December 21st 2008
Sunday Scan: Pre-Christmas Edition
How You Gonna Grow The Middle Class, Joe?
R
ecent news reports tell us that Joe Biden’s big job in the Obama administration will be to increase the size of his much-loved middle class. Just one question, Joe:
How much are you going to do that by lifting the poor up to the middle class, and how much are you going to do it by taxing the wealthy down to it?
Just wondering …
Peanut Nutty
R
ecently a school bus in an unnamed U.S. school district has hastily evacuated, then fully decontaminated. Why? Sarin gas? Smallpox pores? No, a peanut was seen on the floor. What hope do we have that our children will get a sensible education if education is in the hands of people who evacuate and decontaminate school buses because of a peanut?
As I usually do when confronted with a story I like, I turn to Stats Blog, where I found another example:
At this time of year many municipal elementary schools in the United States, including the one attended by my children, raise money by selling wrapping paper and candy. This year parents in our school were told that they could no longer pick up their purchases from their children’s classrooms. Instead they had to pick up their orders from a loading dock at specified times, to avoid a danger to the children.
The danger? Some of the orders contained sealed tins of festive nuts. Out of an overabundance of caution the school decided not to allow any of the items on the premises.
Sealed containers! In the hands of adults! What are they afraid of, that a child with a peanut allergy and utterly no self-control will beat a teacher paralyzed by fear of physically restraining a child, rip the tin open, and commit suicide by nut?
“This allergy is just nuts,” by Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of medical sociology, Harvard Medical School, in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, which is excerpted above. Christakis goes on to say:
About 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, and even more – 6.9 million – are allergic to seafood. However, all told, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 hospitalisations a year (out of more than 30 million hospitalisations nationwide). And only 150 people (children and adults) die each year from all food allergies combined.
That’s about the same as the number of people in the U.S. killed by lightening each year. Should we ban thunderstorms? Continue Reading »
