally complete, they may not be entirely sterile.

After the age of six months, things get a little better once the infant is able to start eating solid food. But even then, formula or breast milk remains the primary source of nutrition. So there may still be a risk of nutritional deficiencies, such as iron deficiencies.

4. Are there any viable alternatives?

Over the age of six months of age, for only reasonably short periods of time, parents can feed infants whole cow milk and look into iron supplements.

It isn’t ideal, and only applies for older babies. For those under six months old, cow milk is a real problem. It doesn’t have the right protein blend for babies and has next to no iron – risking anemia in very young babies. Cow milk also has a misbalance of minerals, especially for younger babies.

5. So what guidance is there for low-income parents?

It is challenging and I can’t provide a magic answer. But food banks and the WIC program have been a crucial lifeline. The WIC program in particular has proved itself to be very flexible during this shortage. When Abbott had to recall products and then couldn’t provide enough non-recalled formulas in states in which they were the WIC provider, WIC was able to change providers and reprogram EBT cards to allow low-income parents to buy different brands.

6. What can be done to prevent this situation happening again in the U.S.?

First we need to help families regain confidence in the formula production and supply system. This will prevent problems such as hoarding or making home brew formulas.

Then we need to look at how to make sure one plant going down doesn’t affect the whole system. The federal government can’t stockpile formula in the same way it might stockpile oil, as formula has a shelf life. But diversifying infant formula production is a possibility. This would involve making sure multiple factories and companies are making the formulas that this country needs. This doesn’t necessarily mean increased costs – competition could potentially drive down prices.

I believe America also needs to look at the country’s breast feeding support system. Don’t get me wrong, some parents will always need formula. But those who want to breast feed need everything possible done to support them. That includes better family leave policies, and help for low-income mothers who want to pump and store milk while they work.

Steven A. Abrams, Professorof Pediatrics, University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On May 12, 2022, astronomers on the Event Horizon Telescope team released an image of a black hole called Sagittarius A* that lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, explains how the team got this image and why it is such a big deal.

1. What is Sagittarius A*?

Sagittarius A* sits at the the center of our Milky Way galaxy, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. For decades, astronomers have been measuring blasts of radio waves from an extremely compact source there.

In the 1980s, two teams of astronomers started tracking the motions of stars near this mysterious source of radio waves. They saw stars whirling around a dark object at speeds up to a third of the speed of light. Their motions suggested that at the center of the Milky Way was a black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez later shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

The size of a black hole is defined by its event horizon – a distance from the center of the black hole within which nothing can escape. Scientists had previously been able to calculate that Sagittarius A* is 16 million miles (26 million kilometers) in diameter.

The Milky Way’s black hole is huge compared to the black holes left behind when massive stars die. But astronomers think there are supermassive black holes at the center of nearly all galaxies. Compared to most of these, Sagittarius A* is meager and unremarkable.

2. What does the new image show?

Black holes themselves are completely dark, since nothing, not even light, can escape their gravity. But black holes are surrounded by clouds of gas, and astronomers can measure this gas to infer images of the black holes within. The central dark region in the image is a shadow cast by the black hole onto the gas. The bright ring is the gas itself glowing. The bright spots in the ring show areas of hotter gas that may one day fall into the black hole.

Some of the gas visible in the image is actually behind Sagittarius A*. Light from that gas is being bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole toward Earth. This effect, called gravitational lensing, is a core prediction of general relativity.

3. What went into producing this image?

Supermassive black holes are extremely hard to measure. They are far away and shrouded by the gas and dust that clogs the center of galaxies. They are also relatively small compared to the vastness of space. From where Sagittarius A* sits, 26,000 light years away at the center of the Milky Way, only 1 in 10 billion photons of visible light can reach Earth – most are absorbed by gas in the way. Radio waves pass through gas much more easily than visible light, so astronomers measured the radio emissions from the gas surrounding the black hole. The orange colors in the image are representations of those radio waves.

The team used eight radio telescopes spread across the globe to collect data on the black hole over the course of five nights in 2017. Every night generated so much data that the team couldn’t send it through the internet – they had to ship physical hard drives to where they processed the data.

Because black holes are so hard to see, there is a lot of uncertainty in the data the telescopes collect. To turn it all into an accurate image, team used supercomputers to produce millions of different images, each one a mathematically viable version of the black hole based off the data collected and the laws of physics. They then blended all of these images together to produce the final, beautiful, accurate image. The processing time was equivalent to running 2,000 laptops at full speed for a year.

4. Why is the new image such a big deal?

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first image of a black hole – this one at the center of the galaxy M87. The black hole at the center of this galaxy, named M87*, is a behemoth 2,000 times larger than Sagittarius A* and 7 billion times the mass of the Sun. But because Sagittarius A* is 2,000 times closer to Earth than M87*, the Event Horizon Telescope was able to observe both black holes at a similar resolution – giving astronomers a chance to learn about the universe by comparing the two.

The similarity of the two images is striking because small stars and small galaxies look and behave very differently than large stars or galaxies. Black holes are the only objects in existence that only answer to one law of nature – gravity. And gravity does not care about scale.

For the last few decades, astronomers have thought that there are massive black holes at the center of almost every galaxy. While M87* is an unusually huge black hole, Sagittarius A* is likely pretty similar to many of the hundreds of billions of black holes at the center of other galaxies in the universe.

5. What scientific questions can this answer?

There is a lot more science to be done from the data the team collected.

One interesting avenue of inquiry stems from the fact that the gas surrounding Sagittarius A* is moving at close to the speed of light. Sagittarius A* is relatively small, and matter trickles into it very slowly – if it were the size of a human, it would consume the mass of a single grain of rice every million years. But by taking many images, it would be possible to watch the flow of matter around and into the black hole in real time. This would allow astrophysicists to study how black holes consume matter and grow.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and this new image has already generated 10 scientific papers. I expect there will be many more to come.

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.