Salon.com > Safety

Can more armed guards keep our schools safe?

Tue, 07 May 2013 21:17:00 +0000

The debate over placing more armed guards in schools has turned the spotlight on school resource officers who comprise an increasing share of law enforcement personnel in schools—and who worry that their role is misunderstood.

A point of view largely missing from the discussion is whether someone who is sworn to protect school safety should be armed, says Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO)

“When I first got started in this, I was a little concerned that kids were going to be focused on my gun,” adds Canady, a former police lieutenant who spent 12 of his 25 years as a school safety officer in Hoover, AL—where he still lives, and where the national association is based.

“But they weren’t. As I interacted with them and got to know them, it humanized my role. And, yes, I do realize that they still were seeing me as law enforcement.”

Majority of chemicals in household products have never been independently tested

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:59:00 +0000

Current law regulating industrial chemicals commonly used in household products rarely requires companies to provide the federal government with adequate information about their safety, a new report finds.

"Regulators, doctors, environmentalists and the chemical industry agree that the country’s main chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, needs fixing," Ian Urbina wrote in The New York Times on Sunday.

According to the report in the Times:

CDC report: ADHD diagnosis on the rise in the United States

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:15:00 +0000

According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to one in five high school age boys and 11 percent of all school-age children in the United States have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The findings were part of the Centers' study of children and health, in which the agency interviewed more than 76,000 parents across the country.

As The New York Times reports:

The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 53 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis.

And as the Times notes, these numbers are likely to grow as the American Psychiatric Association prepares to expand the definition of the disorder, opening up the possibility of medicating many who wouldn't have previously qualified for the diagnosis.

Has Sandy put our water at risk

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:33:00 +0000

The safety of our water supply is a growing concern after Hurricane Sandy swept millions of gallons of sewage into our waterways. In New Jersey, with many cities and towns still experiencing flooding, several municipalities have issued boil water advisories. However, unlike many regions of the world besieged by floods, deadly diseases such as cholera and typhoid are not a major risk in the U.S. Watch the video below, via HuffPost Live, in which reporters and experts discuss the risks to our water supply: