Iron test

SCREENING babies for anaemia could prevent impaired motor development, says
Andrea Sherriff and her colleagues at the University of Bristol. They studied
infants and found that those with the lowest levels of haemoglobin at 8 months
had the poorest motor skills at 18 months, such as walking and climbing stairs.
The problem could be easily averted if all babies under 8 months were screened,
the researchers report in Archives of Disease in Childhood (vol 84, p
480).