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Where Do Gender Roles Come From? A person's sexuality comes from within him or her, making a person heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual, depending on the partners he or she is(or is not) attracted to. Unlike sexuality, however, gender roles are imposedfrom without, through a variety of social influences. Formed during the socialization phases of childhood and adolescence, gender role issues influence people throughout their lives; conflict can arise when some one does not feelat ease with his or her gender role. The first and one of the strongest influences on a person's perceived genderrole is his or her parents. Parents are our first teachers--not only of suchbasic skills as talking and walking, but also of attitudes and behavior. Someparents still hold traditional definitions of maleness and femaleness and what kind of activities are appropriate for each. Parents start early in treating their baby boys and baby girls differently. Although baby boys are more likely to die in infancy than girls, and are actually more fragile as infants than girls are, studies have shown that parents tend to respond more quickly to an infant daughter's cries than they are to those of an infant son. Parents also tend to cuddle girls more than they do boys. They are also more likely to allow boys to try new things and activities--such as learning to walk and explore--than they are girls; parents tend to fear more for the safety of girls.

Health insurance is in the midst of a design shift toward greater financial risk for patients. Where medical cost exposure is high relative to income, the shift will increase the numbers of underinsured people. This study estimates that nearly sixteen million people ages 19-64 were underinsured in 2003. Underinsured adults were more likely to forgo needed care than those with more adequate coverage and had rates of financial stress similar to those of the uninsured. Including adults uninsured during the year, 35 percent (sixty-one million) were under- or uninsured. These findings highlight the need for policy attention to insurance design that considers the adequacy of coverage.

In a world where information and communication technologies (ICT) are fast becoming ubiquitous and indispensable, the ICT industry has a crucial enabling role in social, economic and human development. Deploying ICT triggers changes in behaviour and governance.

AHRP's stated rationale for objecting to a policy mandating Merck's HPV vaccine in 11 year old girls [Link] is validated by an internationally recognized expert in the field who tested the vaccine in clinical trials.Dr. Diane M. Harper, a lead researcher in the development of the human papilloma virus vaccine, who says giving the drug to 11-year-old girls "is a great big public health experiment." Dr. Harper, a scientist, physician, professor and the director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, said: "It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11- to 12-year-old girls There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue." All of her trials have been with subjects ages 15 to 25. "This vaccine has not been tested in little girls for efficacy. At 11, these girls don't get cervical cancer - they won't know for 25 years if they will get cervical cancer."

She believes the ideal way of administering the new vaccine is to offer it to women ages 18 and up. At the time of their first inoculation, they should be tested for the presence of HPV in their system. If the test comes back negative, then schedule the follow-up series of the three-part shots.

But if it comes back positive? "Then we don't know squat, because medically we don't know how to respond to that," Harper said.

Today's News Today's News This Issue Letters to the Editor Writers Eminent Domain Reform To Be Introduced in U.S.House of Representatives Property Owners Still Left Unprotected from Federally Funded Abuses Two Years After Kelo By The Castle Coalition Arlington, Va. - July 12, Representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA) and F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced the Private Property Rights Protection Act of 2007 to stop taxpayer funding of eminent domain abuse. This bipartisan bill would counter the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which allows governments to use eminent domain to seize private property on behalf of private developers in hopes of increasing tax revenue. The Act would deny for two fiscal years economic development funds to state and local governments that use eminent domain for private development. In 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed H.R. 4128, the Private Property Rights Protection Act of 2005, by a vote of 376 to 38. The bill was co-sponsored by representatives from across the political and ideological spectrum, including Representatives Waters, Sensenbrenner, John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), and Henry Bonilla (R-TX). Despite unprecedented bipartisan political and public support, the bill languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee and ultimately died. "Federal protections from eminent domain abuse are long overdue," said Bert Gall, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which argued the Kelo case on behalf of the homeowners. IJ and the Castle Coalition - a nationwide grassroots organization of property owners and activists dedicated to stopping eminent domain abuse - have led the fight to reform state and federal eminent domain laws. "Even though the vast majority of Americans oppose the abuse of eminent domain for private development, the federal government still funds that abuse." June 23 marked the two-year anniversary of the Kelo decision. In every poll since that ruling, the public is overwhelmingly against eminent domain for private use. Forty-two states have passed eminent domain reforms reining in the Kelo decision, including 10 states where voters passed ballot measures by wide margins in last year's elections. But many of those reforms

Shots In The Dark by Barbara Loe Fisher   The worldwide acceptance of mass vaccination to suppress infectious childhood diseases once fiercely resisted is one of the most successful public relations stories in the history of medicine. As a result, epidemics of smallpox, which once swept through 18th- and 19th-century port cities such as Halifax, New York, and Boston without warning and cut down entire families, are now dry facts relegated to medical books. Images of children struggling through whooping cough, walking down the street coughing spasmodically, and stopping at curbs to spit up sticky mucus are only fading memories for grandparents alive to talk about what their parents told them.  Baby boomers and their parents still remember lining up in school in 1955 for polio vaccinations, with the hope that this magic bullet would keep them out of the dreaded iron lung.  Mass vaccination has dramatically suppressed childhood diseases. In Canada, recorded diphtheria cases dropped from 9,000 in 1924 to two to five by 1994.  When measles vaccination began in the United States between 1963 and 1965, doctors reported more than 400,000 cases annually; by 1995, that number had dwindled to 309. Cases of tetanus are almost unheard of in North America and Europe.   Yet the universal use of vaccines as a worthy goal that prevents needless suffering and that benefits all mankind has begun to be challenged.   The voices of critics are heard in the living rooms of families whose children have been injured or have died from reactions to routine childhood vaccinations, and in courtrooms, where parents are suing vaccine makers and challenging mandatory vaccination laws. In the U.S. Congress, legislators who have heard them have set up a vaccine injury compensation program. At scientific conferences and in the pages of prestigious medical journals, researchers and physicians are risking their careers by discussing vaccine side effects.

Today, vaccinations are big business. In 1995, an international high-technology research firm, Frost & Sullivan, projected that the worldwide human vaccine market will increase from $2.9 billion to more than $7 billion by the year 2001.   Public health officials in every country assist the industry�s growth, often by force of laws that ensure citizens use about a dozen different viral and bacterial vaccines, including ones to suppress even generally mild childhood diseases such as chicken pox. Traditional public health measures, improving sanitation, nutrition, living conditions, health education, and access to affordable medical care, especially in underprivileged populations often take a backseat to achieving a 100 per cent vaccination rate.   Most medical doctors consider vaccines their single most important tool in protecting public health. Few would question the profound importance of vaccines to public health, wrote Richard B. Johnston, Jr., MD, medical director of the March of Dimes and chairman of the Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Committee, in a 1994 National Academy of Sciences report, 

Adverse Events Associated with Vaccines Not only have deaths from the most common childhood infections been almost eliminated, but also so have the devastating morbidities of diseases like measles, paralytic polio, and congenital rubella. This revolution has . . . led to major savings in medical costs and gains in work productivity, as well as to reductions in deaths and suffering.   An ancient philosophical dispute goes modern   The whole idea of man versus nature can be traced back to the origins of western medicine more than 2,000 years ago. In a four-volume book series Divided Legacy: A History of Schism in Medical Thought by medical historian Harris L. Coulter, PhD, the centuries-old war between empiricism and rationalism in medicine is revealed as a contest between two competing health philosophies. Is each individual governed by a vital force that, through unique reactions to external stimuli, is capable of participating in the healing process, as empiricists, including Hippocrates, have maintained?  Or are all human organisms simply a series of complex chemical reactions governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and mechanics, as rationalists, including Louis Pasteur, have maintained?   Empiricists accept the existence of viruses and bacteria as part of nature and illness as part of the life process. They consider fevers, diarrhea, and runny noses good, not bad, and do not suppress them with chemically based drugs that might interfere with the body�s natural ability to harness the immune system to participate in the healing process. They stress that each individual is unique and that individualized therapeutic techniques can stimulate the body to restore health. Empiricists dislike the one-size-fits-all mass vaccination approach. 

CDC backpedals on vaccination recommendations Healthcare workers oblivious to their participation in mass medical experimentation COEUR D'ALENE -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Immunization Update for Sept. 14, broadcast via satelite to public health institutions all over the nation, was an installment of the periodic program which served two specific functions: It served notice that influenza vaccine will be late and in short supply this year and it cleverly backpedaled on several aspects of previous CDC vaccination recommendations because too many people have died or become permanently damaged as a result. The CDC must have known it would have to play hardball with health professionals to overcome recent failings with regard to vaccination policy: Mercury-based preservative thimerosal has been banned from vaccines amid claims that it may be harmful and news that the oral polio has been responsible for spreading the disease rather than preventing it and contains the carcinogenic monkey virus SV-40. To compel audience participation and compliance, the CDC urged the health professionals in the audience to fill out the form to receive continuing education credit for watching the program and fill out the evaluation form and send them both in to the CDC. For their trouble, the CDC promised to mail them a collectible “Star Wars” pro-vaccination poster. The ruse apparently worked as the 25 women and one man in attendance accepted the explanations from program host CDC National Immunization Program Director Dr. William Atkinson for vaccination policies that may have been responsible for the injuries and deaths of thousands of people in over the last 30 years. Promise of a “collectible” poster from the 70s also helped these healthcare professionals to accept the new recommendations without questioning whether or not they might be lethal as well. Pneumococcus vaccine

Hepititis B There is a new, two-dose, thimerosal-free hep B vaccine manufactured by Merck and Smith/Kline. The CDC recommends that all infants be vaccinated against hep B before leaving the hospital. “Infants have been our emphasis over the last few years,” explained Atkinson. Hep B is primarily spread through intravenous drug use and promiscuous sex. For the CDC to recommend that all infants receive hep B vaccine must be because the federal agency expects babies to start sharing needles and engaging in promiscuous sex immediately upon leaving the hospital or the CDC believes it is safer, for the sake of the children, to assume that all mothers are intravenous drug abusers with multiple sex partners. The American Association of Pediatricians (AAP) recommended that hep B vaccine be delayed until six months of age due to thimerosal content. But, since thimersal has been removed, the AAP recommends that infants begin receiving the shots by no later than two months.

Polio vaccine “Today may be the last day we talk about polio vaccine,” Atkinson said. The CDC no longer recommends the administration of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) since it has been proven the vaccine causes outbreaks of the disease and contains the carcinogenic SV-40 monkey virus. Atkinson did mention OPV may be used in the event that parents refuse to have their child injected with the third and fourth doses of Inactivated Polio Vaccine, or if the child is traveling to a country where polio may be present within 4 weeks -- but that will be only until the end of this year as supplies of OPV will run out and they will not be replaced. Atkinson promised that in a few more years polio will be wiped out forever and will not be part of the recommended vaccination regimen. “The end of polio disease is in sight,” he said and added that China was just certified “polio free” this year. Historical references to 200 years of polio eradication efforts show that polio has never been controlled through vaccination. The definition of the disease just changes to become paralytic meningitis based upon the vaccination status of the individual.