Friday, April 8, 2011

Health - The New Old Age: Time for My Mother to Move

Health - The New Old Age: Time for My Mother to Move

The New Old Age: Time for My Mother to Move

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 05:25 AM PDT

Studied: Older Parents Find More Joy in Their Bundles

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 11:30 AM PDT

THE GIST Older parents are happier than younger parents.

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THE SOURCE “A Global Perspective on Happiness and Fertility” by Rachel Margolis and Mikko Myrskyla, published in Population and Development Review, March 2011.

IN the ongoing debate over whether children bring joy or whether they make parents more miserable, the gloom contingent appears to be gaining, with a recent New York magazine cover story (“Why Parents Hate Parenting”) escalating into a collective Internet-aired “Yes!” and culminating in a book deal for its author.

But not all parents are made wretched by their offspring. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, and the University of Pennsylvania found that people over the age of 40 are happier with children than without.

To arrive at this conclusion, the demographers Mikko Myrskyla and Rachel Margolis crunched data from the World Values Surveys, looking at self-reported levels of happiness among more than 200,000 respondents from 86 countries.

They studied how individual factors such as age, sex, income and health status affected happiness as well as how the respondents’ institutional and cultural context came into play — whether they lived in countries with a social democratic, conservative or developing regime. This led to some interesting off-shoot conclusions like this one: people in former socialist countries show a strong positive relationship between happiness and child-raising, with parents of three in those countries happiest of all.

But the most striking findings revolved around parenthood and age. Whether it is a function of exhaustion, bickering over diapers or something inherently unpleasant about raising little children, the data doesn’t say, but parents under 30 are decidedly less happy than their child-free peers. Then, once parents hit 40, the relationship reverses and people with children are cheerier than those without.

The more, the merrier, too — at least for older parents. For people under 30, happiness declines with each additional child. Young parents of two are unhappier than young parents with one, and young parents of one child are unhappier than young people with no children. But with parents between the ages of 40 and 50, the number of children has no impact. And after 50, each child brings more joy.

According to Dr. Myrskyla, parents in poorer health are made disproportionately happier by additional children. “This supports the idea that older people who are in need of kin support benefit from having children,” he said. More children can argue with one another over who cares for their elderly parents. And parents can hope that at least one of them will push the wheelchair and help pay bills.

The data did not take into account the age of the children involved, leaving it unclear whether people are happier having children later in life or whether they’re happier once their children are older and not quite so demanding. Either way, at least in the United States, with rampant adultescence and the steady rise of college tuition, older parents may be increasingly beleaguered, too.

World Briefing | ASIA: India: ‘Superbug’ Gene Found in Environment

Posted: 07 Apr 2011 10:00 PM PDT

Bacteria containing an antibiotic-resistant “superbug” gene have been found in 2 of 51 tap water samples in New Delhi and in dozens of puddles and pools that children could play in, according to a report published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases. A team from Cardiff University in Britain found the gene, NDM-1, in 11 different types of bacteria, including those that cause cholera and dysentery. Bacteria with NDM-1 have caused fatal infections in people hospitalized in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and in a few foreigners who visited those countries for surgery, but this is the first time they have been found in the environment. Their presence in water has not caused any known outbreaks of untreatable disease, but experts fear it could, especially in the rainy season.

Vital Signs: Hazards: For Children in E.R., a Big Increase in CT Scans

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 01:15 AM PDT

The number of computed tomography scans performed on children visiting hospital emergency rooms has increased fivefold in recent years, to 1.65 million in 2008 from 330,000 in 1995, a new study has found.

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The analysis, published online on Tuesday in the journal Radiology, found that CT scans were performed in almost 6 percent of all children’s emergency department visits in 2008, compared with about 1 percent in 1995. Scans were most commonly done on children arriving with head injuries, headaches or abdominal pain.

The sharp increase in the use of CT scans did not surprise the authors of the report, who said advances in the technology had resulted in improved image quality that can greatly aid diagnosis of childhood ailments. But the scans expose patients to high levels of ionizing radiation that can cause cancer in later years, and radiation is even more harmful for children than for adults.

“We don’t want to scare people into not giving the examination when it should be done — the risk really is low,” said Dr. David B. Larson, the lead author of the study, who is director for quality improvement in the department of radiology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “But we should be judicious. If we don’t need to give the exam, then we shouldn’t.”

It May Be a ‘Budget Battle,’ but Some Skirmishes Have Little to Do With Money

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 07:43 AM PDT

WASHINGTON — There are fights about money and fights about ideas, and the battle over a spending plan to keep the government open is increasingly centered on the latter.

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Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Planned Parenthood supporters held a rally on the National Mall on Thursday to protest proposed federal aid cuts.

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New York Times reporters and editors discuss the impasse over the federal budget while the specter of another government shutdown looms over the negotiations.

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The frenetic negotiations to avert a government shutdown seem largely focused not on dollars and cents, where the two sides are not all that far apart, but on policy issues, primarily abortion and environmental regulations, that defy easy compromise.

“We’ve been close on the cuts for days,” Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said Thursday, adding, “The only things — I repeat, the only things — holding up an agreement are two of their so-called social issues: women’s health and clean air.”

Speaker John A. Boehner begged to differ, saying that Democrats and Republicans were far apart in every way. After a meeting on Thursday at the White House, Mr. Boehner said, “When I see what the White House has to offer today, it’s really just more of the same.”

As both sides waged war in the Senate and House, and via news releases and Twitter feeds, hundreds of supporters of Planned Parenthood rallied in the capital to oppose cuts to their programs, which have become a focal point of Republican policy riders.

Policy provisions tend to worm their way into any spending bill; indeed, some of the provisions Republicans are seeking to undo became law through spending measures passed by Democrats a few years ago.

But the debate over these measures is different in a few significant ways. The House Republican proposals are numerous and sweeping, and would essentially rewrite broad areas of policy. And they are attached to a document that is meant not simply to pay for government services, but avoid a shutdown, which raises the stakes of the debate considerably.

Further, it is a difficult proposition to come to an accord over social issues that have been publicly debated for decades in a divided government with each side under pressure from its ideological wing.

On Thursday, Republicans passed a one-week spending bill — one almost surely destined to fail in the Senate — that featured one of the key provisions they are seeking.

The measure would reinstate a policy, scotched a few years ago by Democrats, that prevented the District of Columbia from using locally generated taxes to provide financial help to poor women for abortions. (The use of federal funds for abortion is already prohibited.) Because this law was on the books for years — passed by Democrats as a rider to unrelated bills — it has perhaps the best chance of surviving in any spending compromise.

Republicans also seek to prohibit payments for abortion providers overseas — a measure known as the “Mexico City” policy that was overturned by an executive order from Mr. Obama. Another rider seeks to end the United States’ contribution to the United Nations Population Fund, which focuses on reproductive health.

Finally, rather than cut all federal funds for Planned Parenthood, House Republicans would like to take the money given to it and other family planning organizations and give it to state health departments to spread at their discretion.

Presumably, states controlled by Republican legislatures would choose not to give that money to Planned Parenthood. This rider has become a major sticking point, as it is a priority for House Republicans and inflames Democrats.

“I am really stunned, and I am angry as a woman,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, “that we have come to this after weeks of negotiating on numbers, where we have in principle an agreement on numbers, that there are those in the Republican Party in the House who are willing to shut down the government, take people’s paychecks away from them, because they want to deny women access to health care in this country.”

Republicans are also seeking to undo years of environmental regulations, greatly restricting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. House Republicans are broadly seeking to match a Senate bill offered by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader — one that failed in that chamber — to prohibit new greenhouse gas regulations and suspend others.

While Democrats have criticized the Republicans for attaching the social policy riders to the short-term spending bill, it is hardly an unprecedented practice. In 2009, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the same sort of spending bill, known as a continuing resolution, which was signed into law by Mr. Obama with a host of amendments designed to set policy.

That bill eliminated the so-called D.C. Opportunity Scholarships program, a voucher program for public school students here. The program is beloved by Mr. Boehner, who sponsored a bill this year to revive it.

That bill also provided money to support repeal of Mexico City abortion policy that Republicans now seek to reinstate, created a mechanism for the government to provide federal health benefits for same-sex partners of federal employees and eased restrictions on American travel to Cuba.

“President Obama and Democratic leaders were for these types of policy restrictions before they were against them,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner. “Simply put, they have supported hundreds, if not thousands, of them during their time in Washington.”

Democrats counter that they did not use such riders as a sword over the heads of Republicans during talks to keep the government from shutting down.

Well: Scrumptious Desserts (Hold the Guilt)

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 11:38 AM PDT
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