Missing-Kid Programs Stir Anxiety

The national obsession with missing children--involving in-school programs to teach children how to avoid kidnaping, television programs dramatizing the plight of missing youngsters and printing photographs of allegedly missing victims on grocery bags--may be triggering increased anxiety among children, making them afraid even to go outside their own homes for fear they will be captured by a stranger.

This warning about the unwitting side effects of well-intentioned programs comes from a Dallas pediatrician writing a letter to the editor in the journal Pediatrics. The chairman of an American Academy of Pediatrics committee studying the issue agreed that the side-effect warning is a point well taken.

Committee Criticized

The caution came from Dr. Gordon Green, who criticized the committee for an earlier position paper on the role of doctors in dealing with missing-child episodes. But with the highly visible warnings, argued Green, “is a heightened level of anxiety in the kids themselves.”

Green said that in his own practice he has encountered children afraid to go outside, even in their own neighborhoods. Children up to the age of 10 told him they feared going to a neighbor’s house to play because of what they perceived as the danger of being kidnaped and that they had nightmares about being captured by mysterious strangers.

“Some of this concern is certainly based in reality, but the educational programs in our schools, television programs, the ever-present posters and even our grocery sacks have an inherent risk of creating real problems among sensitive children,” Green warned.

“Self-defense classes, fingerprint drives and similar well-intended activities have the potential for causing a degree of alarm that is no longer protective, but actually harmful.”

NEW AIDS STUDIES

Two new research studies have added emphasis to a key aspect of so-called “safe sex” campaigns to stem the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The two studies both find that, of all the sexual practices focused on in the attempt to control AIDS, by far the most significant risks are taken by people who practice receptive anal sex.

Oral-genital contact, by contrast, appears to play no statistically significant role in transmission of the AIDS virus among homosexual and heterosexual men. The practice of douching after anal intercourse--which some practitioners (homosexual and heterosexual) believe may reduce the chance of contact with the AIDS virus--doesn’t work and may measurably raise the risk of coming down with some other type of infection. And oral sex should not be considered safe, one study concludes, because other risks--of herpes infection, hepatitis, syphilis and gonorrhea--remain.

The studies appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., which published results of research in San Francisco, and in The Lancet, which carried results from the multi-center study supervised by the National Institutes of Health. The San Francisco study assessed the relationship between sexual practices and subsequent AIDS virus infection in 1,034 San Francisco single men. The national study included 2,507 men in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Pittsburgh.

The National Institutes of Health project also concluded that questions remain whether the use of condoms--a topic of vigorous current debate--actually impedes AIDS infection in anal intercourse. The study noted that while condoms have been established in laboratory studies to prevent passage of the AIDS virus, not enough is known about their practical effects in actual intercourse to draw final conclusions on their value in AIDS control.

“Avoidance of anal intercourse must be the principal focus of efforts to reduce risk in the male homosexual community,” the government-run study concluded. “This educational message must be given the highest public health priority.”

EKG AND GENDER

Middle-aged men who show signs of nonspecific heartbeat irregularities associated with the risk of possible future heart attacks have nearly double the risk of sustaining a later fatal seizure than women the same age who show the same irregularities, new research concludes.

The study, published in the journal Circulation, tracked men and women who underwent electrocardiograph examinations where their heartbeats showed electronic signs of two different risk factor-related readings. The project involved 17,000 participants in an internationally known, long-term Chicago study.

The striking sex differences remained after a variety of other potential differences--blood pressure, age, cholesterol levels, smoking and diabetes--were taken into account. The gender differences alone indicated that in the 11 1/2 years after their EKG readings showed signs of eventual future heart trouble, men were nearly twice as likely to actually die of a heart attack than women.

The finding is generally in concert with widely observed greater heart-attack risk for men, but the new results emphasize that an abnormal EKG reading in a man should be regarded with utmost seriousness while the same reading in a woman may not be such a dire prediction.

A HERPES SKIING MYTH

It’s a common belief among skiers that a variety of minor facial herpes infection that seems to be triggered by sun exposure at high altitudes can somehow be prevented by use of sunscreens with high protective ratings. The assumption is so common, in fact, that researchers who set out to test it had trouble finding subjects because so many skiers take the sunscreen-herpes theory as an article of faith.

An undaunted team from San Francisco General Hospital took its research directly to the slopes. The team reports in the American Journal of Sports Medicine that it was finally able to assemble 51 skier subjects who were divided in groups that used sunscreen with a protective value of 15 and a group that used an inactive placebo material. Six of the 51 skiers--who had an average age of about 38--had previous histories of minor facial herpes breakouts associated with sun exposure in skiing.

The San Francisco researchers returned from such locales as Park City, Utah, and Snowmass, Colo., with a surprising finding: The sunscreens have no discernible ability to avert a herpes episode. “Alternative methods for control of sun-induced reactions of herpes simplex infections should be investigated,” the team concluded.

YOUTHS AND SMOKING

Teen-agers who start smoking in high school are most strongly influenced by whether their best friends already smoke, and younger students in the seventh and eighth grades can probably be persuaded not to take it up if they are given more and better information on the health consequences of tobacco addiction.

The observation that health consequence information may actually prevent future smoking in these younger children and teen-agers may justify enhanced and intensified smoking-education programs in those grade levels.

Those conclusions are major findings of a new study in Minnesota that also concluded that young smokers generally were perceived as more independent than nonsmokers and came from families where children were comparatively less involved in family decision-making than nonsmoking youths. The study, which also concluded that smoking among brothers and sisters and the degree to which a young person seems rebellious also influence subsequent smoking habits, was conducted by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

The research was based on a survey of nearly 2,300 young people from the seventh through the 11th grades who responded to a series of questionnaires over a two-year period. The report was published in the American Journal of Public Health.