Jamie Oliver at TED: Teach every child about food

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

Investigating easy bruising in a child

From BMJ:

In a child, unusual bruising or bleeding out of proportion to the injury sustained should be investigated.

All children under investigation for easy bruising or a bleeding tendency should have:

- full blood count
- blood film (peripheral smear)
- coagulation screen including a thrombin time, in addition to a Von Willebrand factor assay and assays of factors VIII and IX

This is to ensure that mild forms of haemophilia are excluded even if the activated partial thromboplastin time is normal

In 30% of cases of haemophilia, there is no family history: it arises secondary to new genetic mutations


The coagulation cascade. Black arrow - conversion/activation of factor. Red arrows - action of inhibitors. Blue arrows - reactions catalysed by activated factor. Grey arrow - various functions of thrombin. Image source: Wikipedia

References:
Investigating easy bruising in a child. Anderson and Thomas 341, BMJ.

'Nodding disease' - Sudan and Uganda's incurable child disease with unknown cause

AlJazeeraEnglish: Hundreds of children in southern Sudan have died from a mysterious illness that they have called the "nodding disease". The mentally and physically disabling disease, which has no cure yet and affects only children, first emerged in Sudan in 1980s.

"We have no clue as what is causing this. It's like a detective novel and a murder mystery, because it's fatal," says a tropical disease specialist from UNICEF.

Bizarrely, the seizures occur when the sufferers start to eat, or when it is particularly cold. When a bowl of sorghum is placed in front of Susannah, the "nodding" begins almost immediately, and stop when she has finished eating.

Some villagers say the disease is a curse, others blame the country's long civil war and suspect that government forces have been dropping chemical weapons.

93% of those surveyed are infected with a parasitic worm which causes Onchocerciasis (also known as river blindness). However, the level of infection among children without "nodding" is 63%. The worm is carried by black flies which breed near fast-flowing rivers.



A team of CDC experts conducts a multifaceted investigation in northern Uganda. An Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer tells the story about Nodding Disease, a neurologic syndrome which is devastating to afflicted children.

References:

'Nodding disease' hits Sudan. BBC, 2003.

African outbreak stumps experts: childhood nodding syndrome. Nature, 2011.
Mysterious nodding disease debilitates children - CNN, 2012.