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Swine Flu: 8 Ways to Get Your Family Ready
Tweet Share on Facebook April 30, 2009 Comment (11)Pandemic flu plans aren’t just for governments: Families need them too, says Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians and a family doc in Boise, Idaho. And parents need to prepare now. Here are eight things families should do to get ready for swine flu, according to Epperly:
- Stockpile food and medical supplies. Two weeks of food, common cold medicines such as ibuprofen, and tissues would be a good place to start, Epperly says. The idea is to be self-sufficient if schools and businesses are closed or if you want to stay home and avoid the risk of being exposed to flu in public places. Here’s the pandemicflu.gov family pandemic planning checklist.
- Plan for school closures. Decide what the family will do if schools or day-care centers are closed, as they are in several states.
- Wash hands often, and use alcohol hand sanitizers to reduce the spread of germs. Clean home surfaces with Lysol or another disinfectant to reduce transmission.
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Schools Closed Around the Country to Fight Swine Flu
Tweet Share on Facebook April 29, 2009 Comment (9)Swine flu keeps getting scarier, with the first death from A/H1N1 flu confirmed in the United States—a 23-month-old toddler in Texas.
I wrote yesterday, as part of my 5 tactics for keeping your family safe, that parents need to get ready for the fact that schools may be closed as a result of the flu outbreak. Now that’s happening, with school closures in Texas, Illinois, California, and New York. More are on the way.
President Obama today said that schools should shut down if they have confirmed cases. And he added: "Parents should also think about contingencies if schools in their areas should shut down... Just sending a [sick] child from a school to a day-care center would not be a good solution."
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Can a Kid Invent a Better Diabetes Management Tool?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 29, 2009 Comment (1)Diabetes is a pain to manage, and the tools needed—meters, test strips, lancets, and pumps—don’t make it much easier. Here’s a chance to invent a killer app for diabetes management and pick up a cool $2,000. That’s the prize for kids under 18 in the 2009 Diabetes Mine Design Contest. Adults can snag $10,000.
The contest grew out of Diabetes Mine blogger Amy Tenderich’s open letter to Steve Jobs, when she asked the Apple mogul why his company could come up with such elegant hardware for listening to MP3s, while 20 million diabetics are stuck with kludgy, ugly equipment. Why not have customizable ring tones? Thumb wheels? Wireless pumps?
Entries are due Friday, so get cracking. Submissions can be a two-minute YouTube video or an elevator pitch; here’s how to enter.
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Swine Flu: 5 Ways to Keep Your Kids Safe
Tweet Share on Facebook April 28, 2009 Comment (41)Swine flu has parents seriously worried. With the suspected death toll mounting in Mexico and at least 64 confirmed cases in the United States, there's good reason to worry. One New York City school is closed because dozens of students have fallen ill.
Parental fears get amplified when the public-health experts say, correctly, that they don't know what's going to happen next. "We don't know how worried we need to be," says Joseph Bocchini, chairman of the department of pediatrics at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. "We know that this is a virus that has caused severe disease in Mexico. But so far the cases that we know of in the United States have been mild. The potential for this to become a pandemic is real, but we don't know how likely that is."
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Could Autism Be Caused by Lack of Vitamin D?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 24, 2009 Comment (44)Could autism be caused by low levels of vitamin D? That’s a new idea that’s just starting to emerge, sparked by the large number of autism cases among children of Somali immigrants living in Sweden and Minnesota.
The mothers and young children are exposed to much less sunshine in their new homes than they were back in Somalia. Lighter-skinned people make more vitamin D than dark-skinned people do when exposed to sunshine, so it’s easy to imagine that the Somalis are getting relatively little vitamin D. And because most of the Somali immigrants are Muslim, they cover themselves when going outside, reducing their sun exposure even more. But there’s as yet no clear connection to autism.
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How to Keep Kids From Smoking
Tweet Share on Facebook April 22, 2009 Comment (5)How can parents and society keep kids from smoking? One way is to make sure that merchants know they'll get in trouble if they sell cigarettes to minors. That can cut by 21 percent the odds that a 10th grader will become a daily smoker. And that's good news, because the earlier a person starts smoking, the more likely he or she will be hooked for life.
Public-health advocates have been trying for years to figure out how best to keep children and teens from taking up the cigarette habit. It's often hard to determine what works and why. Banning sales to minors doesn't work unless the bans are enforced, according to Joseph DiFranza, a professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. DiFranza, a family physician, became convinced that more needed to be done to keep kids from starting to smoke when he realized how hard it is for patients who smoke to quit. Back in 1987, he sent his daughter, who was then 11 years old, into 100 stores in Massachusetts to try to buy cigarettes. Seventy-five percent of the merchants sold them to her, even though it was illegal to sell cigarettes to minors in that state.
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Worried Your Kid Is Addicted to Video Games? Unplug the Xbox, and Get Him a Job
Tweet Share on Facebook April 21, 2009 Comment (20)The news that almost 10 percent of kids show symptoms of addiction to video games makes this a great time for Michael Gurian’s new book. He has made a crusade and a career out of advocating for boys, who he feels have been neglected by schools and society in an effort to give girls long-denied opportunities. Boys without purpose are boys who spend the day racking up high scores on Grand Theft Auto IV. This might not be the best preparation for manhood.
I talked with Michael about The Purpose of Boys: Helping Our Sons Find Meaning, Significance, and Direction in Their Lives (Jossey-Bass, $26.96), which aims to answer that question. Here’s an edited version of our conversation:
How has the situation changed for boys since you first started writing about them 20 years ago?
I’m going to give two answers that sound contradictory, but they’re not. Definitely, the grass roots have awakened–first the moms of sons, then that fans out to the dads and the schools, which are gradually shifting over to take care of both girls and boys. But at the highest public-policy levels, there isn’t awareness. This president has started a council on girls and women, but there is no council of boys and men. At the high policy levels, there is still a national blindness. -
Is Your Kid a Video-Game Addict?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 20, 2009 Comment (44)Are nearly 10 percent of kids and teenagers who play video games showing signs of addiction? That’s the word from a report in the journal Psychological Science, which says that 8.5 percent of the 1,178 kids ages 8 to 18 who were randomly sampled by a 2007 Harris poll showed at least 6 of 11 addiction symptoms.
But don’t trash the Xbox just yet. First of all, the addiction symptoms included skipping household chores or homework to play, playing games to escape problems, and lying about length of playing time. If that’s true, I’m definitely addicted to reading, because I’ll happily evade vacuuming and other unpleasant aspects of life by burying my nose in a book. And who hasn’t lied when asked about staying up last night surfing Craigslist or checking out Facebook? It’s a great question, particularly since today marks the beginning of Turnoff Week, a time to consider life without video.
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Relapse: One Good Reason Kids Shouldn’t Get High on 4/20 Day
Tweet Share on Facebook April 20, 2009 Comment (18)Kicking addiction is a struggle under the best of circumstances, and there’s mounting evidence that the earlier a kid gets a drug habit, the harder that struggle becomes. I was reminded of that powerfully, and painfully, when I heard that Nic Sheff, author of the hard-hitting memoir Tweak about his teenage struggle with addiction, had relapsed.
Today is 4/20 day, a counterculture holiday for potheads to light up and celebrate their favorite mind-altering drug, marijuana. (Theories about the origins of the name, which also can be written 4:20 or 420 day, are diverse.) Last year, on April 20, 10,000 people convened at the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus for the impromptu WeedFest. I have fond memories of lounging on the quad at my own university on a sunny spring day, with the air thick with the sweet smoke of weed. It seemed like harmless fun, though even then we could see that some of our classmates were getting too befuddled to function.
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Childhood Smiles—or Frowns—and the Risk of Divorce
Tweet Share on Facebook April 17, 2009 Comment (5)Big smiles early in life mean a person is less likely to end up divorced in adulthood—though that doesn’t mean that pouty-pusses are doomed to be alone. Researchers at Indiana’s DePauw University measured the “smile intensity” in two groups of photos—college students’ yearbook photos and childhood photos of Midwesterners. After measuring muscles around the eyes and cheeks in 655 yearbook photos, the scientists concluded that the stronger the smiling, the more apt people were to stay together. The top 10 percent of smilers had a 5.5 percent divorce rate, while 27 percent of the bottom 10 percent of smilers were divorced. Only 55 people participated in the childhood photo study, making it too small to analyze reliably, but the pattern seemed to hold.
“The bottom-line finding is that people who smiled more stayed together, people who smiled less were more likely to get divorced,” says Matthew Hertenstein, an associate professor of psychology at DePauw who led the study.
