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Kids need counselling on networking sites: Experts

(IANS) / 19 May 2012

Children addicted to social networking sites without understanding their implications are falling victim to grudges which move from cyberspace to the real world, say police, teachers and psychologists.

Their views come in the wake of a Class 10 student on Wednesday stabbing his classmate in a central Delhi school, apparently miffed at the latter posting a photograph of his on Facebook.

Recently, we came across a case where students had created a page on their teacher on a social networking site so that they can make fun of her and abuse her, a officer of Delhi Polices cyber cell, who did not want to be identified, said.

The lack of counselling and emotional management skills in children along with unhindered access to networking sites are giving way to violent expressions among children unable to handle the situation, the experts said.

Children need to be told that networking sites are not for spreading hatred or vent anger. Schools should take initiatives and counsel the students. This is a must. Unfortunately, not much attention is being given to counselling on cyber activity, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Economic Offence Wing) K.K. Vyas said.

Social media provides space for youngsters to hide and vent their anger. So, teaching children anger management will be the best solution for controlling violence, said Director of Mental Health and Behaviourial Sciences at Fortis Hospital Sameer Parekh.

He said schools must teach anger management. Parents and teachers must also pay attention to childrens behaviour, he said.

However, with unhindered access from their homes, teenagers just could not get enough of networking sites, said a teacher.

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Kids need counselling on networking sites: Experts

NEW YORK (AP) -- Facebook may have made social networking a worldwide cultural phenomenon, but it wasn't the first Internet company to connect people online. And it won't be the last. Here's a look at how social networking has evolved. Some companies have come and gone. Some are mere shells of their former selves. And others show promise, even as Facebook dominates the social Web.

Geocities

Launched in 1994, Geocities offered a way for people to build websites and tell the world about themselves with postings and photos. Users could also buy and sell things through online stores. Pages built to feature different subjects formed virtual communities. Yahoo bought it in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, for about $3 billion and shut it down a decade later. Geocities was among the early services that let people form online communities. Yahoo shut down GeoCities in 2009.

Classmates.com

The website created to connect former schoolmates with one another launched in 1995, possibly before its time. It filed to go public in 2007 when it had about 50 million users, but withdrew the IPO that December, citing "market conditions." Classmates.com still exists today, but is overshadowed by Facebook. It's owned by United Online Inc., which is also home to online florists such as FTD and Interflora.

SixDegrees

Started by Andrew Weinreich in 1997, SixDegrees was "the first online business that attempted to identify and map a set of real relationships between real people using their real names," writes author David Kirkpatrick in "The Facebook Effect." Though it attracted millions of users, the site failed to catch on and shut down in 2000. Weinreich later told Kirkpatrick that "We were early. Timing is everything."

LiveJournal

Launched in 1999, LiveJournal offered and still offers a rudimentary form of social networking. Users write online journals and share them with friends or the general public. The site doesn't require people to use their real names, and with short status update snippets more popular today, seems more akin to blogging than to social networking. It's owned by Moscow-based SUP Media and remains popular in Russia.

Friendster

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Beyond Facebook: A look at social network history

Dr. Dave Hnida (credit: CBS)

Actually, its not a new blood test, but the recommendation that every baby boomer have it is new.

That blood test is a simple blood draw for Hepatitis C. And now, the CDC says everyone born between 1945 and 1965 have this test done at least once.

Hepatitis C is one of the liver disease alphabets youveprobably heard of, but dont quite know what it is.

Hep C is a viral infection of the liver that is the No. 1 cause of liver failure and liver transplants. Yet most people who have Hep C dont even know they carry the virus until its too late.

Thats because it can take decades for the virus to damage the liver, and most people feel pretty well as those years roll by.

But if you can diagnose Hep C before it destroys the liver, you can be treated with medication that we didnt have in the past that works pretty well at killing off the virus, or at least keeping it at bay.

We also have Hep C carriers avoid alcohol since it can beat up the liver at an accelerated rate when the virus is in the system.

Which brings us to the big question how do you get Hep C, and why the fuss over baby boomers?

We think people who used IV drugs in the 60s and 70s may have been infected with the virus, even though at the time we didnt even knowC existed.

Link:
The New Blood Test Every Baby Boomer Should Have

The Claim: A lab-concocted strain of ferret flu could become a doomsday weapon or bioterrorist threat.

The Contrarian: Wendy Orent, author of Plague, says the much-hyped fears are unfounded: The new strain presents no danger to humans but reveals a great deal about the transmission of flu.

Ferrets with the flu sneeze and cough like humans.

iStockphoto

Deadly H5N1 avian flu, long entrenched in Asian poultry, has terrified public health experts ever since it killed a Hong Kong boy in 1997. The disease has caused about 340 human deaths in all, raising concerns it might someday unleash a true pandemic. But that has never occurred. The virus is adept at killing chickens and can infect mammals, but it has never spread among them. Until recently no one knew why.

Last year two scientists independently set out to learn what genetic changes might make H5N1 contagious (and so more dangerous) among mammals. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin at Madison studied a hybrid flu virus made from the avian H5 and the human H1N1 pandemic flu of 2009. Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, genetically altered his H5 strain by changing its receptors so the virus could infect cells higher in the respiratory tract. Then, they stuck their strains deep up the noses of ferrets.

By inserting nasal secretions from the first infected ferret into the nose of another and repeating that passaging from ferret to ferret, both teams allowed natural selection to choose the genetic variants of flu best at growing and spreading in ferrets. After 10 such passages, the virus was able to spread in the air, infecting ferrets in separate cages. Kawaokas ferrets got sick but survived, while 60 percent of Fouchiers died. When the scientists sequenced the genome of the new virus and compared it with the original strain, they discovered about five changes that allowed ferrets to pass the germ on.

The results were accepted for publication, but the U.S. National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity worried that Fouchiers and Kawaokas work might be dangerous in the wrong hands. Members of the board demanded that the genetic recipe for ferret flu be redacted before publication, sparking public hysteria: Had the scientists created lethal, transmissible human viruses? Could the microbe accidentally escape from a lab or fall into terrorist hands to become, as a New York Times editorial called it, a doomsday weapon?

The uproar made no sense. The ferret experiments do not replicate a natural evolutionary process. Without the experimenters deliberately moving the viruses from ferret nose to ferret nose, a contagious strain would never have evolved. To make a deadly human flu, you would need to passage the strain among humans, not ferretsa difficult and ethically impossible experiment.

Virologist Earl Brown of the University of Ottawa points out that passaging a virus from one animal to another increases the virulence of the germ for the newly infected species and decreases its virulence for the original host. Indeed, weakening influenza strains by passaging them in animals is an old technique for making human vaccines, including those for polio and yellow fever, according to virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University. The ferret strains created in these experiments are probably closer to a human vaccine than a doomsday weapon.

Continued here:
Can Stuffing Germs up Ferrets Unleash a Human Pandemic? | DISCOVER

By Timothy W. Martin

U.S. health officials are proposing all baby boomers get tested for hepatitis C, because theyre five times more likely than other adults to have the potentially fatal liver virus and many might not know theyre at risk.

Of the more than 70 million baby boomers those born from 1945 to 1965 800,000 may have contracted the liver virus decades ago from unsafe blood transfusions or experimental drug use and not gotten tested, U.S. health officials say. Many neglect getting tested, because theyve forgotten getting a transfusion or drug use, or theyre unaware they could be at risk. For those baby boomers who do remember risky actions, some may balk at telling their doctor.

So, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday proposed a recommendation that all members of that generation get a one-time blood test for Hepatitis C. About two-thirds of the 3.2 million U.S. adults with hepatitis C is a baby boomer, the CDC said.

Hepatitis C doesnt exhibit many symptoms. It slowly inflames or scars the liver, for years, if not decades. If undiagnosed, hepatitis C can cause liver cancer or cirrhosis, and U.S. health officials said more than 15,000 Americans died from those illnesses in 2007, the most recent data available.

The proposed recommendation comes as treatments battling hepatitis C are improving. For decades, it was combated with an injection that, under the best of circumstances, would clear out 30% to 40% of the virus, Dr. Paul Gaglio, medical director of the liver-transplantation program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York tells the Health Blog. Now, the injections are being paired with two new types of oral tablets, developed by Merck and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, that can block the virus from replicating. The combined therapy has doubled the treatments effectiveness, Gaglio says.

Our hope is that one day well have treatments that produce a near 100% clearance of the virus, he says.

The CDC guidelines, for now, call for hepatitis C testing only for individuals with certain known risk factors say, a blood transfusion before 1992 or admitted recreational intravenous drug use. The proposed recommendation, which could be enacted later this year, would suggest that all of the more than 70 million baby boomers get tested.

Hepatitis C is a huge unrecognized health crisis, says Dr. Bryce D. Smith, lead health scientist at the CDCs division of viral hepatitis. Its referred to as a silent killer, because there are so few noticeable symptoms.

For previous generations, blood transfusions and recreational drug use were less common, experts said. And for younger adults, universal standards were established in the early 1990s for more widespread blood screening of donors. The HIV scare, around the same time, led to more cautious drug use, especially for those doing so by injection.

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U.S. Suggests All Baby Boomers Should Get Tested for Hepatitis C