D. Ferrara

Preventive Effect of Cow’s Milk Fermented with Lactobacillus paracasei CBA L74 on Common Infectious Diseases in Children: A Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Fermented foods have been proposed to prevent common infectious diseases (CIDs) in children attending day care or preschool. Objectives: To investigate the efficacy of dietary supplementation with cow’s skim milk fermented with the probiotic Lactobacillus paracasei CBA L74 in reducing CIDs in children attending day care or preschool. Methods: Multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial on healthy children (aged 12–48 months) consuming daily 7 grams of cow’s skim milk fermented with L. paracasei CBA L74 (group A), or placebo (maltodextrins group B) attending day care or preschool during the winter season. The main outcome was the proportion of children who experienced ≥1 episode of CID during a 3-month follow-up. Fecal biomarkers of innate (α- and β-defensins, cathelicidin) and acquired immunity (secretory IgA) were also monitored. Results: A total of 126 children (71 males, 56%) with a mean (SD) age of 33 (9) months completed the study, 66 in group A and 60 in group B. At intention to treat analysis, the proportion of children presenting ≥1 CID was 60% in group A vs. 83% in group B, corresponding to an absolute risk difference (ARD) of −23% (95% CI: −37% to −9%, p < 0.01). At per-protocol-analysis (PPA), the proportion of children presenting ≥1 CID was 18% in group A vs. 40% in group B, corresponding to an absolute risk difference (ARD) of −22% (95% CI: −37% to −6%, p < 0.01). PPA showed that the proportion of children presenting ≥1 acute gastroenteritis (AGE) was significantly lower in group A (18% vs. 40%, p < 0.05). The ARD for the occurrence of ≥1 AGE was −22% (95% CI: −37% to −6%, p < 0.01) in group A. Similar findings were obtained at PPA regarding the proportion of children presenting ≥1 upper respiratory tract infection (URTI), which was significantly lower in group A (51% vs. 74%, p < 0.05), corresponding to an ARD of −23% (95% CI: −40% to −7%, p < 0.01). Significant changes in innate and acquired immunity biomarkers were observed only in subjects in group A. Conclusions: Dietary supplementation with cow’s skim milk fermented with L. paracasei CBA L74 is an efficient strategy in preventing CIDs in children.

72nd Congress of the Italian Society of Pediatrics

Child and youth migrations are a particularly dramatic and a daily aspect of the more general problem of contemporary migration flows. Behind and within each of the stories of these children accompanied and unaccompanied migrant children, as UN calls them in a bureaucratic jargon school becomes a treasure trove of identity splinters through biographies and fragments of a past that can return visibility to what would be irreparably forgotten otherwise. School has the opportunity to welcome, support, accompany these children and young new citizens towards the inclusion. School has, also, the opportunity to learn an anthropological view of the presence of migrant children from these life stories, thus activating action-research processes. This action-research will develop new teaching strategies, new approaches based on questions, on an open dialogue, on the paradigms of responsibility, commitment and diversity. A unique opportunity to develop diversity education and citizenship skills, too often mentioned but poorly practiced. Above all, thanks to the sharing and revival of significant life stories and emotionally touching, you can develop emotional intelligence skills, so necessary in an often deregulated age of complexity, which always produces more and more “wasted lives”, above all, thanks to the sharing and reintroduction of significant and emotionally touching life stories. Through a generous listening of students’ lives, and dialogic practices, school could generate new narrations of migration processes, thus replacing those narrations made up of stereotypical clichés, believes, petty and selfish believes of an overlapping lawlessness, of cruelty and hypocritical welcome. These new narrations tell of possibilities, of mutual discoveries, of processes of successful inclusion, of present-future to build together. “The dialogical as Arnkil and Seikkula say is not a method or a set of techniques but it is an attitude, a way of seeing, which is based on recognizing and respecting the otherness of the other, and on going to meet them.” Applying the integrated dialogic approach to coaching as a lifestyle means to mobilize psychological resources of both people who are directly involved and the whole community and local social network, it means being able to stimulate dialogue. Stories of wanderings and landings, escapes and refuges, of scared identities and unpredictable cultural metamorphosis, of so much suffering, are intertwined and interdependent to the dreamed and