New Study Says Kids Are Good For Your Health

January 15, 2010

USA Today

By Sharon Jayson

Being a parent can be stressful, but new research calls into question some long-held beliefs about physical and psychological effects of having kids.
A study published today in Annals of Behavioral Medicine finds that parents have better blood pressure readings than childless adults.

“Women were driving the effect,” says co-author Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “Women with children had the lowest blood pressure, and women without had the highest” of those studied.

Holt-Lunstad, along with researchers from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and California State University-Long Beach, monitored the blood pressure of 198 adults ages 20-68. Participants wore portable monitors, which took random readings three times an hour, multiple times a day, over 24 hours, including while they slept.

The researchers considered other factors that influence blood pressure, such as age, body mass, gender, exercise, employment and smoking. They controlled for length of marriage and duration of marriage before kids. Researchers compared parents with kids under age 2 to parents with teens to parents with kids over 18 and found no differences.

Thomas Kamarck, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who has researched nighttime blood pressure, says he’s not sure about the link to parenthood.

He hasn’t yet seen the new study, but he says that “the fact that there’s no difference between young children and adult children” suggests that blood pressure readings reflect “something about the people who choose to be parents, rather than the day-to-day experience of being a parent” that may account for the findings.

Holt-Lunstad says researchers need to study parents and other adults over time to see whether parenthood actually does reduce blood pressure.

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Airport Body Scanners Break Child Porn Laws

January 5, 2010

guardian.co.uk

By Alan Travis

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to “virtual strip-searching” and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the “child porn” problem was among the “legal and operational issues” now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown’s announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their “gradual” introduction at British airports.

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted.

The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a “pseudo-image” of a child.

Dowty told the Guardian she raised concerns with the Metropolitan police five years ago over plans to use similar scanners in an anti-knife campaign, and when the Department for Transport began a similar trial in 2006 on the Heathrow Express rail service from Paddington station.

“They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way,” said Dowty, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the “prevention and detection of crime” but the purpose had to be more specific than the “trawling exercise” now being considered.

A Manchester airport spokesman said their trial had started in December, but only with passengers over 18 until the legal situation with children was clarified. So far 500 people have taken part on a voluntary basis with positive feedback from nearly all those involved.

Passengers also pass through a metal detector before they can board their plane. Airport officials say the scanner image is only seen by a single security officer in a remote location before it is deleted.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: “We understand the concerns expressed about privacy in relation to the deployment of body scanners. It is vital staff are properly trained and we are developing a code of practice to ensure these concerns are properly taken into account. Existing safeguards also mean those operating scanners are separated from the device, so unable to see the person to whom the image relates, and these anonymous images are deleted immediately.”

But Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty, had concerns over the “instant” introduction of scanners: “Where are the government assurances that electronic strip-searching is to be used in a lawful and proportionate and sensitive manner based on rational criteria rather than racial or religious bias?” she said.

Her concerns were echoed by Simon Davies of Privacy International who said he was sceptical of the privacy safeguards being used in the United States. Although the American system insists on the deletion of the images, he believed scans of celebrities or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles would prove an “irresistible pull” for some employees.

The disclosures came as Downing Street insisted British intelligence information that the Detroit plane suspect tried to contact radical Islamists while a student in London was passed on to the US.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name was included in a dossier of people believed to have made attempts to deal with extremists, but he was not singled out as a particular risk, Brown’s spokesman said.

President Barack Obama has criticised US intelligence agencies for failing to piece together information about the 23-year-old that should have stopped him boarding the flight.

Brown’s spokesman said “There was security information about this individual’s activities and that was shared with the US authorities.”

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Autism On The Rise

October 6, 2009

New  York Times

By Benedict Carey

More than 1 in 100 American children and teenagers may have autism, Asperger’s syndrome or a related developmental problem, although such diagnoses often do not hold up, according to a government report released on Monday.

The estimate, based on a telephone survey of some 78,000 households and published in the journal Pediatrics, is the highest yet of the prevalence of so-called autism spectrum disorders, which include everything from severe autism to milder social difficulties to “pervasive developmental disorder,” a description given to many troubled children.

Nearly 40 percent of the children in the study who were given such a diagnosis grew out of it or no longer qualified for it, the study found. The estimate is based on those whose parents said they were currently struggling with one of the disorders.

Prevalence estimates for autism-related disorders have increased so quickly over the past decade — to 1 in 150 in 2007, from 1 in 300 in the early 2000s — that researchers have debated whether the disorder is in fact becoming more common or is simply diagnosed more often.

The new survey is not likely to settle the question. “This is an excellent study, but what it looks at is the prevalence of the diagnosis, not the disorder,” said Dr. Susan L. Hyman, a pediatrician at Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester. “The next step scientifically is to see whether those diagnoses are being made accurately.”

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