Education news

Smart Phones, App Track Student Illnesses

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<b><span style="color: #783f04;">One elementary school has partnered with a San Francisco-based startup in the creation of a smartphone application that they hope will prevent the spread of illnesses.eastridge Community Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado was selected earlier this year to participate in the FLUency program, which makes use of a mobile application to offer parents and school officials the ability to keep track of each students’ health using smartphone-enabled thermometers.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #783f04;">“The program is a way for schools to keep their communities healthier by knowing more about what’s going on around them,” said Nita Nehru, marketing and community manager for Kinsa, the startup spearheading the program. “We have so much access to knowledge around us with Google Maps and Waze and Foursquare, but we have very little information about when and where symptoms and illnesses are starting.”</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #783f04;">Additional symptoms such as runny noses or other pains can be uploaded manually, reports Nelson Garcia for 9News.nehru said the app allows parents to discover a flu going around the school before an entire group of children is infected, writes Quincy Snowdon for The Aurora Sentinel.there are currently about 40 schools across the country participating in the program.  So far, over 1,000 schools have applied to take part.  Eastridge was chosen after Brandon Loy, the school nurse, showed interest.loy said the program has been working well so far in the school, but because it has only been two weeks, not enough time has passed to tell if it is having any effect on students’ overall health.  She said that she hopes more families will join in.  As of November 21, there were 127 Eastridge users of the app.  Nehru said in all, the app has a little over 4,000 users.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #783f04;">The app is in its first full school year of use, but saw a high level of success in its pilot program last winter in which 18 schools participated.  Nehru added that all of the pilot schools had less children missing school due to illnesses while the app was being used from January to March.  While she said it is difficult to say that was completely because of the app, she did note that a correlation could be seen.nehru went on to say that one of the important goals of the app was to increase student attendance because schools lose money each time a student is absent.  According to data from the state Department of Education, the cost per absence in the state amounts to $32 per student.  That number is derived from a per-pupil funding formula combined with the number of days per year that children are in the classroom.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #783f04;">Although it remains to be seen how the app will influence attendance at Eastridge, </span></b></div>
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Smart Phones, App Track Student Illnesses

One elementary school has partnered with a San Francisco-based startup in the creation of a smartphone application that they hope will...

Three Illinois Schools Close Due to Legionella Bacteria

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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">School officials in Elgin, Illinois have reported the evacuation of 2,900 students from three schools in the area after high concentrations of Legionella bacteria were found in the cooling towers for the facilities.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Higher than normal” levels of the bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease were found at Larkin High School in Elgin, Eastview Middle School in Bartlett and the administration building of Elgin School District U46, causing the closure of all three buildings.  Students were relocated until parents were either able to pick them up or the district was able to bring them home.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“While risk of exposure to the bacteria was low, we decided, in consultation with the Kane County Health Department, to evacuate staff and students to safe locations as a precaution,” the school district said.while students in classrooms heard a public address announcement asking everyone to leave the building, students who were eating lunch said they did not hear anything official concerning the school’s closure.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“All of a sudden somebody said, ‘Let’s go,’” said sophomore Jonathon Davis of Elgin. “We said, ‘Who’s fighting now?’ We didn’t know what was going on. They said to go out in single file but everybody ran out. In five minutes the school was empty.”</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Other students who had been in the lunchroom at Larkin said they thought it was either a fire drill or live-shooter drill.  It was not until they went outside that a Facebook announcement from school district CEO Tony Sanders explained the evacuation, writes Dave Gathman for The Chicago Tribune.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some parents also reported that they had not heard of the evacuation and they were merely showing up at school to drop something off to their child.sanders said he made the decision close to 10:30 am on Wednesday after reading the annual report concerning the air quality testing of the school cooling towers, which described “higher than normal” levels of Legionella bacteria.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He added that Educational Services Center staff had been asked to report to either Bartlett High or Elgin High to help students there.  Because the central office was closed, key district leaders would be moved to district’s plant operations building where a news conference was held this afternoon.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A decision has not been made yet concerning whether or not the schools will remain closed.  In the meantime, all 19 towers are being thoroughly cleaned and sanitized.the state is currently dealing with an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia, which has already resulted in the deaths of 13 people.</span></i></div>
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Three Illinois Schools Close Due to Legionella Bacteria

School officials in Elgin, Illinois have reported the evacuation of 2,900 students from three schools in the area after high concentratio...

Data Shows US Kids Inadequately Hydrated

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Data shows that a broad cross-section of  kids ages 6 to 19 are not drinking any water as part of their daily fluid intake. In fact, a majority of children and teens are not drinking enough fluids in general and are walking around in a mildly dehydrated state, says a new study.</div>
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Postdoctoral researcher Erica Kenney at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and her colleagues retrieved information about children’s consumption of water from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHNES) and published their findings last week in the American Journal of Public Health, writes Richard Harris for NPR.</div>
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At first, the Harvard study was based on the consumption of sugary drinks in schools and the ways in which kids could be steered to drinking water instead. After the study began, they found that children were not drinking much fluid at all and they wondered if that was creating problems.</div>
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The NHNES includes testing of urine that revealed whether the participants are hydrated. The report showed that more than half of the thousands of students studied between 2009 and 2012 were somewhat dehydrated.</div>
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“This doesn’t mean we’re saying kids are dropping like flies or that they’re very seriously dehydrated and need to go to the hospital or anything like that,” Kenney says. “But even mild dehydration can affect children’s fatigue levels, mood and possibly their ability to learn,” she says.</div>
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Kenny was concerned when the study showed many children drink no water at all and those who did drink water were not drinking very much of it. The Institute of Medicine says children and teenagers should be drinking around two to three quarts (48-72 oz.) of water daily, which includes water in food, juicy fruits, and vegetables, based on age, size and sex. Research suggests that adolescent boys normally need to drink more water than girls.</div>
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Some schools have had trouble providing tap water to students because of infrastructure with aging plumbing, along with concerns about lead in the water. Some schools offer bottled water, but it is an expensive solution and the mechanics of serving it are difficult.</div>
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“There’s a lot of research out there to suggest that even mild levels of dehydration are enough to impact cognitive functioning and mood in kids,” Kenney says.</div>
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Long-term and severe dehydration can result in serious health problems with circulation, metabolism, temperature regulation, and waste removal, but even mild levels of dehydration can lead to headaches, dry mouth, dizziness, irritability, increased heart rate, and poorer physical performance, writes Ashley Welch of CBS News.</div>
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Senior author Steven Gortmaker, a professor of the practice of health sociology, says the solution to this public health problem is simple: focus on helping children drink more water.</div>
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Robert Preidt, reporting for HealthDay, quotes an expert in in child health on the importance of hydration:</div>
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“Children can be more susceptible to dehydration than adults,” said Nancy Copperman, who directs public health initiatives at North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, N.Y.</div>
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That, “coupled with an already impaired hydration status, can have physiological problems such as [neurological] issues, increased demands on their kidneys and heat stroke,” she explained.</div>
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It could be that children do not ingest enough water while they are at school because they prefer not to use the bathrooms at school, possibly because of lack of privacy, embarrassment, or even bullying.</div>
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Copperman also suggested that water sent to school in students’ lunch boxes should be frozen so that is is cold when lunchtime rolls around. She adds that thirst is not a good indicator of the need for water, so parents should make sure kids have access to water throughout the day.</div>
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Also, water infused with fruit, cucumbers, or mint makes water more appealing to children.</div>
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Data Shows US Kids Inadequately Hydrated

Data shows that a broad cross-section of kids ages 6 to 19 are not drinking any water as part of their daily fluid intake. In fact, a ma...

Researchers Find Racial Bias in Treatment of Kids with Appendicitis

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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Researchers using a national survey data base from 2003 to 2010 found that black children with acute appendicitis, an extremely painful condition, were less likely than white children to get painkillers in the emergency room. And only about half of children of any race got painkillers even though it is common protocol to administer painkillers in cases of appendicitis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“Black patients with moderate pain were less likely to receive any analgesia, and black patients with severe pain were less likely to be treated with opioids,” Dr. Monika Goyal of the Children’s National Health System in Washington and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Pediatrics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Why does this happen? It may be a combination of unwarranted fear of opioids and an unconscious bias against African-American kids, according to experts. Researchers believed that a study focused on appendicitis cases in general would be helpful, because medical experts broadly agree that the condition merits pain relief measures.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Of the kids in emergency rooms for appendicitis, only 57% received anything for their pain, and only 41% were given an opioid drug. Only 12% of black children were given an opioid for pain relief. Goyal wrote that the findings suggest that there are racial disparities in the administration of opioids to children with appendicitis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Furthermore, the findings suggest that clinicians are reacting to the pain of patients differently if they are black. And though clinicians recognize the pain equally across racial groups, they more often treat black patients with nonopioid analgesia, but treat white patients with opioid analgesia for the same type and amount of pain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Although in the past, painkillers were thought to mask symptoms important for diagnosing stomach pain, that mindset has evolved. There are also protocols to make sure that children who need to take opioids to control severe pain will not overdose or become dependent on the medication.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Goyal and his team used data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey of almost a million respondents age 21 or younger who were diagnosed with appendicitis in an emergency room, according to Kathryn Doyle of Reuters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“It should also be noted that these data were collected between 2003 and 2010, so some of this information is over a decade old and one might hope that things would be different if the data were collected today,” said Dr. Eric W. Fleegler of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.fleegler’s colleague Dr. Neil Schechter, who coauthored an editorial published with the research, said it should be noted that all patients do not experience pain in the same way, with discomfort depending on the duration of symptoms and degree of inflammation. It is typical, however, to prescribe analgesics for appendicitis , said Fleegler and Schechter.                                     </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“The bottom line with all of this is that pain matters, its treatment should be patient centered and individualized, and every patient should feel reassured that they will be treated equally,” Fleegler and Schechter told Reuters Health by email.they added that hospitals should be using national benchmarks to measure how they are doing compared to others nationwide. If there is more or less opioid use for a given condition, an education program for staff could be helpful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Yasmin Tayag, reporting for Inverse, says that researchers had documented racial disparities related to waiting times, admission rates, and pain management before this study was completed. This, however, is the first time biased practices have been discovered towards children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A study, Racism and the Empathy for Pain on Our Skin, published in 2011 in Frontiers in Psychology found that white people do not feel the same level of empathy for physical pain in black people as they do for people of their own race.</span></div>

Researchers Find Racial Bias in Treatment of Kids with Appendicitis

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