Posted on 08/20/2009 1:58:02 AM PDT by Daisyjane69
There are, however, other reasons why minorities seem to be more at risk of swine flu. Low-income parents have a harder time keeping their sick children home from school.
"For some parents in lower-wage jobs, if they don't show up at work, they don't get paid, and people may already be on the economic margins," Barry says. "So parents were desperate to get some of these children back in school."
As a result, there were many sick, contagious kids in Boston classrooms this spring. Because of the economic pressures and demographics of the Boston school system, most of them turned out to be black or Hispanic.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
I’m a huge proponent of vitamin D and it’s okay as far as immune response. I have MS and they don’t want you taking things that boost the immune system, like echinacea, but they insist on keeping vitamin D levels up. My neuro does vitamin D tests and if my vitamin D levels get low I go on a high dose (50,000 units per week) and then back off to 2,000 per day. I didn’t know that about vitamin D and it’s flu connection though. Thanks for the info.
... minorities seem to be more at risk of swine flu. Low-income parents have a harder time keeping their sick children home from school.
Uh... the facts shows they have a hard time keeping them IN SCHOOL.
Look up any inner city school's stats and see the attendance compared to the state average. They're major truants.
Whitey’s fault.
Actually, I should say this one thing here, in the interest of honesty.
I mentioned that my sweetie teaches on the south side of Chicago, but I should have mentioned that it is a private Catholic school. My lack of clarity contributed to a misimpression, and that is my fault. These are self-paying minority parents...vouchers are not legal in Chicago as they are in Cleveland.
Because the parents actually pay for tuition, they make sure the kids attend (what a concept!). Their attendance is in the 93% range.
I don’t wanna think about the public schools on the south side, however.
Freudian slip of the day award?
I'm listening to an online Chi PD Scanner right now, it covers all of Chi. You can't believe what goes on so early in the morning. So I hope your 'sweetie' takes a safe route, or the safest possible, to and from his school.
(1) Yesterday I checked out my old Elem & HS in Chicago. They're now both pathetic examples of what a school should be. Attendance (Truancy) is a major problem. Along with Test Scores.
Hey! A ThreeFer...
“Poor, Minorities, Children” hardest hit. If they had bothered to toss “Single Moms” in...we’d have seen the *very* rare “Four-Fer”.
That phrase strikes me as funny.
<Most classes are 3 hours, once a week, and if you miss one, you’ve missed a lot of material. Hopefully, the profs will be more forgiving if there’s a flu outbreak.
I teach in a grad school with classes just like that. If I am sick, I drag myself in and teach for the same reason your son drags himself in. Fortunately, so far I haven’t been terribly sick on the days I have class, just some sneezing and hoarse voice. It’s a really hard decision to miss class if you are truly ill and most profs I know will try to make it in and then go home right after class.
If there is a swine flu outbreak here (I actually thought I had it myself earlier this month, but now am not sure), of course I will have to be accommodating to sick students. I’m not the unfeeling bi$ch in the classroom that I am online. :)
Almost everything students do for me is in electronic format, so they can do their reading and assignments at home and email them to me. It would be harder for students to keep up if I taught a lab science.
Nope. Intentional.
Teaching moment. Invite the flu over for a beer at the White House.
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