Watching the World
No Nuclear War Winners
◆ At a meeting in Virginia of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, doctors from Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union agreed that it would be ‘futile to plan to survive a nuclear war’ because the casualties would be so vast that they would include most of the medical personnel who could treat victims. Soviet cardiologist E. Chazov said: “Some of the military, public functionaries and even scientists are trying to diminish the danger of the nuclear arms race, to minimize the possible consequences of a nuclear war.” Summing up the doctors’ position, Chazov said: “Statements appear that a nuclear war can be won, that a limited nuclear war can be waged, that humanity and the biosphere will still persist even in conditions of total nuclear catastrophe. This is an illusion which . . . must be dispersed.”
Attitudes of Younger Catholics
◆ A Knights of Columbus poll of Catholics aged 10 to 30 revealed massive opposition to many basic Catholic teachings. The survey found that 90 percent rejected the Church’s position on birth control and 89 percent opposed the Church’s stand against remarriage for divorced people. Only 25 percent said that they believed in the infallibility of the pope, and only 37 percent attended Mass weekly.
Crib-Death Clues
◆ Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), or crib death, has long puzzled doctors. For no apparent reason, seemingly normal babies will die, usually while sleeping. A physician who has investigated the matter for eight years says that the fatal affliction has been linked to severe anemia and cigarette smoking by the mothers during pregnancy. Dr. Richard L. Naeye, chairman of the department of pathology at the Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania, stated that “a condition of severe anemia during pregnancy predisposes the fetus to SIDS,” and that a pregnant woman who smokes also predisposes her newborn child to the affliction. He noted that crib-death victims were once thought to be completely normal children, but it is now known that there are chronic abnormalities in the brain stem area that controls breathing and other vital functions. The finding that smoking is a factor, Naeye said, “has raised the question of the role of inadequate oxygen delivery to the infant before birth. The areas damaged by SIDS have a much higher need for oxygen.”
Easter Stampede
◆ Christendom’s churches celebrate Easter to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the “Prince of Peace.” But New York City’s annual “Easter Egg Hunt” in Central Park was anything but peaceful. A riot was touched off when several thousand people made a frenzied effort to get prizes that were tossed into the crowd. Scores were knocked to the ground, six were hurt, and dozens of youngsters were separated from their parents. “I saw people getting stepped on and trampled,” said one woman. She added: “People were crying, screaming—the works. It was like the whole world was coming to an end.” A police officer said: “People went crazy.” This mood was more in keeping with the pagan origin of Easter than with anything having to do with Jesus Christ.
Microwave Decision
◆ A New York State worker’s compensation board upheld a judge’s previous decision that a worker’s death was caused by prolonged exposure to injurious microwave radiation used in telecommunications. The board ordered the New York Telephone Company to pay $28,000 to the worker’s widow. He had spent eight years as a supervisor maintaining television relay equipment at the Empire State Building. The judge had ruled that the employee suffered “brain changes, tissue destruction and acceleration of arteriosclerosis” from the prolonged exposure to the microwave radiation.
Church Buildings Under Siege
◆ In two months during 1981, churches and synagogues in Brooklyn, New York, were robbed or vandalized on the average of one every 20 hours. Many of these acts involved toppling statues, smashing tabernacles, breaking stained-glass windows, painting swastikas and graffiti on walls, and other expressions of contempt. Officials indicate that most of the damage comes from troubled youths who are hostile to religion and who have been exposed to a steady diet of violence in their environment, including movies, television shows and rock-music concerts. The spread of drugs and alcoholism among youths was also given as a contributing factor.
Crime Hits One in Three
◆ The U.S. Justice Department said that last year one out of every three American families was victimized by crime, which is steadily rising in volume. Rape touched 6 percent of all families, 14 percent experienced theft while away from home, burglaries hit 17 percent, and an additional 2 percent had cars stolen. The report concluded: “All Americans are at risk to an extent previously unknown.”
Islam Changes a Rule
◆ For centuries, Islamic orthodoxy kept women hidden behind veils. This included the practice of a man not seeing his bride until the actual marriage ceremony. In Saudi Arabia, a committee of interpreters of the Koran recently ruled that a woman might unveil her face to a prospective bridegroom once the couple was formally engaged. The ruling also stated: “Any man forbidding his daughter or sister from meeting her fiancé face to face will be judged as sinning.” This ruling made front-page headlines around the Persian Gulf.
Police Escort Shoppers
◆ A highly successful experiment was much appreciated by elderly shoppers in the Coney Island section of New York city. It involved the use of a police escort two days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for those elderly who wanted to go shopping but were afraid to because of the high incidence of crime in the area. Two police vans shuttled them to and from neighborhood shopping centers. Police officers watched over those at the pickup sites and shopping centers. One policeman remarked at the appreciation that the elderly women showed: “I’ve never been kissed so much in my life.”
Artificial Skin
◆ Doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston report the successful use of artificial skin to replace skin destroyed by burns. Made from cowhide, shark cartilage and plastic, it was used on 10 burn patients who had suffered third-degree burns over 50 to 90 percent of their bodies. Three of the 10 “probably would have died” without it, said Dr. John F. Burke, head of the surgical team. None of the patients needed drugs to suppress their immune systems. So the new skin does not increase the risk of fatal infection. Dr. Burke said it was too soon to predict how long the body would keep this artificial skin without rejecting it, but he believed it would be for a lifetime.
Library “Rip-Off”
◆ The Metro Library in Toronto, Canada, is losing books at the rate of 12,000 a year, damaged or stolen. The cost to taxpayers is $250,000 annually, reports the Toronto Star. The library caught one person who already had removed 20 pages from books that had a replacement value of $1,000. Often the apprehended thief will claim that he is only taking something that can be replaced, that the city is rich and he is poor, and that his “intellectual needs” are more important than the taxpayers’ costs.
Noise Affects Blood Pressure
◆ It has been well established that excessive levels of noise can impair a person’s hearing. Studies at the University of Miami School of Medicine indicate that noise can also trigger high blood pressure, a cause of strokes and heart attacks. Experimental monkeys were exposed each day, for nine months, to the kind of noise that people who work in noisy industries are exposed to daily. The average rise in blood pressure was 27 percent over the study period. Blood-pressure level was increased, however, without hearing being impaired, since the noise level the monkeys were exposed to was not excessively high. During the month following the experiments, the monkeys’ blood pressure remained high, which may indicate the long-term effect that noise can have.
Dialing Jokes Not Funny
◆ The United States General Services Administration calculated that employees of various government agencies in one federal building in Manhattan were spending so much time ringing up telephone company services such as “Dial-A-Joke” (as well as recorded horoscopes, betting results and others) that the government’s phone bill there increased by $3,000 a month. These unauthorized calls are increasing at local agencies and private concerns as well. A New York City official estimated that unauthorized calls to the “Dial-It” lines added at least $250,000 a year to the city’s phone bill. The telephone company says that it received 299 million calls on its various “Dial-It” lines during 1980, an increase of 34 million over 1979.
“Hot” Cars
◆ Stealing cars is big business in the United States. Over a million are stolen each year, and many are “exported” to different countries for several times the domestic price. Estimates of the total number sent overseas range up to 200,000. A U.S. Customs Service officer said: “The problem’s very close to getting out of hand.” Since so many cars are shipped out of the country in legal trade, there are not enough Customs workers to check for illegal ones. Also, says a senior Customs agent in Washington: “We don’t encourage people to work on auto theft because we have other mandated priorities.”
Underground Fires
◆ More than 250 underground coal-mine fires are now burning in the United States, reports the New York Times. Some of these have required mass evacuation of residents. For example, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, an underground coal fire has been burning for 19 years. It was ignited in 1962 by refuse burning in a waste dump that had been dug over a coal seam. Noxious gases and cave-ins due to the fires have come close to taking lives. One 13-year-old boy barely escaped when a huge hole opened up in a yard and almost swallowed him. A service station owner almost lost his life when fumes from an underground fire depleted his oxygen supply as he slept. Found unconscious, he was revived with an oxygen pump. The Bureau of Mines has spent several million dollars trying to solve the problem in Centralia alone. But all efforts have failed to put out the fire. Some experts say that the only sure solution would be the removal of the 109 homes in the affected area, and then the excavation of the fire.
Silent Majority
◆ Seventy-three percent of federal employees in the United States who had abundant knowledge of illegal and wasteful government activities did not report them. They felt that nothing would be done to correct the situation. Fear of reprisal was the reason 19 percent gave for keeping quiet. Of those employees who did come forward, nearly half said that the abuses they reported were not corrected.
Brains Drain
◆ American high school students who get high marks on annual Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) are a vanishing breed. “From 1972 to 1980, the number of students scoring better than 650 out of a possible 800 points on the verbal part of the SAT dropped 46 percent,” reports U.S. News & World Report magazine. Of nearly one million students who took the test last year, only 29,019 scored above 650, while 53,794 did so eight years earlier in 1972.