November 11, 2011
Government warns of risk with high-powered magnets
The government on Thursday warned about a growing problem with powerful ball-bearing magnets, such as those used in desktop toys for adults, and the risk they can pose to children. So far this year, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has received 14 reports of problems with the magnets — up from seven reports last year and one in 2009. The children involved ranged in age from 18 months to 15 years old. Eleven of the children required surgery to remove the magnets. The CPSC says that when two or more of these tiny magnets are swallowed, they can attract one another and lead to serious injuries, such as small holes in the stomach or intestines, intestinal blockage and blood poisoning. USA Today
November 9, 2011
Why Obama’s plan to fix Head Start is not enough
Just four years after the federally funded preschool program Head Start began in 1965, it was slapped by a report, commissioned by the Johnson Administration, that questioned its effectiveness. Forty years later, not much has changed. While Head Start’s aim to prepare low-income students for kindergarten is noble, it’s still faces questions about its demonstrable benefits. Seeking to finally turn the program around, President Obama on Tuesday announced a plan that will require each Head Start center to meet a new set of benchmarks or risk losing its funding. Under Obama’s plan, each of the 1,600-plus Head Start centers nationwide, which operate some 49,000 classrooms, will be evaluated for their effectiveness by the Department of Health and Human Services over the next three years. Low-performing centers will have to compete for federal dollars; if another preschool program can demonstrate better results than the Head Start center that organization will get the funding. Time Magazine
November 8, 2011
Obama announces stricter financing standards for Head Start
President Obama visited a schoolhouse in this suburb of Philadelphia on Tuesday to announce stricter financing standards for the government’s Head Start program, which offers preschool training for children from low-income families. Declaring that investments in early education are critical to the future competitiveness of the United States, Mr. Obama said the government would, for the first time, require Head Start programs to meet certain standards to qualify for renewal of federal grants. The New York Times
Babies on obesity path? New sign may offer answer
Researchers say there's a new way to tell if infants are likely to become obese later on: Check to see if they've passed two key milestones on doctors' growth charts by age 2. Babies who grew that quickly face double the risk of being obese at age 5, compared with peers who grew more slowly, their study found. Rapid growers were also more likely to be obese at age 10, and infants whose chart numbers climbed that much during their first 6 months faced the greatest risks. That kind of rapid growth should be a red flag to doctors, and a sign to parents that babies might be overfed or spending too much time in strollers and not enough crawling around, said pediatrician Dr. Elsie Taveras, the study's lead author and an obesity researcher at Harvard Medical School. Contrary to the idea that chubby babies are the picture of health, the study bolsters evidence that "bigger is not better" in infants, she said. The Detroit News