Before Giving Your Children a Mobile Phone, Advice About Phone Safety is a Must

According to experts, parental advice regarding sexting should ideally begin before middle school or just before they get their mobile phones.

Even though such occurrences may be rare among teens, one disturbed child can begin a dangerous trend among peers. Dr. Susan Lipkins, a psychologist who specializes in school conflict, said, "They're acting out, needing attention, and there may be some reason. There may be something in the child's life where they have already been exposed to sex, either by seeing things or hearing things they shouldn't, or perhaps being abused. One child who acts out will be the one with the problem, and the others who are watching may follow."

Just like we advice children to protect them against child abuse, parents can advice teens not to take a picture of anything private or send their name or any identifying information. Ideally parents must also check the phone and be able to read texts, see photos and have the passwords to apps used by the children.

It is important to establish some rules before handing them the phone and then periodically check if the kid is following the advice.

Source-Medindia

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Children Ill After Drinking Water in Bihar School

The Friday incident took place at the government middle school in Runnisaidpur of Sitamarhi, a district police officer said.

The sick children were first admitted to a primary health centre (PHC) in Runnisaidpur and later over a dozen, who were critically ill, were shifted to the district hospital for treatment.

The children complained of pain in the stomach and started vomiting after drinking the water.

"It appears to be the handiwork of some anti-social elements as the handpump might have been poisoned," education department officials said.

After the news spread, hundreds of villagers thronged the PHC where the children had been admitted.

Expressing concern over the incidents, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said: "I am really worried as after the contaminated mid-day meal tragedy, now reports of poison in handpumps at schools are coming in from various places."

The chief minister added that state Director General of Police Abhayanand had been directed to initiate a probe into the incidents.

As many as 23 children lost their lives July 16 after consuming contaminated mid-day meal at the government primary school in Dahrmasati Gandawan village at Mashrakh block of Saran district, 60 km from Patna.

The mid-day meal scheme is running in 72,000 schools across the state with 1.60 crore students availing hot, freshly cooked meals.

Source-IANS

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Japanese Children Turning into Calligraphers, Thanks to Robots

That's because a robot arm is also attached to the brush and for a moment, as thick lines of glistening black ink are laid down on the page, Nijiya is transformed into a master calligrapher.

A few days ago the 10-year-old student and his classmates from a junior high school in Yokohama, close to Tokyo, came face to face with this strange invention.

Despite being a deft practitioner of such a subtle art form, there is nothing human about this collection of metal rods and whirring motors.

But the robot writes just like an expert calligrapher and its inventor hopes it will help teach a new generation of Japanese children an ancient skill that many fear is fast dying out.

"The teaching of calligraphy is all but lost so I thought I could forever preserve the art of our great masters on the robot's memory," explains Seiichiro Katsura, a professor at Keio University and the robot's inventor.

The machine itself consists of multiple engines and a mechanical arm which is attached to a brush. Its hard drive has been imbued with the skills of 90-year-old Juho Sado, a master calligrapher who taught the robot how to write a series of "Kanji" characters down to the most imperceptible of wrist movements and brush strokes.

The robot's complex sensors recorded everything, from the stroke order, the brush angle, the thickness of the line or the slightest pressure change. It then relays those memories to novices and gently corrects their hand movements if they go wrong.

The little school students from Yokohama were able to practice drawing kanji characters such as "study", "sea" and "flower" in classic cursive -- a calligraphy style where all the lines are interconnected. Each time the students produce near perfect replicas.

"When you take the brush, it's as if the master himself is holding your hand and guiding you," said Ayaka Matsui, an assistant of Professor Katsura who teaches children how to use the robot during introductory workshops at the university.

Nijiya agrees. Proudly waving his "Gaku" character -- which means "study" -- he exclaims: "The master is not there but we feel his presence, like he's trying to teach us."

"It's great," adds his classmate Keisuke Yamagishi. "I only need to put a little bit of pressure through my arm and the brush glides across the paper."

Professor Katsura hopes this new technique will not only be able to teach people other forms of art, but also other fields such as surgery or mechanics.

"The process of transmitting knowledge by hand was often tedious, requiring a long process of acquiring techniques, intuition and experience," he says. "With this robot, the process becomes faster and more efficient."

Source-AFP

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Access to Clean Water and Soap may Lead to Growth Improvements in Young Children

by Kathy Jones on? August 02, 2013 at 8:51 PM Child Health News Providing access to clean water and soap can lead to small, but significant, improvements in the growth of children under five years of age, according to a new study conducted by researchers at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and WaterAid that has been published in Cochrane.
Researchers identified 14 studies conducted in low and middle income countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Chile, Guatemala, Pakistan, Nepal, South Africa, Kenya and Cambodia) that provided data on the effect of water, sanitation and hygiene programmes on the physical growth of 9,469 children. The authors' analysis of the data suggested that interventions to improve the quality of the water in the household and provide soap resulted in an average 0.5cm increased height growth in children under the age of five.

Report lead author Dr Alan Dangour, a public health nutritionist from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: "We typically think that providing clean water, sanitation and hygiene is an effective way to reduce the incidence and associated deaths from diseases such as diarrhoea - which remains the third biggest killer of under fives worldwide. For the first time our analysis suggests that better access to these services may also have a small but important impact on the growth of young children.

"While there are some important shortcomings in the available evidence base, we estimate that clean drinking water and effective hand washing could reduce the prevalence of stunting in children under the age of five by up to 15%.1 This is potentially an extremely important finding, that identifies that improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene could be a key part of the tool kit to tackle the global burden of undernutrition."

Poor height growth, or stunting, affects 165 million children worldwide and results in long term impacts on physical and mental development, increasing the risk of mortality and reducing productivity in adulthood.2 Undernutrition is a cause of 3.1 million deaths annually - nearly half (45%) of all deaths in children under five.2

International development funding supports many nutritional interventions, such as the provision of vitamin supplements, that directly tackle poor nutrition outcomes, but this is the first study to show that interventions in water, sanitation and hygiene could also play a role in improving nutritional outcomes for children.

WaterAid chief executive Barbara Frost said: "As well as resulting in hundreds of thousands of under-five deaths every year, there is a growing consensus that unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene can affect the body's ability to absorb nutrients, impacting on child development and contributing to their stunting.

"Stunting continues to have serious consequences on the social and economic outcomes of developing countries. With only ?1.57 ($2.39) a year provided in aid for water and sanitation per person in sub-Saharan Africa - less than the price of a cup of coffee - we have to make access to these life critical necessities a higher priority."

The authors say that improving access to clean water and soap is likely to have led to the increase in height because of the reduction in microbiological and parasitic infestations in early childhood, which can negatively impact growth.

Professor Tim Wheeler, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development, which funded the research, said: "Failure to get the right nutrition in childhood can cause lifelong damage that cannot be undone. This report provides further support to the idea that using clean water and soap remains one of the best ways to prevent contracting diarrhoea and stopping young children losing the essential nutrients vital for them to grow."

Commenting on the research, Dr Francesco Branca, Director of Nutrition for Health and Development at the World Health Organization, who was not involved in the study, said: "Until now, we have not had a demonstration of the direct nutrition impact of WASH interventions on nutrition. This review shows that a multi-pronged approach is the way to go?bringing together actions to improve food quality and safety as well as feeding and care of children, with others to prevent and treat infections and improve the home environment?to address the scourge of chronic malnutrition."

The authors note there are limitations in the available data for analysis as the main findings of the review are based on relatively short-term studies (9-12 months in duration) and none of these studies is of high methodological quality. There are several large ongoing studies that my help improve the quality of the evidence base. The research was funded by the Department for International Development via the SHARE Research Consortium.

Source-Eurekalert

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Intervention Improves Adherence to Antibiotic Prescribing Guidelines for Children: Study

by Rukmani Krishna on? June 15, 2013 at 12:30 AM Child Health News According to a study in the June 12 issue of JAMA, an intervention consisting of clinician education coupled with personalized audit and feedback about antibiotic prescribing improved adherence to prescribing guidelines for common pediatric bacterial acute respiratory tract infections, although the intervention did not affect antibiotic prescribing for viral infections.
"Antibiotics are the most common prescription drugs given to children. Although hospitalized children frequently receive antibiotics, the vast majority of antibiotic use occurs in the outpatient setting, roughly 75 percent of which is for acute respiratory tract infections (ARTIs). Unnecessary prescribing for viral ARTIs is well documented and has been declining. However, inappropriate prescribing also occurs for bacterial ARTIs, particularly when broad-spectrum antibiotics are used to treat infections for which narrow-spectrum antibiotics are indicated and recommended," according to background information in the article. "Antimicrobial stewardship programs have been effective for inpatients, often through prescribing audit and feedback. However, most antimicrobial use occurs in outpatients with acute respiratory tract infections.

Jeffrey S. Gerber, M.D., Ph.D., of The Children''s Hospital of Philadelphia, and colleagues conducted a study to evaluate the effect of an antimicrobial stewardship intervention on antibiotic prescribing for pediatric outpatients. The randomized trial of outpatient antimicrobial stewardship compared prescribing between intervention and control practices using a common electronic health record. After excluding children with chronic medical conditions, antibiotic allergies, and prior antibiotic use, the researchers estimated prescribing rates for targeted ARTIs standardized for age, sex, race, and insurance from 20 months before the intervention to 12 months afterward (October 2008-June 2011). The study included a network of 18 pediatric primary care practices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (162 clinicians). Overall, there were 1,291,824 office visits by 185,212 unique patients.

The intervention consisted of one 1-hour on-site clinician education session followed by 1 year of personalized, quarterly audit and feedback of prescribing for bacterial and viral ARTIs or usual practice. The researchers measured rates of broad-spectrum (off-guideline) antibiotic prescribing for bacterial ARTIs and antibiotics for viral ARTIs for 1 year after the intervention.

The authors found that among children who were prescribed antibiotics for any indication, the overall proportion of antibiotic prescriptions that were broad-spectrum decreased from 26.8 percent to 14.3 percent in the intervention group and from 28.4 percent to 22.6 percent in control practices (difference of differences [DOD], 6.7 percent) during the 12-months following initiation of education/audit and feedback.

"When stratifying by the individual bacterial ARTIs targeted by the intervention, broad-spectrum (off-guideline) antibiotic prescribing for pneumonia decreased from 15.7 percent to 4.2 percent in the intervention group and from 17.1 percent to 16.3 percent in the control group (DOD, 10.7 percent). Broad-spectrum prescribing for acute sinusitis decreased from 38.9 percent to 18.8 percent in the intervention group and from 40.0 percent to 33.9 percent in the control practices (DOD, 14.0 percent). Broad-spectrum prescribing for streptococcal pharyngitis started and remained low for both the intervention group (from 4.4 percent to 3.4 percent) and the control group (from 5.6 percent to 3.5 percent) (DOD, -1.1 percent)," they write.

In addition, the baseline rate of any antibiotic prescribing for viral infections was low and did not change significantly after the intervention in either the intervention group (from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent) or the control group (from 6.4 percent to 4.5 percent) (DOD, -1.7 percent).

"This intervention nearly halved prescribing of broad-spectrum antibiotics to children during acute primary care encounters and decreased use of off-guideline antibiotics for children with pneumonia by 75 percent by 1 year after the intervention," the researchers note.

"Our findings suggest that extending antimicrobial stewardship to the ambulatory setting, where such programs have generally not been implemented, may have important health benefits."

"This targeted application of antimicrobial stewardship principles to the ambulatory setting has the potential to affect the most common indications for antibiotic use. Future studies should examine the key drivers of these effects on antibiotic prescribing and the generalizability of findings to other health systems and measure the sustainability and clinical outcomes associated with differential prescribing patterns," the authors conclude.

Source-Newswise

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New IPad Application to Help Autistic Children

by Dr.Enozia Vakil on? July 06, 2013 at 10:42 AM Child Health News A newly designed iPad application is all set to help autistic children in their lessons and may become the next best home therapy for these kids, an NGO said.
Tamana, a non-governmental organisation working for multiply challenged and autistic children in collaboration with Deakin University, Australia, launched TOBY (Therapy Outcomes by You) Playpad, a specially designed iPad application, which helps in making an early intervention for children with autism.

"The TOBY Playpad monitors children's performance on tasks from a complex syllabus and covers social skills, language, sensory discrimination and cognitive skills. For example, the child can match pictures of the same colour or shapes and learning becomes easy," said Svetha Venkatesh, director, Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics (PRaDA) at Deakin University.

She also added that technology had been designed for parents and educators, which is cost-effective and easy to use with children at home.

"The TOBY Playpad is available through the Apple iTunes Store and the application is available online for $30. It is currently targeted at children aged two to six years old," Ravneet Pawha, country-director, Deakin University said.

Talking about the new assistive technology for autistic children, Shyama Chona, president, Tamana NGO said,"The use of the new method of technology for children with autism is limited, though technology seems to be a huge interest area for many of these children. The iPad application, the new assistive technology, is a new hope for autistic children."

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that affects the brain in the areas of language and social skills, imagination and activity.

There has been a staggering six-fold increase in autism cases in India, from 20 lakh in 2003 to 1.36 million autism patients at present; many parents are not even aware that their children may have this disability.

"Early intervention therapy will help many autistic children develop their learning ability. Our aim is to build awareness about the TOBY Playpad application and to reach out to as many people as possible," Venkatesh said.

Source-IANS

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