Lighting up: It makes perfect sense to ban smoking at state mental hospitals in an effort to improve the health of patients. However, patients at Connecticut Valley Hospital disagreed and filed suit, arguing that for many, the hospital is their home and smoking one of their few pleasures. If they light up outside in designated smoking areas, they believed they were harming no one else. They filed suit against the state. As a result of the suit and the coverage, the state decided to postpone the smoking ban and study the issue further.
Coming Home to Harkness: Fifty years ago, children with disabilities -blindness, physical disabilities, mental retardation -lived separate lives from other children. During the summer time they felt lucky to be shuttled off to special camps designed for them like Camp Harkness in Connecticut. Now many of those same children -now adults -are still going to the same camps while today’s children are more likely to be “mainstreamed” into ordinary camp programs. We visited Harkness to talk to some of those middle-aged and older adults who have been coming to Camp Harkness since they were children to discuss the camp spirit and why they return season after season.
Autism and Race: Advocates for children with autism say that black and Hispanic children with the disability are far less likely to be diagnosed and get the treatment they need. One study says that African American children are 2.6 times less likely to receive and autism diagnosis on their first visit to a specialty care office and more likely to be misdiagnosed with conduct disorder and adjustment disorder. This story profiled one such child, Ronnie Bonner, and talked to experts about why there is this disparity in diagnosis and treatment. The story was aimed at raising awareness about this problem
Saving Stem Cells: Depending on who you talk to, banking your child’s umbilical cord blood is a forward-thinking and potentially life-saving, disease-curing step or its an expensive measure that you will probably never have reason to use. Those in the latter camp would prefer the widespread establishment of public banks, rather than private ones. This is a look at the issue, including interviews with parents who decided to preserve the cord-blood. A sidebar talks about the advantages of banking the placenta stem cells as well as the umbilical cord blood.