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Preventing Colds and Flu

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As you have probably heard, there are a lot of colds and flu around this year. Both respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses have been especially circulating within the schools. This is due to the fact that children tend to spread germs easily and lack of fresh outdoor air. Remember all of these stay healthy tips:

1. Hand washing is one of the best ways to prevent the spread of illness. Wash your hands often — when they are dirty, before eating, after using the restroom, and after sneezing into a tissue.

2. Cough Etiquette. Avoid coughing or sneezing into your hands – use a tissue or your elbow. After sneezing, try and wash your hands as soon as possible. This will ensure that any bacteria or germs from your sneeze don’t remain on your hands all day, preventing you from spreading any germs.

3. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth. Germs spread this way. If you do have to touch these areas, try and clean your hands before and after to ensure no germs are being spread around your body.

4. MOST IMPORTANTLY stay away from people who are sick and stay home when you are sick to avoid spreading the flu around.

How To Include Special Needs Children At Birthday Parties

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If your child has certain special needs issues and invited to a birthday party, try to include them as much as possible. If the birthday party is a drop off party, you may ask to stick around by volunteering to help all the kids in order to be there for extra support and safety. Socialization is important and it is your duty to do everything possible to make sure it happens.

New School Lunch Rules: Students Fight Back

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Most schools comply with the new low calorie limits (650 – 850 depending on grade level) by giving out smaller portions. Kids complain that after they eat lunch, they are not full. As a result of schools putting caloric limits on school lunches, some students have started to protest. Students in Kansas made a spoof video on YouTube called “We Are Hungry”. Many Wisconsin students boycotted school lunches and started to bring in food from home.

With a high school calorie limit of 850, they are not taking into account a student’s weight. For example an 85 lb freshman and 280 lb senior each get the same portions by law. Some students have to purchase 2 meals just to get full. To get the equivalent of the amount of lunch kids got last year, they would have to spend about $6 – $7 now.

These smaller lunch portions were created with the assumption that all students are getting a full and filling breakfast at home before school. Unfortunately in the real world this does not always happen. For some students this scaled back lunch is often the main meal they rely on to get them through the rest of the day. In fact this meal is supposed to hold athletes over until their late night dinner after sports.

School Lunch Regulations Silliness

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In order to comply with the new forced limits on grains, protein, sodium and fats; schools have begun to act silly. For example Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Lexington, MA has removed its SALAD BAR!!! One would assume that salad is healthy however not the government. Being afraid that the school could not control the portions of protein or grains the students would take out of the salad bar, they decided to remove it all together. In Shrewsbury, MA they decided croutons on a salad added too much grains to the meal so they banned them. Also on the Shrewsbury hit list and now banned from their salad bar are hard-boiled eggs and turkey slices because the nanny state can not regulate how much protein one will take. Whole-wheat pasta salad is also a no-no because the nanny state says that kids may get too many grains. After all of this Shrewsbury silliness, the school system brought in $10,000 less in September 2012 lunch sales than in the same month 2011.

New School Lunch Rules Tough For Kids To Swallow

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After the new federal rules designed to help kids eat healthier, some schools are reporting fewer kids are buying lunch. The new rules limit the amount of grains, protein, sodium and saturated fat that school lunches subsidized by the US Department of Agriculture may contain. Trans fats are banned and calories per meal are capped. Many students have been upset with smaller portions. For example in Brookline, MA, students have been upset with smaller less filling bagels due to these rules. They report that across the school system about 30% of Brookline students buy lunch, down from 35% last year. This is a drop of 5%. Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Lexington, MA reports a drop of 35% fewer students buying lunch this year since the new regulations went into affect.

Stay tuned here for hilarious yet frustrating stories of how schools are banning certain foods one would consider to be healthy, simply to comply with these new regulations dictated to them by the government. Also we will report on clever ways students are taking matters into their own hands to fight back against the nanny state.

New Autism Treatment – Early Start Denver Model Behavioral Therapy

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Intensive early behavioral therapy may normalize the brain activity in children with autism when they look at faces and improve their social skills according to a recent study. This is on top of what was previously known that it could help develop language and thinking skills. Researchers looked at 48 autistic children between 18 and 30 months. Half of the children were treated with a new type of therapy called Early Start Denver Model for 20 hours per week for 2 years. After 2 years, researchers used electroencephalograms to measure the brain activity of the children with autism as well as of children without autism while they watched faces and toys. The majority of autistic children treated with the Early Start Denver Model showed greater brain activation when looking at faces rather than objects (a response common to children without autism). The opposite was found among the kids with autism who received other interventions.

The autistic children with increased brain activity at the sight of faces also had better social and behavioral skills. The study is the first to find underlying changes in brain function along with behavioral changes after early therapy. The full study can be found in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, November 2012.

Doctors Turning Away Unvaccinated Children

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Some doctors will turn away patients that refuse to be vaccinated to protect their other patients. The biggest concern doctors have with people not being vaccinated is that an unvaccinated child could expose other patients, especially newborns and children too young to be vaccinated yet, to potentially deadly diseases.

Vaccinations and Autism

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By now you have probably heard the rumor that childhood vaccines can cause autism. Lets take a closer look at how this idea came about. In 1998 a British gastroenterologist published a paper in a medical journal theorizing a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. His research was based on interviews with parents based on TWELVE children!! The press ran away with the story that vaccines cause autism.

Since this global panic, a mercury-based preservative thimerosal has been removed from all vaccines. This was to just to be safe just in case the observed autism was in fact mercury poisoning. Throughout the past decade there have been dozens of studies that have collectively drawn on data from millions of children. These studies have consistently found no connection between vaccines and autism. In 2010 the original British medical journal retracted their original 1998 paper and the UK’s General Medical Council revoked the British gastroenterologist’s medical license.

Although we recommend all children get vaccines as scheduled there are still a few parents that swear that it was in fact vaccines that caused their child’s autism. What do you think? Please share your experiences and thoughts with us.

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