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Proponents of an effort to repeal California’s new stricter law requiring mandatory vaccines for schoolchildren failed to submit enough signatures to qualify a ballot initiative asking voters to repeal the law. County election clerks reported receiving fewer than 234,000 of the 366,000 signatures needed to ask California voters to repeal the law, according to figures provided to the secretary of state’s office and posted online Thursday. The new state law struck down the state’s personal belief exemption for immunizations, a move that requires nearly all public schoolchildren to be vaccinated. (Williams, 10/8)

Efforts to protect children in foster care from being inappropriately medicated with powerful antipsychotic drugs got a big boost forward on Tuesday, when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed three bills into law designed to reform prescribing. Overprescribing of psychiatric meds for foster youth is a persistent problem nationwide, with children given the drugs at double or triple the rate of those not in foster care. (Korry, 10/8)

Ever since the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the narcotic painkiller OxyContin for certain children in August, it has faced unabated criticism from lawmakers and public officials who are wrestling with devastating rates of prescription opioid abuse in their communities. ... The crux of the issue is whether the agency’s approval will lead to more prescriptions for OxyContin in young patients. (Saint Louis, 10/8)

Timothy Dick’s office receives all kinds of reports of child abuse and neglect. Perhaps a child has a broken bone, or is underfed, or has been left home alone for too long. But when caseworkers drive to the child’s home to investigate, they often discover the same root cause. “What we’re finding more and more is that the parents are addicted to opiates. And more often than not, it’s heroin,” said Dick, assistant director of child protective services in Clermont County, Ohio. (Quinton, 10/9)

Roughly 20% of high school students report being bullied at school in the past year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 15% of high school students said they were bullied online. That number has gone down significantly since the federal government started collecting data on the problem in 2005. A decade ago, 28% of students reported being bullied. Why? One reason is that anti-bullying laws seem to actually work. That's what a new study in JAMA Pediatrics suggests, although not all bullying laws are equally impactful. (Christensen, 10/8)

Researchers have found that when children eat organic fruits and vegetables, the amount of pesticides in their bodies declines significantly. Most organophosphorus pesticides have been phased out for residential use, but they are still widely used in agriculture. High doses in agricultural workers can be deadly. (Bakalar, 10/8)

A new study says children living near the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a rate 20 to 50 times that of children elsewhere, a difference the authors contend undermines the government’s position that more cases have been discovered in the area only because of stringent monitoring. Most of the 370,000 children in Fukushima prefecture (state) have been given ultrasound checkups since the March 2011 meltdowns at the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The most recent statistics, released in August, show that thyroid cancer is suspected or confirmed in 137 of those children, a number that rose by 25 from a year earlier. Elsewhere, the disease occurs in only about one or two of every million children per year by some estimates. (Kageyama, 10/8)