Health

From an article by Nick Watt on abcnews.com:

Despite several high-profile international initiatives, the number of children in the developing world who go hungry has barely fallen in the past 15 years, the children's advocacy group UNICEF said today. More than a quarter of the children in the developing world are still critically undernourished, according to a new report from the group. It also found 146 million children go hungry every day and 5.6 million kids die every year because they are not getting enough to eat - a figure that corresponds to 10 children every minute... Almost half of the world's underweight children live in just three countries - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Apparently, the dire situation in South Asia is not caused by a shortage of food but by food that is low in quality and nutrients. Social issues also contribute to the problem. In many places, women receive little education and don't know how to best feed and care for their kids... UNICEF said that fighting child hunger requires more than food deliveries. The organization continues to promote breast-feeding and emphasizes good nutrition for kids in their first two years of life. The group also calls for more vitamin A capsules and food fortifiers, such as iodine and iron. Apparently, vitamin A capsules already save 350,000 children each year. UNICEF has also launched the "Unite for Children. Unite Against AIDS" campaign to bring care and support for those hit by the epidemic. The World Food Program, another branch of the U.N., has planned a global lottery to raise money to combat child hunger. WFP hopes to raise $500 million a year selling scratch cards at about $1.25 a pop.

From a press release from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center:

A new Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study shows that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, even at extremely low levels, is associated with behavior problems in children and pre-teens. While the study examined 5 to 11 year olds with asthma, the findings most likely could be extrapolated to include children without asthma who "act out" or experience depression and anxiety... Previous studies have found link between tobacco smoke and birth weight, number of infections and other health problems, including asthma exacerbations. In a groundbreaking study in 2002, Dr. Yolton found that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, even at extremely low levels, is associated with decreases in certain cognitive skills, including reading, math, and logic and reasoning, in children and adolescents.

From an AP article on MSNBC.com:

America may be the world's superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia. Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia's rate is 6 per 1,000. "We are the wealthiest country in the world, but there are still pockets of our population who are not getting the health care they need," said Mary Beth Powers, a reproductive health adviser for the U.S.-based Save the Children, which compiled the rankings based on health data from countries and agencies worldwide. The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world... In the analysis of global infant mortality, Japan had the lowest newborn death rate, 1.8 per 1,000 and four countries tied for second place with 2 per 1,000 - the Czech Republic, Finland, Iceland and Norway. Still, it's the impoverished nations that feel the full brunt of infant mortality, since they account for 99 percent of the 4 million annual deaths of babies in their first month. Only about 16,000 of those are in the United States, according to Save the Children. The highest rates globally were in Africa and South Asia. With a newborn death rate of 65 out of 1,000 live births, Liberia ranked the worst.

The Daily Kos asks the provocative question: Do "Christian Nations" Let Their Newborns Die?:

Somehow I sense this issue will not get the traction the overheated fetus debate gets with the fundamentalist crowd. There's just something not quite as alluring about discussing health care provisions for pregnant moms and their offspring compared with telling your neighbor what to do with her womb... So are we to expect Falwell, Robertson and Dobson to froth up the political waters on behalf of single-payer health insurance and longer paid leaves from the workplace? I'm not holding my breath. The well-being of mothers fares poorly as well, according to the report, with the U.S. tied for last place among industrial nations on indicators such as "mortality risks and contraception use." Perhaps it's time for Mullah Dobson to live up to his organization's name and focus on the family - which as he endlessly wants to remind us, means state intervention in the mother-child reproduction wars. It's hard to see the logic in how a soul that's stainless when it's enwombed does not deserve the best resources of a wealthy nation to make sure the physical body that accompanies it into life is healthy.

Right on.

From a press release from the National Sleep Foundation:

In a national survey on the sleep patterns of U.S. adolescents (ages 11-17), NSF's 2006 Sleep in America poll finds that only 20% of adolescents get the recommended nine hours of sleep on school nights, and nearly one-half (45%) sleep less than eight hours on school nights. What's more, the poll finds that parents are mostly in the dark about their adolescents' sleep. While most students know they're not getting the sleep they need, 90% of parents polled believe that their adolescent is getting enough sleep at least a few nights during the school week. The poll indicates that the consequences of insufficient sleep affect nearly every aspect of teenage life. Among the most important findings:

• At least once a week, more than one-quarter (28%) of high school students fall asleep in school, 22% fall asleep doing homework, and 14% arrive late or miss school because they oversleep.
• Adolescents who get insufficient amounts of sleep are more likely than their peers to get lower grades, while 80% of adolescents who get an optimal amount of sleep say they're achieving As and Bs in school.
• More than one-half (51%) of adolescent drivers have driven drowsy during the past year. In fact, 15% of drivers in 10th to 12th grades drive drowsy at least once a week.
• Among those adolescents who report being unhappy, tense and nervous, 73% feel they don't get enough sleep at night and 59% are excessively sleepy during the day.
• More than one-quarter (28%) of adolescents say they're too tired to exercise.

It strikes me as ironic that, at a time when science and faith are apparently in conflict in our culture, science has or is on the verge of duplicating many of Jesus' miracles. About the conflict between faith and science: for example, the battle that's been going on in the courts lately between those who view "Intelligent Design" as an alternative scientific theory to be taught alongside evolution and those who view it as nothing more than pseudoscience or thinly-veiled creationism that might be taught in church but not in school. I really don't think there is actually an inherent conflict there, as I discussed here. However, if faith and modern science aren't inherently in conflict, they're orthogonal to each other. Science relies on observation. "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). I've been thinking about a different kind of conflict. Or maybe it is a way that they are complementary. When questioned about his identity by the followers of John the Baptist, Jesus pointed to his acts of healing as proof of his identity: "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor." (Matt. 11, Luke 7) Recently, I listened to a very interesting segment of NPR's Science Friday. The summary:

Doctors announced this week that they have created a bladder using living cells, the closest they've come yet to making a fully functioning organ. The bladder was tailor-made using the cells of a woman suffering from spina bifida. The researchers say that the replacement organ seems to be well tolerated by the human body, and it did work as a functioning bladder. In this hour, we'll take a look at tissue engineering. How close are scientists to making organs to order, or getting limbs to regrow? Plus, a look at bionics. We'll talk with the inventor of a computer controlled hand for amputees, and hear about the latest in bionic eyes.

William Craelius, a biomedical engineer from Rutgers University, was on the show. From a press release from a few years back:

Bionic limb replacements that look and work exactly like the real thing will likely remain a Hollywood fantasy, but fast advances in human-to-machine communication and miniaturization could bring the technology close within a decade. That is the outlook of Rutgers biomedical engineer and inventor William Craelius, whose Dextra artificial hand is the first to let a person use existing nerve pathways to control individual computer-driven mechanical fingers. Craelius published an overview of bionics entitled "The Bionic Man - Restoring Mobility," in the international journal "Science," ...

Advances in prosthetics have allowed people who have lost one or even both of their legs to walk around freely on their own. In addition to bionic limbs, scientists are also developing the bionic eye...attempting to treat blindness via chips to be implanted in the retina. According to wikipedia, "leprosy is easily curable by multidrug antibiotic therapy." Cochlear implants have restored a form of hearing to people who are profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. From wikipedia:

A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted hearing aid that can help provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear. Unlike other kinds of hearing aids, the cochlear implant doesn't amplify sound, but works by directly stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with electrical impulses. External components of the cochlear implant include a microphone, speech processor and transmitter. An implant does not restore or create normal hearing. Instead, under the appropriate conditions, it can give a deaf person a useful auditory understanding of the environment and help them to understand speech when coupled with post-implantation therapy. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, approximately 100,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants; roughly half are children and half adults. The vast majority are in developed countries due to the prohibitive cost of the device, surgery and post-implantation therapy...

Of course, scientists can't bring people back from the dead on demand, but it's not exactly uncommon for cardiac resuscitation techniques to revive people who are clinically dead. It's interesting how, in a sense, science has been able or is on the verge of being able imitate most of the miracles that Jesus used to confirm his message. It makes me wonder what sort of miracles he would have used if he had been here today. The guests on the Science Friday show emphasized that the main obstacle preventing further advancement is funding as the governemnt funding agencies are having to divert funds elsewhere. I'd much prefer my tax dollars go to research like this than to some of the other ways they've been used lately.