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School Atmosphere
Affects Student Smoking
Students at high schools that value caring and inclusiveness are significantly less likely to be smokers than their peers at schools placing a heavier emphasis on academics, Scottish researchers report.
Students’ attitudes toward a school and the quality of student-teacher relationships also appeared to play a role in whether or not students chose to smoke cigarettes, especially for boys.
“Schools can make a difference,“ Dr. Marion Henderson of the Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences in Glasgow, who led the study, told Reuters Health. “It’s worth schools trying to think about the social environments they’re creating.“
Current anti-smoking efforts at schools, which usually focus on individuals rather than the school environment, have done little to discourage smoking among teens, Henderson and her colleagues note in the journal BMC Public Health.
They sought to investigate whether the quality of the school environment itself might be related to students’ likelihood of picking up the habit by looking at 5,092 students at 24 high schools in Scotland.
Varying Rates
Overall, 25 percent of males and 39 percent of females smoked. But smoking rates varied sharply from school to school, from a low of 8 percent to a high of 33 percent for male students. For girls, the percentage of smokers ranged from 28 percent to 49 percent.
Even after the researchers accounted for factors associated with smoking such as a student’s socioeconomic status, the amount of spending money he or she had, or whether a student lived with both parents, school-to-school differences in smoking rates remained.
Kids attending schools with worse student-teacher relationships as rated by students, teachers and the researchers themselves were more likely to be smokers. And when more students said they didn’t like their school, the percentage of smokers in the student body also was higher. Both factors had a particularly strong influence on whether or not boys smoked.
The findings in this study make it clear that it’s not only individual factors such as deprivation that influence the likelihood a student will smoke. “Once you’ve leveled the playing field for these things, schools can make a difference (in) smoking just by being nicer social environments to be in,“ Henderson said in an interview.
Schools could build more positive environments by finding ways to make all students feel valued, even if they are not top academic achievers, the researcher said.
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Emergency in Pompeii
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Some 2.5 million tourists visit Pompeii each year.
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The Italian government declared a state of emergency at the Pompeii archeological site to try to rescue one of the world’s most important cultural treasures from decades of neglect.
A cabinet statement said it would appoint a special commissioner for Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried by an eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in AD 79 and now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
“To call the situation intolerable doesn’t go far enough,“ said Culture Minister Sandro Bondi, who took office in Silvio Berlusconi’s new conservative government in May.
Archeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of Pompeii, dogged by lack of investment, mismanagement, litter and looting. Bogus tour guides, illegal parking attendants and stray dogs also plague visitors.
Some 2.5 million tourists visit Pompeii each year, making it one of Italy’s most popular attractions, and many have expressed shock at the site’s decay.
A report in daily Corriere della Sera this week said most of the 1,500 houses at the site are closed to the public, its frescoes have faded to become almost invisible and restoration work that began in 1978 has yet to be completed.
The “state of emergency,“ which the government said would last for a year, allows for extra funds and special measures to be taken to protect the site.
“Every year at least 150 square meters of fresco and plaster work are lost for lack of maintenance,“ Antonio Irlando, a regional councilor responsible for artistic heritage, told the newspaper.
“The same goes for stones: at least 3,000 pieces every year end up disintegrating,“ he said.
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Orangutan Populations Declining Sharply
Orangutan numbers have declined sharply on the only two islands where they still live in the wild and they could become the first great ape species to go extinct if urgent action isn’t taken, a new study says.
The declines in Indonesia and Malaysia since 2004 are mostly because of illegal logging and the expansion of palm oil plantations, Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, told AP.
The survey found the orangutan population on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island dropped almost 14 percent since 2004, Wich said.
It also concluded that the populations on Borneo Island, which is shared by Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, have fallen by 10 percent. Researchers only surveyed areas of Borneo that are in Indonesia and Malaysia.
In their study, Wich and his 15 colleagues said the declines in Borneo were occurring at an “alarming rate“ but that they were most concerned about Sumatra, where the numbers show the population is in “rapid decline.“
The number of orangutans on Sumatra has fallen from 7,500 to 6,600 while the number on Borneo has fallen from 54,000 to around 49,600, according to the survey on the endangered apes, which appears in this month’s science journal Oryx.
Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s top two palm oil producers, have aggressively pushed to expand plantations amid a rising demand for biofuels which are considered cleaner and cheaper than petrol.
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Olympic Air Clean
Beijing’s environment bureau insisted on Tuesday that pollution would not be a problem for the Olympics despite heavy smog enveloping the city exactly one month before the Games start.
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Cancer Deaths Tied
To Education Levels
Declines in death rates from the four leading types of cancer in the United States since the early 1990s have been driven largely by progress among college-educated men and women, researchers said.
The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was the latest to illustrate how a person’s health can be closely tied to socioeconomic factors such as education and income level.
Researchers at the American Cancer Society and Emory University in Atlanta calculated death rates for lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer by level of education among US blacks and whites ages 25 to 64 for 1993 through 2001, Reuters reported.
Death rates for each of these types of cancer decreased from 1993 to 2001 in men and women with at least 16 years of education--a college degree--except for lung cancer among black women, for whom death rates were stable, they found.
They noted that less-educated adults are more likely to smoke. They added that in breast cancer, less-educated women may be less likely to get a mammogram that could provide early detection of the disease. And less-educated people may be less likely to get colorectal cancer screening tests. Less-educated people may be less likely to get the best types of cancer treatment, they added.
Bangladesh Releases 25,000 Protected Turtles
Bangladeshi bio-marine experts have released 25,000 endangered baby turtles into the sea in the past two months as part of a state-run captivity breeding program, an environmental official said.
Rafiqul Islam, spokesman for the Coastal and Wetland Biodiversity Management Project, told AFP that 80 to 90 percent of the Olive Ridley turtle eggs would have been destroyed by humans and dogs if the program had not existed.
“We started collecting the eggs along the southern coastline at the end of last year and since May we have released 25,000 hatchlings following an incubation period,“ he said.
He said the biggest danger the turtles faced was from local tribesmen who considered the eggs a delicacy.
The initiative started five years ago but this breeding season had been the most successful by far, he said.
“Last year 15,000 were released. The number has grown a lot this year because we have worked very hard to expand the program.“
As well as setting up hatcheries in the southern district of Cox’s Bazar, officials had also focused on educating locals about the importance of protecting the turtles.
Indonesia Criminalizes Giving Money to Beggars
Residents in one Indonesian city who give in to the tug of guilt could face three months in jail under a law criminalizing giving money to beggars and street children, the city’s mayor said.
The new regulation approved last month by the Legislative Council in Makassar, South Sulawesi, is aimed at reducing the city’s swelling population of beggars, Mayor Ilham Arif Sirajuddin said, Alalam reported.
“Under the law, people who give money to beggars will be jailed up to three months or have to pay a maximum fine of 1.5 million rupiah (163 dollars),“ he said.
Sirajuddin said beggars and street children could face maximum sentences of three years in jail or fines up to five million rupiah.
The crackdown has been matched by a program to train beggars for work, he said.
There are currently 2,600 street children and beggars in Makassar, up from 870 in 2006.
“They enjoy being street children because they can get money easily by asking passers by,“ Siradjuddin said.
He said street children faced high risks, and that they were commonly exploited by adults, including in some instances their parents, into earning money.
The regulation is in line with those in other big cities across the country, including Jakarta, Denpasar in Bali and Medan in North Sumatra.
Toilets That Pay!
It pays to use a toilet in southern India, as residents are earning close to a dollar a month by using public urinals, a scheme launched by authorities to promote hygiene and research in rural areas.
Dozens of people are queuing up to use toilets in Musiri, a remote town in Tamil Nadu state, where authorities have succeeded in keeping street corners clean with the new scheme, The Times of India newspaper said.
“In fact, many of us started using toilets for urination only after the ecosan (ecological sanitation) toilets were constructed in the area,“ said S. Rajasekaran, a truck cleaner.
The urine was also being collected and tested for its efficacy as a crop fertilizer, an official of the state’s agricultural university added.
People relieving themselves in the open is a common sight in India’s rural towns and villages, as basic sanitation still eludes millions.
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