A Very Special Needles
Last week saw the end of the traditional school year here in North Carolina, which for me meant sitting on a metal folding chair. For 3 hours. If people are going to sit on folding chairs that long we either need to redesign the seats or redesign the human posterior. Oh, right, we’re already doing that second one. I don’t want to brag, but my kids racked up some awards, ranking among the dozens who earned “Best Student,” the 150 awardees for “Most Improved,” and scoring the coveted “Best Self-Esteem Award,” given to all the students along with a coupon good for a free small fries with the purchase of any chicken sandwich. I would rather have been at Wellesley High School, where I would have happily endured sitting in a folding chair to hear English teacher David McCullough, Jr. tell the graduates, "You're not special."
If students are not special, they’re at least being safer in many ways according to early data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey. Compared with 1991, today’s teens are smoking less, drinking and driving much less, and watching almost no Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. The one thing they are doing a lot more is texting and driving, but then in 1991 to text and drive you had to hook a fax machine to your suitcase phone. Now one in three high school students admits to texting behind the wheel. The most frequent text message reads, “Dude, I think that guy is driving drunk!” Other popular activities while driving include tweeting (“I’m #drivingsober!”), updating Facebook (“On the road, plan to look up any minute now.”), and searching Wikipedia for arcane subjects (“will smith television”).
Does it make you crazy how conventional wisdom spreads even though no one knows if it’s even right? I never followed that advice about allowing children to serve themselves at meals, mainly because I hate to clean up the table. Finally, a group of nutrition researchers in Pennsylvania decided to see if kids allowed to serve themselves actually eat less than kids whose parents dish out their chow. Their food of choice? Nearly one pound of macaroni and cheese, or as my kids call it, “an appetizer.” It turns out the 3- to 5-year-old test subjects ate just as much when they served themselves as when an adult prepared their plates: roughly half of it. The researchers are now under investigation by nutritional authorities for feeding children pasta and simulated dairy products.
I hate how when you give people free stuff they don’t take care of it. The CDC gives away about 82 million doses of vaccine a year through the Vaccines For Children program, at a cost of $3.6 billion. In return they burden the 44,000 providers who administer these vaccines with all sorts of pesky requirements like keeping track of the vaccines and storing them at the proper temperature so they don’t go bad and some other stupid stuff. Recently the Office of the Inspector General decided to visit grantees’ medical offices, sending inspectors out to practices for 2-week intensive site visits.
Inspectors checked vaccine logs, monitored refrigeration temperatures, and allegedly ate donuts from the staff break room. It turns out that none of the practices were following all of the program requirements, and over 3/4 allowed the vaccines to get too warm for a total of 5 hours over the 2-week period. To top it off, offices that underwent these intensive site visits were no more likely to meet their vaccine management requirements in the future. And, fellow pediatricians, that’s why more people don’t give us nice things! I know how the CDC can punish doctors who don’t take care of their vaccines: make them listen to a 3-hour lecture. While sitting on metal folding chairs.