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Arsenic in Playgrounds Remains a Children’s Health Threat
Tweet Share on Facebook November 24, 2009 Comment (2)Children are exposed to toxic arsenic in school playgrounds, despite the fact that the pesticide has been banned from use in play structures since 2003. That's the upsetting news from researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans, who tested 38 playgrounds for arsenic in that city and found it in the soil at 36 percent of them.
Arsenic is a neurotoxin and a carcinogen; neither is something you want anywhere near your child. Because many wooden play structures built before 2003 were treated with the wood preservative known as chromated copper arsenate, or CCA, it's not a big surprise that the ground around those play sets would contain arsenic. The median arsenic concentration in the soil of the contaminated playgrounds studied was 57 parts per million, more than four times the legal level for arsenic in soil in Louisiana. Given that children are active on school playgrounds day in and day out, that exposure is no small deal.
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Curbing Mom's Smoking, Childhood Lead Exposure May Be Key to Preventing ADHD
Tweet Share on Facebook November 23, 2009 Comment (3)Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder takes a huge toll on children, with about 9 percent of kids ages 8 to 15 displaying diagnosable symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior that can make schoolwork an ordeal and friendships trying. Maternal smoking and lead exposure in early childhood might be behind nearly 40 percent of ADHD cases, according to new research. If that turns out to be true, it may be possible to prevent many cases of ADHD and reduce the huge social, financial, and personal toll of the disorder.
While the cause (or, most likely, causes) of ADHD remains a mystery, we do know that it tends to run in families, so there's probably a genetic susceptibility. In addition, prenatal exposure to tobacco smoke and industrial chemicals and childhood exposure to lead have long been associated with attention problems and impulsivity. Both lead and tobacco alter how the brain uses the neurotransmitter dopamine, which helps control movement and emotion, and the brains of people with ADHD may be less sensitive to dopamine.
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Need Help with H1N1 Vaccine Fear? Sid the Science Kid Explains How Flu Vaccines Work
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2009 Comment (4)My 7-year-old neighbor looked less than thrilled as her mom drove her off for her second H1N1 flu shot yesterday. But she and her little sister both have asthma, and their mom didn't want to take needless risks with a novel flu strain that's hitting children harder than adults.
With H1N1 vaccine gradually being distributed to more pediatricians and clinics, parents will increasingly be getting it for their kids. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll on H1N1 flu vaccine found that about 55 percent of parents plan to have their children vaccinated for H1N1 flu. Unfortunately, more than half of those parents (52 percent) are having trouble finding vaccine. Federal and state governments are still scrambling to organize a national vaccination campaign that has been widely criticized for failing to match supply with demand and for failing to make sure that high-risk children—such as my neighbors with asthma—get vaccinated first. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, told the Associated Press today that the campaign is "not working right at all."
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Our Readers' Smart Tips to Stop Teens From Texting While Driving
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2009 Comment (8)If you have teenagers, you know that two of their most beloved pieces of hardware are the cellphone and the car. Put them together, and it’s teen nirvana. One quarter of teenagers say they text while driving, according to a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, despite the many public safety campaigns pointing out the dangers. Half of the teenagers polled say they have ridden in a car while the teenage driver was texting.
To say texting while driving is a dumb idea is an understatement, given that all the research shows that doing so—or even just talking on the phone—makes an accident much more likely. (A recent Virginia Tech study says texters are 23 times more likely to have a crash.) But since we regard cars as mobile living rooms, it’s easy to see why it’s hard for us all, teenagers and adults alike, to resist.
I recently suggested three ways to cut the risk of teenagers texting while driving: Set family rules for cellphone use; never use a phone while walking, driving, or otherwise moving; and don’t text and drive yourself. My clever readers came up with many more:
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Safety of Caffeinated Alcohol Drinks Is Under Federal Spotlight
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2009 Comment (7)Alcoholic drinks laced with caffeine are increasingly popular on college campuses and among underage teen drinkers, probably because the caffeine in brands like Four Loko, Joose, and Liquid Charge makes it possible to stay awake and keep on partying without having to stop to mix a Red Bull and vodka.
But law enforcement types such as state attorneys general have been pushing to get jazzed-up malt liquors and vodkas banned, arguing that these drinks are dangerous and are often marketed to the under-21 crowd.
It looks like the Food and Drug Administration thinks caffeinated alcohol drinks are a bad idea, too. FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein announced today that the agency is investigating the safety and legality of mixing caffeine and alcohol in a single product. He told 30 manufacturers of juiced hooch that they have 30 days to explain why they think these products are safe. The scarcely veiled threat is that the FDA can ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks under existing law that bars dangerous food additives. Or it could require manufacturers to reveal how much caffeine is in each drink. My bet is that they’ll go for an outright ban.
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Your Kids Can’t Say No to Candy? Blame It on Their Brains
Tweet Share on Facebook November 11, 2009 Comment (6)Don't be surprised if your children just can't ignore the fact that there's still Halloween candy in the pantry. Their brains are designed to be obsessed with Snickers, Nerds, and Reese's Pieces. And that inability to ignore the candy is what makes them such amazing learners and discoverers.
That's what I just heard from Sharon Thompson-Schill, a professor of psychology and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. For 15 years, she's been studying adults who have trouble remembering things because of damage to the frontal lobe of their brains. Along the way, she realized that young children act a lot like brain-damaged adults. "Learning and behaving without a frontal lobe is different than learning and behaving with one," Thompson-Schill says. "[Children are] impulsive, they don't follow rules, don't stay on task."
Indeed, the past decade of research on children's brain development has shown conclusively that they are not little adults and that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used for higher-order decision making, doesn't mature in humans until the teenage years or beyond. That's undoubtedly an evolutionary development, says Thompson-Schill, since there's no such difference between child and adult brains in other primates. She calls that delayed frontal lobe maturation "cognition without control," the title of her new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Cognition without control is a good thing for children, the scientist says, even if it sometimes drives their parents bonkers.
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No Luck Finding an H1N1 Flu Shot? You’re Not Alone
Tweet Share on Facebook November 6, 2009 Comment (16)If you've been frustrated in trying to get your kids vaccinated against H1N1 flu, you're not alone: Two thirds of parents who have sought vaccine for their children have failed to find it, according to a Harvard School of Public Health survey out today. That's no small deal, because 41 percent of the parents polled said they have tried to get their children vaccinated against swine flu. Hearing that big Wall Street firms Goldman Sachs and Citigroup got H1N1 vaccine doesn't do much to reassure worried parents that the system is directing vaccine to the kids who need it the most. Although almost 36 million doses of H1N1 vaccine have been distributed, many parents are still anxiously waiting.
My area is typical. At present there's no H1N1 vaccine to be found through the county health department, and school clinics have been canceled for lack of vaccine. I was able to get FluMist for my child at a county clinic in mid-October, even though she doesn't have asthma or other chronic health problems that would have put her at greater risk of complications. All children and young adults from 6 months old to 24 years are a priority group for H1N1 vaccine because they have little or no immunity to this flu virus. But in hindsight, I wish the county had been stricter with those first vaccine clinics and restricted them only to pregnant women and children who are at greater risk than mine.
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4 Ways to Stop Stressing Out Your Kids
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2009 Comment (14)Kids are stressed out, and their parents all too often don't know it. That's the word from the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey, which for the first time asked children about their stress levels. One third of the 1,206 children ages 8 to 17 said they were more stressed now than a year ago. And parents seem to be missing those clues:
- Thirty percent of children said they worried about their family's financial problems, but only 18 percent of the parents thought this was a source of stress for the child.
- Almost half of children worried about doing well in school, while just one third of parents thought that was an issue for their child.
- Twenty-nine percent of teenagers said they worried about getting into a good college or getting a job after high school, while only 5 percent of teenagers' parents thought that was a source of stress.
- Two thirds of parents thought their own stress levels had no impact on their children, but 80 percent of the children said they learn healthy living habits from their parents.
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Flu Fears, Vaccine Fears, and Cheerleader Desiree Jennings’s Story
Tweet Share on Facebook November 2, 2009 Comment (20)There's no shortage of flu fear these days. We're either afraid our children will get the flu—and mad/scared/frustrated because there's no vaccine to be found—or afraid that the vaccine will cause grievous harm. Those last fears were stoked by the story of Desiree Jennings, a 26-year-old Washington Redskins cheerleader from Ashburn, Va., who fell ill 10 days after getting a seasonal flu shot. Antivaccine activist group Generation Rescue, founded by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, seized on her story, saying her apparent dystonia—manifesting itself in seizures and the inability to walk forward—was caused by the flu shot.
After the local Fox TV station here in D.C. reported Jennings's story, neurologists who saw the video (which is now a fixture on YouTube) said the symptoms didn't appear to be dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes sustained muscle spasms, but rather a psychogenic disorder, meaning the symptoms are real, but the cause is psychological. People with dystonia and the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation also spoke up; they were not happy to have their very real ailment pulled into the mix, especially since it has never been associated with the flu vaccine. Faced with the criticism, Generation Rescue pulled Jennings's story from its website.
