Anatomy for education

 by Paula Johanson

How are children and youths to learn about bodies for health and sex education? This topic is a matter of careful thought for many parents. And there are resources to help families with learning the science of anatomy for health and sex education.

Some of these resources are formal and written about the science of how this knowledge helps people. The United Nations World Health Organization has an e-book on International technical guidance on sexuality education, available for free download. Click on this link to find their page with links to this free e-book in English, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Russian, and also a link to another page with several more free articles to download in English.

For people needing something more oriented to family learning, there's a whole page of resources recommended by doctors on body knowledge and more available at this link from Planned Parenthood. This list includes recommended books for parents to read on their own and books they can share with their children.

Some teenagers and parents find the website Scarleteen to be useful, with articles on bodies, health, gender, relationships, and more. Scarleteen has been online for over twenty years. While it's not a place for doing science, it's a place for learning. It also has places to ask questions, including a message board and live chat.

Among the newest resources now available is We Are Beautiful, with a website at this link. The organisers of this website are concerned about a lack of educational material that shows the diversity of our bodies. As they note, some people worry that their bodies are ugly. This website has images (in green or purple) of body parts based on adults of many ages and shapes, to show the variety of shape that is normal. These images are also free downloads for a 3D printer.

Even adults who think they know all about their bodies can find things to learn from these books and websites, to improve their knowledge and health.

I Blame Dr. Suzuki, or, Why I Write about Science

By Gillian O'Reilly

How did a history and art history graduate end up writing about science? I blame it on Dr. David Suzuki. Specifically, I blame it on a 30-year-old episode of the radio program Quirks and Quarks, which Suzuki hosted, and on a talk he gave to a group of booksellers some 25 years ago. In both cases, the stories he told lodged themselves in a corner of my mind and slowly, slowly pushed science to the forefront of my interests.

The Quirks and Quarks episode was a presentation of ordinary citizens grappling with a new aspect of science in an extraordinarily thoughtful way. It showed a community somewhere in New England faced with a proposal for a laboratory examining recombinant DNA. Back then, for the ordinary layperson, recombinant DNA was the stuff of science fiction or nightmares or both. As I recall, Quirks and Quarks broadcast parts of the public hearings over at least two episodes, devoting hours to the topic with very little editorial comment. We simply heard ordinary people informing themselves, working through questions and coming up with their conclusions. The lab was allowed.

When David Suzuki spoke to the booksellers a few years later, he began by discussing the all-too-common idea that science doesn’t have anything to do with one’s day-to-day life. Intellectually, I agreed with Suzuki that this idea was wrong, but, frankly, science didn’t seem to have much to do with my day-to-day life either.

Suzuki pointed out that, when he was a child, he wasn’t allowed to go to the movies or the swimming pool because of polio scares. As someone who had measles before there was a vaccine and who had seen the results of childhood polio in 1980s Africa, his statement hit home for me. He detailed other ways that science had changed his and everyone’s lives, but what I remember was the vaccines – the very ordinary way that children’s lives have been changed in ways today’s kids can scarcely imagine.

Over the years, I have recalled and reflected on the stories Suzuki told, as I gradually became more interested in writing about STEM topics. These two episodes showed both the ways in which ordinary people’s lives can be affected by science and the way ordinary laypeople can grasp and make intelligent decisions about science.

So I write about STEM subjects, not just for the budding scientist, but for the kids who will grow up to be historians or artists or school principals or lawmakers – all of whom will need to understand and make intelligent decisions about the wonderful science around us.

Gillian O’Reilly is the co-author with Cora Lee of The Great Number Rumble, Revised and Updated: A Story of Math in Surprising Places (Annick Press, 2016), illustrated by Lil Crump.

Quarantine Tent looks to the past in the discussion about vaccines

By Pippa Wysong

When it comes to communicating science, talking to people in-person is still a valid approach. Often getting an idea or information across is about the experience, and interacting with real people.

The Quarantine Tent is an experience. Here, visitors meet people transported from the past who have vaccine-preventable diseases from an era before vaccines were available.

At the Quarantine Tent, volunteers play the roles of diseases vaccination can now prevent. Pippa Wysong photo.

With vaccination rates dropping, diseases such as whooping cough and measles that were once tamed in populations are starting to make a come-back. And for some people, these diseases have debilitating long-term effects. Many of today’s parents don’t have the context, in terms of history, as to what the risks of these diseases mean in terms of a non-vaccinated population.

The Tent was first presented at Canada’s biggest, nation-wide science festival, Science Rendezvous in 2013 at the University of Toronto location where the actors (mostly medical students) and I interacted with over 500 visitors to the tent. As of July 2014, the Tent has now been to two Science Rendezvous festivals, was invited to set-up at a 100th anniversary fair put on by Sanofi-Pasteur on the historic Connaught Laboratories property, and hosted by the Hamilton Public Health Services for the city’s Open Streets festival.

At the Tent you can meet smallpox. He’s 20, from 1921, and the blisters on his face and hands look terrible. He contracted the disease in Ottawa when he was visiting family during an outbreak. He lost several family members there to smallpox, including his father and younger brother. That year, Ottawa saw 1,352 cases, and 30%-50% of non-vaccinated people who got smallpox died.

The last case in Canada occurred in 1967 from someone returning from Brazil. A success story of vaccination, globally smallpox was eliminated in 1979.

Or meet diphtheria. She is 19 and from 1913 when there was an outbreak in Toronto. She‘ll tell you how she lost her kid sister from the disease just a few days ago, how a younger brother is struggling, and will describe the symptoms of “The Strangling Disease”.

In the 1920s, diphtheria killed 15% of children between 2 and 14 every year. Until 1920, about 12,000 cases and 1,000 deaths occurred each year in Canada (those numbers would be bigger with today’s population). After the vaccine was introduced, diphtheria deaths and incidence fell sharply and major cities, for the first time, reported zero cases by the mid 1930s.

The Quarantine Tent also features polio, HPV, measles, 1918 flu and whooping cough. My grandfather, Dr. Gordon Bates was a physician and national public health activist from WW-I through to the 1970s who treated these diseases and saw the havoc they wreaked. The inspiration for the Tent came from the stories of old that I grew up with, and the education bug is probably inherited.

Vaccines have been an incredible success story in terms of reducing the incidence of these diseases. Unfortunately, growing numbers of people not vaccinating their children – largely because they don’t know how devastating these diseases, unchecked, really can be. People from the past will tell you about seeing loved one or friends getting sick, dying or developing disabilities from these diseases. Ever hear of the permanent hearing loss caused by ‘measles ear’? Serious complications occur in upwards of 10% of measles cases.

Or, they have been misinformed about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, both challenging things to communicate to people who don’t understand statistics. A simple message from the Tent is ‘what does society look like without vaccines’?

Or, they’re worried about ingredients in vaccines (which were all tested for safety before being added, by the way). Formaldehyde sounds scary. But the amount in a vaccine is far less than what your own body produces, and 600 times less than what occurs in a pear (it’s a natural metabolite), and is easily cleared by the body. With many things, it’s the quantity that makes the poison and the amounts naturally made by your body and in vaccines are miniscule.

By the way, there are over 12,000 peer-reviewed studies in the medical literature on vaccines, population effects, long-term effects, safety and more. Knowledge is constantly increasing.

No medical treatment is 100% effective or 100% safe, and that’s another difficult concept to communicate. People would like zero risk, but that’s not possible. Surgery and headache remedies have risks too, but most of us benefit from them. A risk that is ‘rare’ is difficult to communicate because people think ‘what if I’m that one?’. So, turn that around to how ‘common’ the risks are if diseases are unchecked -- and suddenly a ‘rare’ risk looks better.

There is always someone out there for whom a treatment doesn’t quite do the job, or who experiences a bad side effect. But looking at it from a population point of view, the treatments are far safer and beneficial than having masses of people suffering the condition.

All these diseases (except smallpox) are still around, and if vaccination rates keep dropping, could make a serious come back. All of them.

So, vaccines, why bother? Take a trip to the past to find out.

Thoughts on WiFi, Science and Science Reporting

Posted by Gillian O’Reilly

Recently, the Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association called for an end to new WiFi setups in the province's 1,400-plus Catholic schools, saying computers in new schools should be hardwired instead. The union – which represents 45,000 teachers – cites research by the World Health Organization and said the “safety of this technology has not thoroughly been researched and therefore the precautionary principle and prudent avoidance of exposure should be practised.”

Here are two stories on it:

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/ontario-catholic-teachers-union-urges-ban-on-classroom-wifi/article2336605/

http://toronto.openfile.ca/blog/curator-blog/curated-news/2012/oecta-releases-policy-wi-fi-schools-complete-alarmism-and-sketch

I must admit that I have a little trouble with the WiFi topic because I know someone whose family seems to have been affected by WiFi (grown child with seizures, a grandparent with other issues) and who is very concerned by it.

I am basically agnostic/skeptic on this issue. The only detailed media I have heard about it was a CBC Sunday Edition program that was not very scientifically presented – lots of personal anecdotes from thoughtful and sincere people who have had dramatic encounters with WiFi, one scientist who has talked a lot about this issue and, it seemed, a lack of probing into the scientific details (more the fault of the journalists than the fault of the people concerned about the issue).

On the opposite side, all I have heard are health bodies who say there is no problem. Any one with a memory knows that there have been lots of times that we've been told something was no problem when in fact it was -- but that's history, not science. Again, no real science reporting on how they arrived at that conclusion.

As someone who comes to science from an arts background, my general approach to science is that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy." There are all sorts of new and interesting things being discovered all the time (like a sea sponge that makes a structure of glass! cool, eh?) and scientific thinking changes all the time. The point is to try to be intelligent about it, whether or not one has a science background oneself.

For instance, and to take a dramatic example, it wouldn’t have taken a scientist to ask a few questions to the now-disgraced anti-vaccine campaigner Andrew Wakefield; it would only take a logical, intelligent thinker. How big was your sample, Dr. Wakefield? (Twelve.) Is that a useful sample? (No.) Do you have any conflicts of interest in this matter? (Yes.) You wouldn’t even have to ask, Is it possible you falsified the data? (Yes.) It’s a pity the editors of The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, didn’t ask these questions before they published his report.

So I'm quite prepared to believe that WiFi is a problem and I'm quite prepared to believe that it isn't – as long as I'm told something about the science behind it. I don't want to be told (like my friend) that if I'm concerned, I should go out and get a tinfoil hat. I don't want to be mollified by an official "there is no problem." And I don’t want people feeding me quotes that they haven’t sourced properly.

I simply want science reporters and institutions like OECTA to do what they are supposed to do – ask the tough, logical, scientifically literate questions these issues demand and present the answers to those questions to me clearly. That way I, and the folks making policy decisions on these topics, can do some intelligent informed thinking, whether we are scientists or not.