Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

PNCHA ready for Children's Week activities

Plans for the annual Children's Week program are being finalized by the Prescott-Nevada County Health Alliance.

At the PNCHA's March meeting, Prissy Traczewitz said plans are shaping up nicely. The body walk will arrive Thursday, but volunteers will be needed to set it up and work it. Candace Carrie has the training manual and will be working with teachers at Prescott Elementary School, getting them ready for the activity.

Janet McAdams said about 14 people will be needed to work the different stations of the body walk. The walk, basically, will lead children through the human body, where they will be taught about the organs and what they do.

Phillip McAdams said the fire house will be ready for Children's Week. This activity teaches children how to escape safely from a burning building. It is a "shrunken" two-story house which has non-toxic smoke pumped in to simulate a fire. Children are shown how to climb out the windows and exit by the doors in a safe manner.

Lori Arnette spoke on doing body mass indexes (BMI) for students in the Prescott School District. The screenings, she said, began at McRae Middle School. Once the BMIs are done at MMS, the crew will move to Prescott Elementary School, then to Prescott High School. The BMIs will show how much body fat the students have.

Arnette said it will take until the middle of May to do BMIs for all the students. Once gathered, though, the information will be sent to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, with reports also being sent to parents.

The BMIs, she said, will see the students having their height measured twice and weight once.

Prescott, she said, is one of the few schools in the state to start doing the BMIs.

Janet McAdams presented a PowerPoint program on women in smoking. The idea, she said, is to dispel myths about women and smoking as smoking is the leading cause of preventable death killing 440,000 people per year. However, she added, obesity is a close second, as some 400,000 people a year die from complications arising from being obese.

From smoking alone, though, 178,00 women die annually, with 1,700 in Arkansas dying from smoke-related illnesses. This costs the state $75 million annually for health care, or about $475 per household in the state.

Tobacco companies, McAdams said, target women and girls, and in the 1970s began keying in on the very young. For 12-year-old girls during the 1970s, smoking increased 110 percent.

One of the reasons for the increase in women's smoking was the introduction of cigarettes designed specifically for women, such as Virginia Slims. However, McAdams said, tobacco companies also targeted minorities.

The end result, she said, is 68,000 women in America die from lung cancer each year. Lung cancer in women has been on the rise since the 1930s, and women with the same smoking history as men are more than twice as likely to have lung cancer.

However, McAdams said, cancer is still the second leading cause of death in women, following cardiovascular disease. More women than men die due to heart disease.

Women who smoke are at unique health risks, she said. Smoking can result in reduced fertility, increasing the chance of having a stroke, low birth weight in babies, can cause spontaneous abortions, stillbirth and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Along with this, women who smoke will eventually develop what is termed "smoke face" and look older than they are.

The lower tar and nicotine in women's cigarettes, McAdams said, doesn't mean a reduced risk of disease because more cigarettes are smoked to get the same amount of nicotine. But, she added, women are more likely than men to smoke light or ultra light cigarettes.

While tobacco companies have made health claims about their product, she said, no government agency has checked to see these claims are true.

"Tobacco is highly addictive," she said, "more so than cocaine or heroin."

The next meeting of the PNCHA will be held April 27 at the St. Michael Community Room, with Dr. Faye Boozman the featured speaker.