As the United States battles against a devastating opioid epidemic, reports persist of children and babies accidentally overdosing after mistakenly consuming pills. Other babies are affected even before birth. The incidence rates for neonatal abstinence syndrome, or babies born addicted to drugs, increased nearly five-fold in the United States since 2000, a report published Monday found. Neonatal abstinence syndrome refers to the multitude of problems that occur when a newborn is exposed to addictive opioids while in the womb. Drugs like heroin, codeine, oxycodone and others pass easily through the protective placenta and cause dependence in the baby before he or she is born.

I can see the effects of it on kids -- those read to as children and those who weren't read to as much,

Ms Anderson said: "For families it is an enormous issue. It stops hands-on care, which leads to best outcomes for babies, and there is a financial element to that is impacting how involved families are able to be, making them lose out on valuable time bonding with their baby."

"We have a house in North Georgia, and (we) spend some time there and love going out and seeing the creeks and the waterfalls and things like that," she said. "When you're out there painting, you experience your surroundings, because you're standing there painting for so long and (you) take in all the sights and smells and part of that even goes into your work. You just try to grasp your whole environment and that's kind of what happened with these pieces.

The high susceptibility of neonates to infections has been assumed to be due to immaturity of the immune system, but the mechanism remains unclear. By colonizing adult germ-free mice with the cecal contents of neonatal and adult mice, we show that the neonatal microbiota is unable to prevent colonization by two bacterial pathogens that cause mortality in neonates. The lack of colonization resistance occurred when Clostridiales were absent in the neonatal microbiota. Administration of Clostridiales, but not Bacteroidales, protected neonatal mice from pathogen infection and abrogated intestinal pathology upon pathogen challenge. Depletion of Clostridiales also abolished colonization resistance in adult mice.