The report presents a mixed picture. Over the past 25 years, there have been notable improvements in child well-being in the group of countries examined in this report: steady decline in child mortality, overall reduction in adolescent suicide and increase in school completion rates. But the last five years have …
an eight - year - old British boy spoke his first words after swimming with dolphins, reported British newspapers. Nikki Brice, starved of oxygen at birth, had been left unable to speak although he had the physical ability. But after a few days at the Human Dolphin Therapy Centre in …
each year, between March and June, the Grim Reaper celebrates. It is around this time every year that the nation witnesses a sharp rise in the number of suicides among the school-going children. The capital's police, for instance, refer to this period as the "suicide season'
the number of hiv positive cases in India is currently estimated at three million, says a study. The risk of vertical transmission of aids to new born children has also greatly increased, says the report which was recently presented at meeting between representatives of the government and the United Nations …
there are around 50 million children not attending primary school in South Asia. And of those who do go to school, 60 million drop out each year. Welcome to South Asia: the most illiterate region of the world. Excluding Sri Lanka and Maldives, the rest of the region stands nowhere …
a controversial study suggesting that autism is a rare side effect of immunisation against measles, mumps and rubella has led to frantic calls for extended research into the safety of multi-component vaccines. These immunise children against several diseases with a single shot. A team led by Andrew Wakefield of the …
UK's child haemophiliacs are to be given genetically-engineered clotting agents to remove any risk of their contracting Creutzfeltd-Jacob disease (CJD), a government spokesperson announced recently. A number of Britons could be incubating the new variant of CJD linked to meat from mad cow disease-infected cattle. Haemophiliacs, who receive clotting factors …
Studies in Kathmandu reveal that infants and children are much more vulnerable to vehicular exhaust. Lead in the auto emission can cause severe behavioural changes, affect the child's capacity of body movements and other less noticeable illness. In severe cases, there can be a total brain disorder and even kidney …
long before the 83rd Constitutional Amendment Act-1997, making primary education a fundamental right, was tabled in the Indian Parliament, the state of Madhya Pradesh had embarked on an innovative scheme called Education Guarantee Scheme ( egs ) in January 1997. This guarantees education to citizens on demand, and also aims …
soft pvc toys for infants release unacceptable quantities of hazardous substances, says a Scientific Committee of the European Union (eu) in Brussels. The Committee states that exposure of babies to the three softeners added to pvc toys - the phthalates dinp , dehp and dnop - can be hazardous. Doses …
There is something seriously wrong with the mindset of India's bureaucrats. The Centre for Science and Environment had made a complaint to the Election Commis-sion that the manner in which the Bhartiya Janata Party (bjp) government in Delhi had given in to the Congress (i) antics on the phasing out …
studies have shown that the problem of obsessive compulsive disorders ( ocds) in most people starts in childhood. Patients suffering from the disease develop odd behaviours such as checking things again and again, showing jerky movements after a brief illness or head injury, or spinning around a set number of …
The absence of a mother's touch can severely affect the development of an infant's brain. Mary Carlson, psychologist and neuroscientist at the Havard Medical School, USA, says that the lack of physical touch increases levels of a critical stress hormone in a child's brain, making a baby ill-natured. This may …
Leaded gasoline causes about 90 per cent of airborne lead pollution in cities, the rest of which comes from factories, power plants, lead pipes, lead-based solder and paint. In the developing countries, about 15 million children may be suffering from permanent brain damage due to lead poisoning. About 80 per …
A watchful eyeParents would soon be able to use the Internet to keep an eye on their children at nursery school. A new system called Kindercam can send a colour video image twice a second from a video camera in the nursery school to the Kindercam web site, where parents …
Children absorb more information by watching TV than by reading, says a study done by Juliette Walma van der Molen and Tom van der Voort of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Five news stories were distributed among 152 children aged 10-12 years. Half the children received information from the original …
Poverty, especially in rural areas, and illiteracy go hand in hand. The majority of the world's poor, about 1 billion of the world's 5.7 billion people, live in rural areas. Of those, 500 million are children. About 40,000 people die every day from hunger-related causes, most in rural areas. About …
asthma is a chronic and debilitating disease, causing the inflammation of airways, making them contract suddenly and violently. Asthmatics, therefore, get attacks of shortness of breath and wheezing that can sometimes be life threatening. In a potentially lethal overreaction of the immune system, things as harmless as dust, mites or …
Chewing gum contains the natural sweetener xylitol, which can help reduce chronic ear infections, say researchers from the University of Oulu, Finland. About 300 pre-school children were given chewing gum, half containing xylitol and the rest plain gum. The incidence of ear infections fell by 50 per cent in those …
According to a recent report, about 25,000 workers in the bidi, zarda and gul factories in the northern part of Bangladesh are suffering from several diseases including tuberculosis and ulcers. The cause of these maladies is attributable to unhygienic conditions prevailing in factories
for all parents in the us who suspect that their children are using drugs, a government-approved kit will soon be at their disposal. The kit called "Dr Brown's Home Drug Testing System" has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (fda) for use. The nod came four months …