You know what’s scary about getting what you want? There are always unintended consequences. For example, pediatricians constantly urge families to go outdoors. Now, according to this week’s New York Times, some combination of Daylight Savings Time and global warming seems to be driving families outside to play badminton, ride bikes, and run down to the beach to figure out how many years we have until people can buy oceanfront property in Kansas. The result? Ratings are falling for my favorite TV shows! Stop the madness now, people, or all I’ll have to do on Wednesday nights is catch fireflies with my children. Do the folks behind Screen Free Week really not care about Phil, Claire, and all those lightning bugs?
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The TV is asking, "What about me?" Kids and their parents are spending more time outdoors, causing damage to prime time ratings.
When it comes to kids’ activity levels, a new Canadian study suggests we still have a ways to go just to get to where we think we already are. When investigators had children wear accelerometers to measure their activity for days at a time, it turned out the kids were about 60% as active as their parents estimated. That means my own kids actually only exercise for 5.23 minutes a day as opposed to the 8.7 minutes I thought. The study did confirm that children were sleeping about as long as parents thought they were, rather than getting up in the middle of the night to, say, do jumping jacks.
Of course we can’t celebrate Screen Free Week until we finish with National Immunization Week/World Immunization Week. Just in time for the festivities the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention released an analysis of measles cases in the United States for 2011, now at a 15-year high! We saw 222 confirmed cases last year, the vast majority in unvaccinated patients. Only around a third of patients were hospitalized, and no one died, so for measles it was a pretty good year. We had to import all of our measles, mostly from Europe, where low vaccination rates have led to a glut of the virus, undercutting prices and flooding the domestic market with cheap infections. Fortunately, anti-vaccine forces in the States are working to create a competitive home-grown contagion that most casual sufferers won’t be able to distinguish from the imports.
One way to ensure we have plenty of infectious disease in the United States would be to continue to leave millions of children uninsured, at least based on the findings of the National Immunization Survey 2009. In addition to learning that uninsured children were less likely to be vaccinated against rotavirus, investigators also found that children whose parents hadn't graduated college and children from poorer families were less likely to have received rotavirus vaccine. Additional analysis demonstrated that the sky is, under certain conditions, blue.
Health policy experts responded to these results, suggesting either universal health coverage for U.S. children or sending all parents to college and securing them high-paying jobs before their children turn five. I'm for whatever solves the problem, so long as it doesn't lead to the cancellation of any sitcoms.