Keep an eye out for the Donate Life float, and for Dolores Evans. After a 20-year battle with diabetes and high blood pressure, Dolores’ kidneys failed in 2008 and she found herself on dialysis – and on a transplant list for a new kidney.
She received one in November 2008, and tomorrow rides aboard the float to honor her donor – her adult son Ryan, whose kidney Dolores received when he was killed last year.
There are more than 100,000 people in the U.S. on a transplant list, and one is added every 11 minutes. If you haven’t already signed up as an organ/tissue donor, resolve to do this good deed in 2010. Click here for information …
Happy New Year.
No one likes to think about car trouble – being stuck at the edge of the freeway with traffic zipping past perilously close. And no one likes to think about having a car accident, especially the type where you’re trapped inside the car and need to cut a seatbelt or break a window to escape.
For lots of us, the holiday season at year’s end brings too many goodies and too little time for our workout schedule. That could mean an extra pound or two, or it could even tip the balance toward a diagnosis of diabetes. (Latest estimates from the American Diabetes Association put total cases at almost 8% of the U.S. population!)
If you’re hoping for new eating and exercise resolve as you turn that final calendar page this week, 
The ranks of the nearsighted are growing, with a study out this month from the National Eye Institute concluding that the condition has jumped from 25% of adults in the 1970s to more than 41% this decade. Researchers haven’t pinned down the exact cause (genetics can play a role) – but some are pointing the fingers at the plethora of digital screens parading before our eyes.
Kids are still growing. And if a child grows an inch but her weight stays the same, that is the equivalent of 5 pounds of weight loss in an adult.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced yesterday that 800,000 doses of H1N1 vaccine intended for children ages 6 months to 3 years have been recalled because their potency had dipped below manufacturers’ standards. The agency insists that there are no safety concerns with the four recalled lots of vaccine, and that doses from those lots were still potent enough to be effective.
Remember Follow the Leader, Kick the Can, neighborhood baseball? These were the things we did as kids when the grown-ups sent us outdoors to play. And without such enticements as chat rooms, iPods and Nintendo, these were the best game in town.
