|
News & Views - July, 2001 Issue (page
2)
|
Page 2 of 3 - Previous | Next
RESEARCHERS FIND NO LINK BETWEEN VACCINE, AUTISM
(March 7, 2001) The San Jose Mercury News reported a study
conducted by the California Department of Health Services that was published March 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study compared the number of autism cases in California with immunization records of kindergartners in the state from 1980 to
1994. “While cases of autism have risen sharply in the past two decades, the rates at which children received the measles, mumps and
rubella (MMR) immunization have stayed the same or risen only slightly since the, leading researchers to conclude that there is no
correlation between the vaccine and autism.”
STUDENTS MUST BE SCHOOL CITIZENS
(March 7, 2001) The Associated Press article run in the Arizona Republic
quotes Jerome Freibert of the University of Houston saying “schools with student bodies of 2,000 or more increasingly turn out tourist
students. Think of Paris. People come and go and don’t leave anything of themselves – they simply pass through. Students must be citizens
in their schools rather than tourists.” He recommends creating programs that engage everyone in the school life, with “small unit
organizations within the school, two years with the same teachers and time set aside to talk to adults - the role models.”
WASHINGTON POST SURVEY OF ADHD
(March 18, 2001) The Sunday Post Magazine at www.washingtonpost.com
published a survey of varying opinions about the diagnosis and medication protocol for ADHD, quoting for example, Peter Breggin, “the
profession’s prickly conscience.” He is medical consultant in three separate class action lawsuits filed last September on behalf
of children medicated with Ritalin, which accuse Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp, the American Psychiatric Association, and CHADD, an
advocacy group for people with ADHD, of conspiring to poison America’s children. The article contrasts “two of the untestable hypotheses
of psychology,” attributing ADHD either to flaws in the wiring of brain circuits” or to an “evolutionary mismatch in which alternate
state of readiness represent a holdover from prehistoric times when extremely alert, impulsive people presumably had advantages in
the struggle to survive.” The current theory is that “ADHD may derive from abnormal neural circuits linking the frontal lobes, the
deep brain structures called the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum.”
BULLYING AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERN
(April 30, 2001) The School Daily, a New Zealand
online site, reports studies that 60% of the students in New Zealand report being bullied. The comparable figures for Great
Britain and the US suggest about one-third of the students report being bullied, and that “Australia has had at least one class action
taken out against schools on behalf of pupils who have been bullied.”
|