Miscellaneous

The Impact Of Screen Media On Children: A Eurovision For Parliament

by Dr Aric Sigman
Health Education Lecturer, Fellow of the Society of Biology, Associate Fellow of the British
Psychological Society.

Introduction
The EU discusses many aspects of its citizens’ lives. Yet the main waking activity of Europeans – watching screen media – has never been thought of as an issue requiring parliamentary consideration. Over the course of childhood, children spend more time watching TV than they do in school (Zimmerman et al 2007a). The average seven-year-old will have already watched screen media for more than one full year of 24-hour days. By age 18 the average European young person will have spent a full 4 years of 24-hour days in front of a screen. But screen time is no longer merely a cultural issue about how children spend their leisure time. Screen time has now become a medical issue. Research published in the world’s most reputable medical and scientific journals shows that the sheer amount of time children spend watching TV, DVDs, computers and the internet is linked with significant measurable biological changes in their bodies and brains that may have significant medical consequences.Given that children undergoing key stages of development are spending increasingly large parts of their lives watching screen media, the EU must take a serious interest and establish a view on the matter. The following will provide the reasons why.

Interesting and new and innovative science with plants

A group of 5 girls have carried out a science experiment at Hjallerup School in North Jutland, Denmark that saw garden cress seeds placed in 12 tubs and split into two batches. Both batches were placed in different rooms that remained the same temperature, and were given the same amount of water and sunlight over the course of 12 days. …. The girls’ experiment was geared towards testing the potential impact of phone radiation on surrounding objects. They didn’t have phones to use though, so decided the routers were a good alternative.
SNIP

New report: Brain diseases such as dementia affecting more people under 55 than ever before

Professor Colin Pritchard’s latest research published in Public Health Journal has found that the sharp rise of dementia and other neurological deaths in people under 74 cannot be put down to the fact that we are living longer – the rise is because a higher proportion of old people are being affected by such conditions, and what is really alarming, it is starting earlier and affecting people under 55 years.
SNIP

Professor Pritchard said, “These rises in neurological deaths, with the earlier onset of the dementias, are devastating for families and pose a considerable public health problem. It is NOT that we have more old people but rather more old people have more brain disease than ever before, including Alzheimer’s. For example there are two new British charities, The Young Parkinson’s Society and Young Dementia UK, which are a grass-roots response to these rises. The need for such charities would have been inconceivable a little more than 30 years ago.”
SNIP

“This has to be speculative but it cannot be genetic because the period is too short. Whilst there will be some influence of more elderly people, it does not account for the earlier onset; the differences between countries nor the fact that more women have been affected, as their lives have changed more than men’s over the period, all indicates multiple environmental factors. Considering the changes over the last 30 years – the explosion in electronic devices, rises in background non-ionising radiation- PC’s, micro waves, TV’s, mobile phones; road and air transport up four-fold increasing background petro-chemical pollution; chemical additives to food etc.
SNIP

EU institutions agree on new rules to protect workers from electromagnetic fields – but are they protective enough?

[ NOTE: Due to a change in servers there were problems sending out two postings. They are now being re-posted.]

The following EU agreement, on the face of it, reads like a real breakthrough. However note the qualifying statement: “not to unduly hamper the use and development of industrial and medical activities”. My reading of this indicates that ICNIRP”s rational for health protection (short term/ acute exposure protection) will likely remain the basis for this new directive.

Will the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) be happy with these new rules? The ETUC has previously opposed the draft EU agreement because it followed the ICNIRP limits which “only considers short-term effects of exposure and disregards the long-term impacts on workers’ health”. The ETUC have called for binding legislation needed to protect worker’s health from EMF exposure risks.

The question is: Are these new rules still just a rehashing of ICNIRP’s industry friendly limitations?

SNIP

Touchy feeley cell phone underpants

We’ve all heard of the underpants bomber who in Dec. 2009 unsuccessfully tried to set off an al-Qaeda fundamentalist inspired underwear bomb on a Northwest Airline plane. Perhaps inspired by this ingenious new concept for underwear, Durex has taken the fundamentalist doctrine to a whole new level with its Fundawear range where you too can also set off a ‘charge’ in someone’s (or your own) underwear.