The Sky is Falling!
A recent suggestion was that there is a pending crisis in childhood diabetes and that schools need to do more to avoid a disaster.
It quoted figures to suggest that 2 or 3 out of every 100,000 school aged children (up to 15 years of age) have Type 2 Diabetes. That’s not good, trust me.
But if they are all at state schools, that’s actually less than one child for every 130 schools for goodness sake.
I am assuming of course that none of those dozen or so children attend private schools, as I understand from the same sources that those schools really look after their students.
Maybe if we all moved our kids to private schools we could save them (and save the education budget a packet in the process.)
Yes, diabetes is a serious problem but it’s not caused by state schools. Nor is childhood obesity - which is now permanently shackled to overweight which is not the same thing.
We must, as a community, be wary of public attitudes being shaped by small reader’s polls in newspapers. More wary still that such attitudes be allowed to substitute for hard facts and good science in driving public policy.
These are real community health issues, whatever their magnitude, and attempts to point the finger of blame at state schools and then fund the so-called solutions from the education budget must be resisted.
We should all be demanding that the health budgets (at all government levels) accept that it is their brief to deal with these major health issues, get the science right and develop workable solutions.
We should also be demanding that these same Health agencies provide all the necessary additional resources (including staffing) to implement any school based campaigns that have demonstrated merit.