Health & Safety

Let’s put aside the question of whether or not you want to get the H1N1 vaccine because that is one spicy meatball, and for the time being assume you want to get it for yourself or your children. The first few flu-vaccine clinics last weekend were swamped with patients seeking the vaccine, waiting hours on line according to the San Francisco Chronicle. There will be more clinics in November, and only time will tell what the waits there will be like.Vaccine events vary in each city; you can supposedly go to your city’s public health department website (here is a list of California health departments) for more information. Many of the sites are all but useless, with a lot of information on covering your mouth when you cough but not much about where to get the vaccine they keep advising you to get. San Francisco’s site is typical in that it tells you to call your primary care provider and ask about vaccines, but the San Franicsco health department’s swine flu Twitter feed has more up-to-date information, and SF residents can also call 311 for updates. Contra Costa’s public health department site is a welcome contrast from SF’s, with detailed info on upcoming drive-through flu clinics.

Many Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS MinuteClinic locations also have the H1N1 shots; call the stores nearest you to ask. Kaiser patients can phone 800-573-5811 to find out where to go get the shot. Walgreens also has dedicated flu shot clinics. Flu.gov has a ton of information and links that will panic you and make you say “Just tell me where to get the shot! Argh!” Hmm, maybe you’re better off calling your primary care physician after all.

Taking a CPR/emergency class for infants and children is such a pain…but not as big a pain as helplessly watching a child choke or stop breathing in front of you. CPR classes are offered daily all over the Bay Area, and many organizations will give lessons free to a group of parents. Make learning CPR the focus of your next mommy-get-together, or contact one of these fine civic organizations:

DayOne: This San Francisco parenting support organization offers several classes monthly for $45.

CPR Family: Classes in San Rafael and San Francisco run $35-75; pre-crawling babies are welcome.

American Red Cross: The paterfamilias of lifesaving organizations offers classes in most communities for around $50. Type in your ZIP code to find the location nearest you.

SafetyMax: Will give seminars for groups of 12 (minimum) in your Bay Area home or office.

CPR Education Seminars: Teaches safety classes all over the North and South Bay as well as in San Francisco.

Last week’s horrific death of young Everett Carey, the four-month-old who died in a BART parking lot when his father forgot to drop him off at daycare and instead left him in the car with windows rolled up, underlines how tragic accidents can happen to anyone unwary. It’s easy to think that it couldn’t happen to you, that you’re more responsible and aware than that. But Alan Carey, Everett’s dad, probably thought that too.

The combination of a sleep-deprived parent, a busy schedule, and a rear-facing infant seat that holds a sleeping, silent baby can be a deadly one. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “Nationally, an average of 36 children a year die when they are trapped in overheated cars. Some get into the cars on their own and some are intentionally left by parents, but the majority are forgotten by a parent or caregiver who fails to glance in the backseat.”

What Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten calls a “fatal distraction” could happen to you. Some tips on keeping your kids safe, from kidsandcars.org:

– Keep a stuffed animal, preferably a large or eye-catching one, in your car seat and place it in the passenger seat as a reminder whenever the child is in back.

– Always put something in the backseat, such as a purse, lunch bag, or briefcase, that makes you have to open the back door each time you park.

– Tell your daycare provider to call you and other emergency contacts if your child does not arrive by a certain time each day.

But you’re not going to buy those hard, yucky, white-inside berries from the grocery store, are you? Get the very best berries, and teach your children a lesson about nature at the same time, with a trip to a local farmers’ market. The produce in Northern California is some of the best in the country, and the farmers’ markets are thus bursting with stalls selling fruits and vegetables so fine they’re the stuff of fever dreams. Carrots as sweet as apples! Peaches with juice that runs down your face and you don’t even care!

Picking through piles of produce can also help introduce kids to new fruits and vegetables. The delicate swirls of sweet pea shoots and mounds of emerald kale and mustard green are so beautiful, they must be tasty too, right, kids?

Some markets have prepared-food stalls too: honey, dips and jams, nuts, ethnic food. Or there are fish, egg, or fresh-poultry sellers, it’s not all about produce. But it is about buying food that’s as beautiful as it is healthy. To find out what markets are near you, visit localharvest.org.

Healthy-food-oriented parents whose kids attend a SFUSD school will want to be at Mission High School on Thursday night, at a special meeting organized by parents who hope to change SFUSD’s food policies. Here’s what the flyer says:

Are you interested in learning more about the food in SFUSD schools, and how to improve it? Do you want to see more fresh fruits and vegetables served with school meals? Perhaps you have heard about the food in Berkeley schools and wonder why San Francisco is different? Are you dreaming about locally-grown foods in our cafeterias?”

Why, yes! Yes, I am! I’ll see you there. This is just an evening of brainstorming; petitioning the SFUSD will come later. The meeting is at Thursday, May 21 at 7pm at Mission High School, 3750 18th Street (at Dolores) in San Francisco. Email lenabrook@yahoo.com or visit groups.yahoo.com/group/sffoodsystems/.

For more inspiration, see our earlier post on Ann Cooper, Director of Nutrition for the exemplary Berkeley Unified School District.

While trying to handle the unspooling chaos that is life with kids, many a parent has wished there were someone to bring groceries to them. There are grocery stores that deliver, but you have to know exactly what you want, including product sizes, when you call in to order. Safeway.com has a delivery service too, but in general the produce you can get ranges from meh to total crap.

Sonoma’s Planet Organics has groceries and prepared foods that are much more in line with what health-minded Bay Area parents want their kids to eat. Pristine, local, organic fruits and vegetables in season, organic meats, dairy, pantry staples, even prepared meals all ready to heat up. Customers can have regular deliveries of fruits, vegetables, and groceries; they can go in and order what they want for each weekly or bi-weekly delivery, or they can just order once to try it out. Meat and other perishables are packed with cold-packs so they can sit in a hallway or on a porch until you get home to put it in the fridge.

There’s no delivery fee, but you’ll pay out the nose: $5 mangoes and $8 pounds of asparagus are not uncommon, though there are always decent bargains on seasonal fruit. What you get, however, is choice, beautiful, and absolutely top-notch. You know, the kind of food you’d like your kids to eat.

Planet Organics serves the entire Bay Area: as far east as Livermore, as far North as Petaluma, and as far south as San Jose. Call 800-956-5855 or visit planetorganics.com.

Since when did shopping for groceries become an exercise in balancing priorities instead of just an errand? When you made kids. Having a couple of small people along for the ride really makes you think twice before you grab a box of Pop-Tarts. On the other hand, who can afford to buy organic/natural/locally made all the time? Choosing products is, too often, a tradeoff between what you want and what you can afford, with a lot of information gaps in between to guarantee that you’re both confused and stressed.

Good Guide, once an academic project at UC Berkeley, has become a valuable parental hand-holding resource, with ratings and health/environmental information on thousands of products. What’s in that store-brand toothpaste? Does it really make sense to buy Annie’s organic mac-and-cheese instead of Kraft blue box? Is a tube of California Baby sunscreen worth the $18 or so it costs? For each product Good Guide has an ingredient list that notes which additives are controversial and why, information on makers’ environmental performance, data on the water and energy used to make products, and even data on “social performance:” how the company treats its workers and customers. You’ll never buy blind again.

Good Guide, goodguide.com.

A story in the Marin-Independent Journal spells out the greatest fear of pro-vaccination parents right in the first sentence: “Health officials say the rising number of Marin parents who choose not to vaccinate their children against infectious disease could be putting other children and adults at risk.”

It seems that Marin has one of California’s highest rates of “personal belief exemptions,” a legal document that allows parents to enroll non-vaccinated children in kindergarten. Obviously, any kid who doesn’t get vaccinated can catch a childhood disease like measles or polio. However, as the Journal points out, they can also endanger other kids, even those who were vaccinated, since the vaccinations are not 100 percent effective.

Problems have already occurred. As the Journal writes, “An outbreak of chicken pox affected more than 40 students at the Lagunitas and San Geronimo Valley elementary schools in 2007, where 17 and 57 percent of students had received personal belief exemptions from vaccination. In addition, the Lagunitas School District excluded about 70 students from the two schools for three weeks out of concern that they were at high risk of contagion. Many of them had never been vaccinated.”

So on the one hand you have people like Jenny McCarthy saying that vaccines were behind her son’s autism diagnosis, and on the other you have stories like this. No wonder parents in Marin and elsewhere are scared, even considering the recent news that the most prominent anti-vax researcher faked his famous results.

Wow! Look at that picture! Little Kamani Hubbard was born at San Francisco’s Saint Luke’s hospital about three weeks ago, with a very rare anomaly: 24 functioning fingers and toes, one extra digit per limb. As Seattle’s KIRO-TV reports, the baby’s hands and feet appeared so perfect that at first even the doctors and nurses didn’t notice the extra digits.

Partial extra fingers and toes are relatively common and run strongly in families–Kamani’s dad had himself had an extra half-a-finger removed as a child. But well-formed fingers that can move are incredibly rare, and doctors are urging the Hubbards and others to think of his extra digits as a rare gift:

“It’s merely an interesting and beautiful variation rather than a worrisome thing,” said Dr. Michael Treece and St. Luke’s Hospital Pediatrician. “I would be tempted to leave those fingers in place. I realize children would tease each other over the slightest things, and having extra digits on each hand is more than slight. But imagine what sort of a pianist a 12-fingered person would be, imagine what sort of a flamenco guitarist, if nothing else think of their typing skills.”

OMG, imagine the piecrust you could make with 12 fingers.

The reversal of my cat’s fortunes is made crystal clear for those that take a peek into my digital photo album: page after page of Bobo sleeping. Bobo eating. Bobo stretching and showing his belly. Bobo sniffing my infant daughter’s head…and then no more pictures of Bobo. But he’s lucky: at least I still love him. According to SF Gate “Your Whole Pet” columnist Christie Keith, it’s not uncommon for parents to actually start hating their pets once they’ve spawned. The dog who used to get Christmas cards is now  viewed with fear and loathing.

The problem, says Christie, is that childless folks turn pets into “practice babies” instead of dogs. They sleep in bed, they eat at the table, they ride in the front seat, and they’re generally used to being treated like little humans. And when their owners have a kid and start directing all that energy at a real little human, they get furious at the animal who continues to expect sibling status.

Christie says the solution is to know what to expect of animals and treat them accordingly (hint: animals are not inclined to have birthday parties, with hats and dog-food cakes); but I’m thinking the solution is “wait a little while.” When the kids are blowing you off to hang out with their buddies instead, those puppy dog eyes are going to start looking mighty good again.