A panel at the Values Voter Summit says that the national media is missing the boat when it comes to young people and sex.
“When young adults are asked what they are looking for, they’re not looking for hook-ups. They’re preferring romance over sex, relationships over sex. But most people don’t recognize that,” Valerie Huber, president and CEO of the National Abstinence Education Association said.
She cited a survey from the Centers for Disease Control that showed a 15 percent increase in the number of young people waiting to have sex until marriage.
Huber added that many young people are looking to the media to portray reality rather than pushing a hyper-sexualized agenda on the community.
“Here is what this generation wants: they want the media to show more youth not having sex. They want to hear more reasons to wait for sex — and this is according to a very broad national study — and they want to hear that waiting for sex is realistic; and they want to know waiting for sex is, in fact, quite normal,” said Huber.
David Knopp of Summit Ministries said parents, mentors and peers need to step up and take back control of sex education from those who want to make sex appear as something just for fun or something insignificant to the larger parts of life.
Chelsen Vicari of the Institute on Religion and Democracy said that young Christians need to better defend the Biblical view on sexuality to those inside and outside the church and strive for the purity that God calls for everyone before marriage.
The mysterious viral illness that has been striking children has now spread to 38 states.
The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed 226 cases of enterovirus 68. However, the CDC admits that many other children have likely been infected with the virus and was not severe enough to seek medical attention at a hospital.
Doctors say the reports of the CDC are the “tip of the iceberg” for the mysterious virus.
University of Chicago’s Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital has been forced to divert ambulances to other hospitals because the emergency room was filled with children suffering from severe respiratory illness. It was the first time in 10 years the hospital had to divert ambulances.
Doctors say that while enteroviruses are common illnesses, enterovirus 68 is rare.
“Parents would love to know why this virus is causing severe disease and why there are more cases,” Rafal Tokarz, an associate research scientist at Columbia University who has studied the virus, told the New York Times, “but we won’t be able to answer that until a lot more research is done.”
The Centers for Disease Control is laying out the case for a very grim start to the new year.
The CDC says that as little as 550,000 and up to 1.4 million people could be infected with Ebola by the start of the new year if it is not contained. The World Health Organization says that so far they only have 5,800 confirmed cases and 2,800 deaths, but admit there could be cases in rural areas that are not reported to health care officials.
The CDC report says that currently cases in Liberia are doubling every 15-20 days and doubling in Guinea & Sierra Leone every 30 to 40 days.
The CDC admits their scenario does not take into account the 3,000 troops and medical personnel that President Obama is sending to the region to attempt to control the spread of the killer virus.
The CDC also said that if 70 percent of patients are cared for in proper medical facilities the epidemic can be contained.
The WHO also released a report showing that 337 healthcare workers have been infected with the virus while helping victims and 181 of them have died.
The rare virus that sickened children in California last year and slammed Kansas City a few weeks ago has now been found in ten states.
Doctors say the rare virus, Human Enterovirus 68, is related to rhinovirus which causes the common cold. The Centers for Disease Control says that 10 states have shown cases of the virus: Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Georgia.
Dr. Richard Besser, the Chief Health and Medical Editor for ABC News, said that viruses “don’t respect borders” and that he expects it to appear across the country.
“If your state doesn’t have it now,” Dr. Besser said, “Watch for it, it’s coming.”
Doctors from Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver said that the virus stats showing signs of a cold such as sneezing and coughing. The victims then start wheezing and have trouble breathing similar to an asthma attack.
Children under 5 and those with asthma are considered to be at highest risk. Some patients have to be in intensive care for 4-7 days to assist breathing until the virus clears the system.
The head of the CDC is publicly stating that the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is “spiraling out of control” as the death toll has topped 1,900 and another American missionary has been confirmed to be infected with the virus.
Dr. Tom Frieden reports many countries “turned their backs” on those coming form countries who have been hit hard by the virus and that containment measures are actually hurting relief efforts in effected areas.
Frieden attended a United Nations conference where the world agency says over $600 million will be needed in medication and supplies to stop the outbreak.
The health officials at the UN conference also warned of the increase in spread of the virus. Cases have been reported in Nigeria and Senegal adding to the number of nations treating patients.
“We are working intensively with those governments to encourage them to commit to the movement of people and planes and at the same time deal with anxieties about the possibility of infection,” UN Coordinator for Ebola Dr. David Nabarro said.
Meanwhile, another health worker for the Christian relief agency SIM has been confirmed as a victim of the virus. Details are still sketchy regarding the latest case but officials say the man was working with pregnant women in a wing of the hospital away from Ebola cases and it was not clear how he was infected.
The Centers for Disease Control has issued their highest alert activation over the Ebola outbreak.
Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC Director, announced on the social network Twitter Wednesday the operations center has moved to a “level one response.”
The last two times the CDC has elevated to a level one was the 2009 outbreak of bird flu and to cover the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. The level one is basically an “all hands on deck” order to stop the outbreak of disease.
The increase by the CDC is coming in the wake of Nigerian authorities admitting they did not immediately quarantine a sick man who arrived on an airplane that later died of Ebola. At least one other person directly connected to the man died of the disease and five others are confirmed to have the virus.
“What we do know is that the Ebola virus, both currently and in the past, is controllable if you have a strong public health infrastructure in place,” President Obama said. “The countries that have been affected are the first to admit that what’s happened here is that their public health systems have been overwhelmed. They weren’t able to identify and then isolate cases quickly enough. You did not have a strong trust relationship between some of the communities that were affected and public health workers. As a consequence, it spread more rapidly than has been typical with the periodic Ebola outbreaks that have occurred previously.”
Dr. Pritish Tosh of the Mayo Clinic said that the conditions in the field to deal with Ebola are nowhere near the level of industrialized countries like the United States.
Two American missionaries who contracted the Ebola virus while working to help the African victims of the disease are being brought to the United States.
Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol are being flown to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. The two will be held in a very strictly controlled wing of the hospital inside a chamber with negative pressure keeping air inside the wing.
Both of the patients are said to be in grave but stable condition.
The patients are reportedly going to be transferred on a special plane chartered by the CDC that has isolation pods. The move comes on the heels of an experimental treatment being sent to Liberia. Dr. Brantley refused to take it and demanded it be given to Nancy Writebol.
The CDC issued a warning to travelers to avoid Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Samaritan’s Purse, SIM and the Peace Corps are all pulling their volunteers from those countries because of the uncontrolled outbreak of the virus.
A doctor with the Christian humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse has been confirmed as a victim of the Ebola virus.
Dr. Kent Branley has been heading up one of the relief and treatment centers hosted by Samaritan’s Purse since last October. He had been in Liberia with his wife and children, who have since been evacuated to the United States.
“Samaritan’s Purse is committed to doing everything possible to help Dr. Brantley during this time of crisis,” the organization said in a statement. “We ask everyone to please pray for him and his family.”
The group has been working with the Centers for Disease Control, Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization and Liberia’s Ministry of Health to control the outbreak that has infected almost 1,100 people and killed 660.
A second American doctor, Nancy Writebol, is suspected to have contracted the disease as well and is undergoing confirmatory testing.
The Food and Drug Administration said that a federal employee who found six vials of the deadly smallpox virus in a cardboard box in a storage room at a Maryland lab also found hundreds of vials of other diseases.
The samples included influenza, rickettsia (which can cause the lethal Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) and dengue.
FDA official said Wednesday the collection of 327 vials of the various diseases was found at the same time as the smallpox virus vials announced last week.
Testing at the CDC discovered the smallpox viruses in the vial were alive and infectious.
“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” said Karen Midthun, of FDA’s director for biologics. “However, upon finding these materials our staff did the right thing – they immediately notified the appropriate authorities who secured the materials and determined there was no exposure.”
The FDA said 32 vials of tissue samples and non-contagious virus were destroyed at the laboratory and the remaining 279 samples were sent to the Department of Homeland Security for storage.
The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed the death of a Texas patient who contracted a disease connected to Mad Cow Disease.
The patient died from Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The disease is a rare, degenerative and fatal brain disorder that is caused by the consumption of meat and other products from cows suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “Mad Cow Disease.”
The CDC said this is the fourth time Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease has been found in the United States. The first three cases were confirmed to have contracted the virus outside the USA where the variant is more prevalent and the most recent patient had extensively traveled to Europe and the Middle East. Most of the world’s cases have been in the United Kingdom and France.
Classic CJD is not caused by the Mad Cow Disease related agent. In the United States, classic CJD is found in one person per 1 million residents each year.
