Mom When Can I Get A Cell Phone?

 

By Mary L. Gavin, MD
Oct. 24, 2009

The answer is when your parents think you need one, though many kids seem to be getting them around age 12 or 13. Some younger kids may have them because their parents see it as an issue of safety and convenience. For instance, a kid can call mom and dad when sports practice is over. And a cell phone can give kids almost instant access to their parents if something goes wrong or they need help. Likewise, it can give parents quick access to their kids so they can check on them and make sure they’re OK.

If you do get a cell phone, work out some rules with your parents, such as how many minutes you’re allowed to spend on the phone. Also hammer out some other details: When can you use your phone? When must the phone be turned off? And what will you do if someone calls you too often or leaves a mean message for you?

You’ll also want to make sure you take care of this new item in your life. Have a routine for keeping it charged and storing it in the same place so it doesn’t get lost. And whatever you do, don’t use it in the bathroom. We know someone who dropped her phone in the toilet!
Source: Kids Health

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com

Halloween Be Safe

by Alexander
Oct. 25, 2009

 

 

Dear Alexander,

(Q) What do you like best about Halloween?

 

(A) That’s easy! I love spending time with my friends.

I also love the adventure of going trick-or-treating. It’s perfect: You get together with your group of friends, plan your strategy, and then head out into the neighborhood, looking for goodies!

Of course, I have to be careful. Anything with peanuts will give me a reaction! So I take candy but leave it wrapped in my bag. If anyone offers me unwrapped food, I tell them “No, thanks, I have a peanut allergy.” When I get home, my parents and I sort out the safe candies and give the rest to my friends.

Good luck!

Your friend,

Alexander the Elephant   

 

 

Editor’s Note: The information above is not designed to take the place of a doctor’s instructions. Patients are urged to contact a doctor for specific information regarding guidelines for care.

We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com

 

Source: Food Allergy

 

Wish of the week – Paul

By MWF/PIO
October 25, 2009

Source Make A Wish Foundation

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think? dan@goldcoastchronicle.com

Italian Chicken

By Better Homes
Oct. 22, 2009

Prep: 20 minutes
Cook: 6 to 7 hours (low) or 3 to 3 1/2 hours (high)
 

Ingredients

• 1/2  of a medium head cabbage, cut into wedges (about 12 ounces)
• 1  medium onion, sliced and separated into rings
• 1  4 1/2-ounce jar (drained weight) sliced mushrooms, drained
• 2  tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca
• 2  to 2 1/2 pounds meaty chicken pieces (breast halves, thighs, and drumsticks), skinned
• 2  cups purchased meatless spaghetti sauce
•   Grated Parmesan cheese
•   Hot cooked pasta (optional)

Directions

1. In a 3-1/2- to 6-quart slow cooker, combine cabbage wedges, onion, and mushrooms. Sprinkle tapioca over vegetables. Place chicken pieces on vegetables. Pour spaghetti sauce over chicken.
 

2. Cover and cook on low-heat setting for 6 to 7 hours or on high-heat setting for 3 to 3-1/2 hours. Transfer to a serving platter. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. If desired, serve with hot cooked pasta. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

 

Nutrition Facts

• Calories 300,
• Total Fat (g) 9,
• Saturated Fat (g) 3,
• Cholesterol (mg) 94,
• Sodium (mg) 662,
• Carbohydrate (g) 24,
• Fiber (g) 4,
• Protein (g) 35,
• Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet

Source: Better Homes

 

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com

Dutch Pumpkin Bars

 

By This Little Piggy
Oct. 23, 2009

A yummy alternative to pumpkin pie, and you can jazz it up with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream if you wish. An ideal finale for a festiv

 

Servings:         18

Prep time:       15 minutes

Cook time:      1 hour

Total time:       1 hour, 15 minutes

 

Ingredients:

1 pkg. yellow cake mix
3/4 c. butter
4 eggs
1 15 oz. can of pumpkin
1/4 c. sweetened condensed milk
1 c. brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon

 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease bottom only of 9″ x 13” baking dish.

Measure out 1 cup of yellow cake mix and set aside in a small bowl.

Melt 1/2 c. of butter in the microwave, then mix with the remaining cake mix and 1 egg. Pour into bottom of greased baking dish and spread evenly in a thin layer.

Mix the pumpkin, 3 eggs, sweetened evaporated milk, 1/2 c. of brown sugar and cinnamon. Pour into baking dish on top of the yellow cake layer and spread evenly.

Mix the remaining 1 c. cake mix with 1/2 c. brown sugar and 1/4 c. softened butter to create pea-sized streusel crumbs. Scatter streusel crumbs over the pumpkin layer.

Bake for 1 hour. When cool, cut into squares.

Garnish with whipped cream or ice cream.

 

Source: Mixing Bowl

 

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com

Patient of the Week – Brookelynn Hunt

By St. Jude
October 24, 2009

Brookelynn Hunt

2 years old

Diagnosis:

Brookelynn was found to suffer from atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor (ATRT) in August 2007.

Brookelynn’s Story:

For a week, 13-month-old Brookelynn was off balance and sick to her stomach. Her parents, Christy and Richard, took her to the pediatrician, who said Brookelynn had an ear infection. But two days later, when Richard noticed little Brookelynn’s hand shaking, he felt something more was afflicting his daughter. He was in the process of driving her to the hospital when Brookelynn’s hand shaking turned into something much more serious: a seizure, which caused her to lose movement on her left side.

At the hospital, an MRI revealed a tumor on the right side of Brookelynn’s head. Doctors suspected ATRT. Brookelynn was immediately flown to a local children’s hospital, where surgeons removed 100 percent of the tumor. But doctors wanted to wait six weeks before starting treatment. Christy and Richard were ill at ease with the doctors recommendation, and started searching for alternative options. Their search led them to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

St. Jude staff advised Brookelynn’s family not to wait six weeks, as ATRT is a fast-growing cancer. St. Jude, they said, could see her immediately. “We left that night,” Christy said. “We literally packed up and left right then.”

At St. Jude:

Brookelynn underwent four months of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation. She regained strength and movement on her left side. After she returned home, Brookelynn received oral chemotherapy. She visits St. Jude every six months for checkups.

“St. Jude is such a wonderful place,” Christy said. The family especially appreciated the housing provided to St. Jude families. “We stayed at the Target House for almost seven months,” she said. “It meant a lot. There was so much we didn’t have to worry about – the meals, Brookelynn’s care. It took a lot of stress off of us.”

Christy and Richard are most thankful for what St. Jude has given them—their daughter. “She’s still here with us,” Christy said. “She’s doing really well.” Brookelynn, who became a big sister over the summer, is a sweet little girl who loves animals and her baby dolls.

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@goldcoastchronicle.com

Source St. Jude

Teen Charged with Elizabeth Olten Murder

by AP
Oct. 23, 2009

ST. MARTINS, Mo. — Authorities have charged a 15-year-old with first-degree murder for the death of 9-year-old girl in central Missouri.

Cole County Juvenile Court Administrator Michael County said Saturday that the 15-year-old is being detained for the death of Elizabeth Olten.

Police did not release the teen’s gender or name.

Elizabeth’s body was found Friday — two days after she vanished — after the suspect led police to a wooded area near her home west of Jefferson City.

Cole County Sheriff Greg White said Saturday that the girl was found in an area that had previously been searched but she had been “very well concealed.”

White said Elizabeth was acquainted with the suspect but declined to elaborate.

Source: Fox News

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com

School Kids Praise Obama in New Video?

Soldier of the Week – Army Pfc. David Hutchinson

By David Hogberg
Investor’s Business Daily
October 23, 2009

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@goldcoastchronicle.com

Army Pfc. David Hutchinson landed in Afghanistan on May 16, 2008.

It would be a short deployment.

On his fifth day a grenade wounded him — but not before he killed five terrorists and helped secure the safety of 16 fellow soldiers.

A year later he received the Silver Star for bravery. The Pentagon says he’s just the fifth Army reservist so honored.

Hutchinson was born in 1987 in Humble, Texas. He joined the Army Reserve when he was 18, joining his family’s long line in uniform.

“There was a strong sense of patriotism in the family,” Hutchinson told IBD. “That was instilled in me from the get-go.”

His grandfather, uncle and a few cousins all joined the military, mostly in the Air Force.

Hutchinson had a simple reason for not going that route: “I’m not a big fan of flying.”

Hutchinson is with the 420th Engineer Brigade. Not that he does much engineering. He mostly trains for brigade security. This involves providing safe transport for VIPs.

On the morning of May 21, 2008, members of the brigade’s security detail were in a convoy of four Humvees driving through the mountains of Afghanistan.

Riding Shotgun

Hutchinson was in the third Humvee manning the MK-19, a machine gun that fires 40 mm grenades. “We wanted to know what it was like on that route before we had to drive it with somebody important,” he said.

The ambush came at 11 a.m. as the convoy moved up a small mountain.

“Just about the time that all four trucks got into the pass, the front truck opened up with its 50-caliber machine gun,” Hutchinson said. “At that point I couldn’t see anything, I could just hear the shooting at the front. I immediately started looking around, and two or three seconds later I saw several insurgents pop up on the right side of the convoy, which was my sector of fire.”

Roughly 20 of the enemy attacked the convoy with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-fired grenades. From 200 feet away terrorist snipers tried to riddle the convoy.

Hutchinson was in the Humvee’s turret and opened up with his MK-19. Despite the crash of battle, he aimed methodically. “There were several positions I could see fire coming from, so it was a matter of assessing which position had the most fire coming from it,” he said.

A machine gun nest at the top of a hill, from which the terrorists were firing a Russian-made PKM, gave the enemy fire superiority. Other terrorists were popping up from the nest, firing AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.

“To me, it was very obvious that one position had the most amount of fire coming from it, so I focused my firepower on that spot,” said Hutchinson. “Once that was destroyed, I started assessing other spots that had fire coming from them, and I adjusted and fired at those positions.”

By all accounts his MK-19 shots were the main reason the Americans held the terrorists’ ambush at bay, letting the convoy move out of the line of fire. He was so effective, the enemy turned its focus on him.

The terrorist barrage hit him hard, with Hutchinson’s fellow soldiers later counting 100 bullet marks in the turret.

Hutchinson answered with his own onslaught for a few minutes. He emptied an entire can of ammunition before two grenades struck his Humvee. The force of the blast knocked him out of the turret and into the crew compartment. Shrapnel had gashed his right leg.

“When I landed down in the truck, I couldn’t feel my legs,” he recalled. “Actually, I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. At that point, I couldn’t get back in the turret.”

Hutchinson had landed in the lap of 1st Sgt. David Gusberry, who was in the rear passenger seat. As the private rolled over, he saw that Gusberry was seriously injured.

“His entire face was covered in blood, his armor was covered in blood,” Hutchinson said. “Since I couldn’t get back up into the turret, obviously the next best thing I could do was treat his wounds and try to control the bleeding as best I could.”

Gusberry, who was scanning for the enemy and improvised explosive devices that day, recalls Hutchinson’s cool.

“He never panicked. He did his job, then worked on my injuries,” said Gusberry. “He stayed by me to make sure I didn’t go into shock.”

As the attack subsided, the convoy moved out of the mountain pass and met up with a medical helicopter. Hutchinson refused treatment, insisting that the medics tend only to Gusberry. As injured soldiers must be secured on a stretcher before getting on a helicopter, Hutchinson’s decision shortened the time the chopper spent on the ground.

Hutchinson credits his training, which he received at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, from a couple of sergeants first class, Jimmy Snell and Robert Parsons.

“They told us at the beginning that the training would be long and hard, 14 to 16 hour days,” Hutchinson said. “But if we stuck it out, we’d be part of the security detail.”

The training involved practicing ambush scenarios in which Hutchinson and his fellow soldiers were outnumbered six-to-one.

“That taught us to not freak out, that there was always a way to get out of those situations,” he said. “That hard and very realistic training they put us through contributed to everyone coming out of the situation (in Afghanistan) alive.”

Gusberry says training really took with Hutchinson. Why? “His can-do attitude,” said the first sergeant.

Since returning from Afghanistan, Hutchinson, 22, has been promoted to specialist along with landing more medals: a Purple Heart, an Army Achievement Medal and an Army Good Conduct Medal.

He also is recovering from his wounds. For that he thanks the medics on the ground, plus the doctors, nurses and physical therapists at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. “They are all top-notch,” Hutchinson said. “It’s very obvious they know what they are doing.”

Step By Step

“I can walk for longer distances without a cane,” he said. “I’m also getting back the ability to jog, and May was the first month I had gotten back on a bicycle in over a year.”

Gusberry is also making his way back, although he suffers from partial blindness and will be medically discharged from the Army in a few months. “It could have been a lot worse,” he said.

As Hutchinson heals between Reserve jobs, he works as a retail sales consultant for AT&T . He could be called back to Afghanistan as soon as he’s made a full recovery. He sounds ready to help: “One of the things I noticed while I was there were the people building their own freeways. A lot of the roads are just dirt and hard rock. It was actually inspiring to see these asphalt roads being built, making travel between various cities that much faster.”

Source: Investors

Wash Your Hands

By CDC
Oct. 22, 2009

Handwashing is a simple thing and it’s the best way to prevent infection and illness.

Clean hands prevent infections. Keeping hands clean prevents illness at home, at school, and at work. Hand hygiene practices are key prevention tools in healthcare settings, in daycare facilities, in schools and public institutions, and for the safety of our food.

In healthcare settings, handwashing can prevent potentially fatal infections from spreading from patient to patient and from patient to healthcare worker and vice-versa. The basic rule in the hospital is to cleanse hands before and after each patient contact by either washing hands or using an alcohol-based hand rub.

At home, handwashing can prevent infection and illness from spreading from family member to family member and, sometimes, throughout a community. In the home, the basic rule is to wash hands before preparing food and after handling uncooked meat and poultry, before eating, after changing diapers, after coughing, sneezing, or blowing one’s nose into a tissue, and after using the bathroom.

Wash Your Hands: The Right Way

When washing hands with soap and water:

• Wet your hands with clean running water and apply soap. Use warm water if it is available.
• Rub hands together to make a lather and scrub all surfaces.
• Continue rubbing hands for 15-20 seconds. Need a timer? Imagine singing “Happy Birthday” twice through to a friend.
• Rinse hands well under running water.
• Dry your hands using a paper towel or air dryer. If possible, use your paper towel to turn off the faucet.
• Always use soap and water if your hands are visibly dirty.

If soap and clean water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand rub to clean your hands. Alcohol-based hand rubs significantly reduce the number of germs on skin and are fast-acting.

When using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer:

• Apply product to the palm of one hand.
• Rub hands together.
• Rub the product over all surfaces of hands and fingers until hands are dry.

Handwashing: The Beginning of Infection Control

 

Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian-Hungarian physician, first demonstrated over 150 years ago that hand hygiene can prevent the spread of disease. Hand hygiene as a practice includes performing handwashing, or using antiseptic handwash, alcohol-based hand rub, or surgical hand hygiene/antisepsis.

Dr. Semmelweis worked in a hospital in Vienna whose maternity patients were dying at such an alarming rate that they begged to be sent home¹. Most of those dying had been treated by student physicians who worked on corpses during an anatomy class before beginning their rounds in the maternity ward.

Because the students did not wash their hands effectively between touching the dead and the living–handwashing was an unrecognized hygienic practice at the time–pathogenic bacteria from the  corpses regularly were transmitted to the mothers via the students’ hands.

The result was a death rate five times higher for mothers who delivered in one clinic of the hospital than for mothers who delivered at another clinic not attended by the student physicians.

In an experiment considered quaint at best by his colleagues, Dr. Semmelweis insisted that his students wash their hands before treating the mothers–and deaths on the maternity ward fell fivefold.

Unquestioned today as the most important tool in the healthcare worker’s arsenal for preventing infection, handwashing was not readily accepted in Dr. Semmelweis’s era. Indeed, his pleas to make handwashing a routine practice throughout the hospital were largely met with derision. Another 50 years would pass before the importance of handwashing as a preventive measure would be widely accepted by the medical profession. Sanitation is now a standard and thousands of lives have been saved because of Dr. Semmelweis’s discovery.

 Semmelweis I. Etiology, concept, and prophylaxis of childbed fever. Carter KC, ed. 1st ed. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

 

Source: CDC.Gov

 

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com

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