Rural areas are more dependent on public radio, TV

In the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney said he would cut federal funding for public broadcasting. Public television and radio outlets, including PBS and National Public Radio, received just $445 million of the 2012 budget, about .014 percent. In The Washington Post, Brad Plumer reflected on the importance of public broadcasting, and argued that if the budget is cut, rural areas would suffer the most.

"The usual arguments in favor of public broadcasting focus on the facts that a) public television and radio are highly educational and b) that this government spending mainly benefits rural areas with few other media options," Plumer writes. The government doesn't actually give money to PBS or NPR, he notes; it gives it to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which parcels out the money based on a formula. A lot of it goes to TV programming, the rest goes to 581 local TV and radio stations across the U.S.

PBS would lose just 15 percent of its budget, and NPR just 2 percent if Congress eliminated the public broadcasting budget. But local stations in many rural areas might be forced to close or drastically cut back their programming because more than 50 percent of their funding comes from the government. Plumer says that would be bad for children in rural areas who have only three options for educational programming: Nick Jr., Disney Jr. and PBS. "For families that can't afford cable, PBS is the only option," Plumer wrote. "The big worry is that an end to government funding would leave pockets of the country without public radio and TV, replaced by commercial stations that are less affordable, more saturated with advertising, and less educational." (Read more)

New school-lunch rules produce complaints, more trash, efforts to repeal them

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, the Obama administration's effort to mandate more fresh fruit, vegetables and whole grains into the diets of school children, has some uphill climbing to do and it's not just the kids who are complaining. Though, admittedly, they were the first. Sarah Gonzales of Agri-Pulse took a look at some rural school districts trying to implement the law in advance of the law's implementation deadline, to see how the new science-based standards were working in real lunchrooms. What she found were complaints from student athletes who thought they needed more calories and more options, and substantial increases of good food thrown in the garbage. They also got this parody of "The Hunger Games" from some ingenious Kansas kids:

Dawn Matthews, director of food service for the rural Camdenton school district in Missouri, serves 3,200 school lunches every school day to kids in every grade level from K-12. The new standards, drawn from recommendations from an independent panel of doctors, nutritionists and other experts, require better nutrition and allow schools to serve between 550-650 calories for students in K-5, 600-700 calories of students for 6th through 8th grades, and 750-850 for high school lunches. Agri-Pulse reporters explain that a daily lunch costs $2.10, but almost 60 percent of the meals are offered for free for a reduced price in this rural district. Matthews notes that participation in the program is dropping with the new menu in place.

Urban kids don't like the lunches, either, reports Vivian Yee of The New York Times. (NYT photo by Librado Romero: A Manhattan school where seventh-graders called vegetables "gross.") Even before the deadline for the act to be put into effect, Gonzales notes, Reps. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kans., and Steve King, R-Iowa, introduced the No Hungry Kids Act last month to repeal the new school guidelines. The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture also issued a recent policy statement saying the initial law was "well-intentioned, but falls short of providing a comprehensive policy for educating students in healthy living."

The results of the first few months of trial -- especially the waste -- have been "disheartening," said food director Matthews. It is also early. "I think it's going to evolve over time," said the chairman of Florida's Lake County School Board, Roseanne Brandeburg. "If you're in elementary school, and this is what you're going to be served, you're going to get used to it."

Agri-Pulse is subscription-only, but free trials are offered on its website.

White children exposed to high level of chemical BPA five times more likely to be obese, study finds

White children exposed to high levels of bisphenol A, better known as BPA, are five times more likely to be obese than children with low levels, according to a study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study by the New York University School of Medicine is the first to link the chemical to obesity in children, which is more prevalent in rural areas.

Environment Health News reporter Brien Bienkowski reports that scientists found traces of BPA, which are used in some canned food and beverages, paper receipts and dental sealants, "are found in virtually every U.S. adult and child. In the study of body mass and BPA data from 2,838 youths aged 6 to 19, only white children were found to have significant increases in obesity prevalence as their BPA levels increased. Those with the highest concentrations in their urine were five times more likely to be obese than children with the lowest levels. Black children with higher BPA levels were 1.25 times more likely to be obese than those with lower levels, which the scientists said is not statistically significant. Hispanic children had the same rates of obesity at the highest and lowest levels."

Bienkowski reports that "representatives from the chemical industry said the study had too many weaknesses to prove any connection. Steven Hentges, from the American Chemistry Council's Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group, said that attempts 'to link our national obesity problem to minute exposures to chemicals found in common, everyday products are a distraction from the real efforts underway to address this important national health issue.' "

One study of preschoolers in North Carolina and Ohio found that 99 percent of BPA exposure was through food. But since the chemical is in many plastics and other products, this is difficult for scientists to pin down. “People are always told if you just stop eating or exercise more, you will lose weight. But there may be more to it … and I think there is,” said Retha Newbold, a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, who specializes in BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals.  (Read more)

New website helps farmers keep agritourism safe

Safe Agritourism photo

Agritourism has become increasingly popular as visitors travel to farms to pick their own pumpkins, get lost in corn mazes or pick their own fruit. Keeping those visitors safe is a top priority for farmers, and now they have access to a website guide that can help them do that.

Farmers can use Safe Agritourism to select virtual walk-throughs that are most appropriate for their property and identify health and safety hazard that could exist. Resources are offered that will help farmers fix these hazards. The guidelines are based on "Agritourism Health and Safety Guidelines for Children" that were published in 2007 by the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety.

Features of the interactive website include: pictures that contrast unsafe practices with best practices and guidelines; review questions and resource information; checklists to conduct customized safety walk-throughs; and a resources pages that provides signs, policies, logs and other ready-to-print items. (Read more)

Rural homeschooling increasing, for varied reasons

Homeschooling in the U.S. is on the rise in rural areas, and parents' reasons for the shift are varied, including educational excellence, practical training and religion, author Pamela Price reports for the Daily Yonder. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 1.5 million children were estimated to have been homeschooled in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, and at least one researcher estimated that number to have grown to 2 million in 2010.

The primary reason for homeschooling most commonly cited by NCES in 2007 was "a desire by parents to provide religious or moral instruction in tandem with traditional subjects." Other prevalent reasons included safety concerns, dissatisfaction with academic achievement in public schools, and special health concerns.

Homeschool Legal Defense Association senior counsel Scott Woodruff told Price that homeschooling is a popular option because of an increasing awareness that public schools are underperforming. "Many parents are saying, 'I'm going to take this, the education of my children, on myself," he said, adding that technology now gives parents more options for homeschooling. (Read more)

Researchers look to make farm labor safer for kids

With the help of a tractor-driving simulator, researchers at the University of Iowa and the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin hope to prevent young people from dying in tractor accidents by determining when they can safely operate farm equipment. Results of the study could eventually be used to revise voluntary guidelines for parents and employers about when youth are ready to use certain equipment. (Associated Press photo by Nati Harnik: Mark Gregoricka, 12, operates simulator)

There was much national debate earlier this year about the safety of children working on farms after the Obama administration proposed child farm labor rules that would have restricted the kinds of work children under 18 and 16 could do on non-family farms and adopted a narrower definition of "family farm" that had been used informally for a decade. The proposal was dropped, but the fact remains that teenagers are four times more likely to die on a farm than in any other workplace.

Researchers are studying cognitive development skills in youth while they drive tractors, because children of different ages process information and make decisions differently, The Associated Press reports. Eighty-eight children, aged 10 to 17, will perform a variety of simulated tasks while their speeds, use of brakes, accelerations and eye movements are recorded. The hope is that the simulator can pinpoint differences in the children's performance. (Read more)

Study: Stress of poverty hurts kids' learning ability

A new theory, based on studies matching stress-hormone levels to behavioral and school readiness among children living in poverty, holds that such children have impaired learning abilities partly because of the "stresses of poverty," including crowded conditions, financial worry and lack of adequate child care. The theory is discussed in the September/October issue of Scientific American Mind.

New York University researcher Clancy Blair found that high levels of stress hormones "influence the developing circuity of children's brains, inhibiting such higher cognitive functions such as planning, impulse and emotional control and attention." Those abilities are "important for academic success." Finding ways to reduce poverty stressors in home and school environments could improve children's well being and help them be more academically successful, Blair says in a press release issued by the National Institutes of Health, which funded the study.

As schools prepare to follow new federal lunch rules, fruit and vegetable snack program up for debate

Bloomberg photo by Ian Waldie

As students and teachers return to school, food-service directors are working to implement the new federal school lunch regulations that take effect Oct. 1 -- a story for any local news outlet, since it affects almost every student.

Meanwhile, another school food program is up for debate. Congress is deciding whether frozen, canned and dried produce should be included in the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. House Republicans say yes, to save money and make a wider range of options available year round. But the Senate is pushing to keep the program limited to fresh fruit and vegetables only. The argument — or food fight, as Dina ElBoghdady of The Washington Post calls it — has trade and other groups weighing in.

"If the goal is to expand and improve upon childhood nutrition, it doesn't make sense to limit the kinds of fruit and vegetables that schools serve," said Corey Henry, a spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute. "Let the schools decide." But Sandi Kaur, acting director of nutrition services at the California Department of Education, disagrees, saying "it's the fresh that makes this program unique."

The program allows schools to distribute fresh fruit and vegetables as snacks to students and has "raised consumption in participating schools by a quarter-cup per day, or 15 percent," ElBoghdady reports. "The increase did not contribute to weight gain, suggesting that the fruit and vegetables replaced other foods." Last year, USDA spent $150 million to pay for the snacks for 3 million children. (Read more)

Physician group wants milk out of school lunches

A nonprofit group that promotes a vegan diet is calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to recommend that Congress remove milk from school lunches because it is contributing to childhood obesity. (Photo by Kathleen Flynn, Tampa Bay Times)

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine calls milk an "ineffective placebo" and says a large body of research shows that drinking dairy milk doesn't improve bone health or prevent fractures in children. The group also says milk is "the number one source of saturated fat in children's diets," Feedstuffs reports. "We are asking Congress and the USDA to put children's interests above the interests of the dairy industry," said Susan Levin, PCRM's nutrition education director. She said focusing on milk as the most important source of calcium in children's diets "distracts schools and parents from foods that can actually build bones, like beans and leafy greens."

National Milk Producers Federation President and CEO Jerry Kozak said in a statement, "Milk is the single largest contributor of nutrients in kids' diets," including calcium, potassium, phosphorus, protein and vitamins A, D and B12. (Read more)

Penn State not covered by state open-records law

If Pennsylvania's open-records law applied to Penn State, the Jerry Sandusky scandal might have been uncovered much earlier, saving some children from abuse, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute writes after hearing from Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who broke the story and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ganim (CNN image) "told a group of reporters and editors at Poynter that the open record exemption made it much more difficult to investigate the sex abuse story," Tompkins reports, and explains why the law doesn't apply to The Pennsylvania State University and three other "state-related institutions." He says they must file less information than publicly traded companies have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That is less than politicians have to file when running for state or federal office." Penn State lobbied to keep the exemption when the law was strengthened in 2008.

Tompkins says forner FBI director Louis Freeh, who investigated the university's handling of teh Sandusky matter, should have included making Penn State subject to the open-records law in his recommendations: "The abuse at Penn State is a lesson to us all about what happens when powerful people and public institutions are allowed to operate in the shadows created by what Freeh called a 'closed culture.' It is a culture that protected abusers, failed to protect victims and survived by closing its records to journalists who might have exposed it." (Read more

Lacking money, insurance or dentists, oral health takes a back seat, and rural is barely on the bus

A dentist works at a Remote Area Medical Clinic in Wise, Va.
(Associated Press photo by Steve Helber)

Dental disease is the largest unmet health need in the U.S. among both children and adults, according to the Pew Children’s Dental Campaign. The worst-off are the poor, the young, the old, and those in rural America, reports Margot Sanger-Katz in the National Journal.

Dental disease is among the most common reasons that children miss school. It’s the most common medical reason that soldiers can’t deploy. It is a leading cause of emergency-room visits in several states. For proponents of a freer health care market, who want patients to be motivated by financial incentives to shop around and avoid “unnecessary” care, the dental system offers a glimpse of how such a system might work. And research shows that poor oral health can lead to disease elsewhere in the body.

In a world of medical priorities, dentistry takes a back seat to most, and In a world of health care, and rural America sometimes appears to not even be on the bus. The net result, writes Sanger-Katz, is that the United States faces a shortage of dentists that is particularly acute in poor, rural regions. "Huge pockets of the country have few (or no) providers. The federal government counts 4,503 mostly rural regions where more than 3,000 people share one dentist," she notes, "making it tough for many residents to find someone to fix their teeth."

Sanger-Katz continues, "For more than 100 years, dentistry has run on a separate -- and more laissez-fair -- track than the rest of medicine. Dentists have their own schools and treat patients in their own offices; fewer laws and regulations govern the field. Insurance plans typically demand high co-pays and limit their payouts for invasive procedures. About half of all dental expenses are paid out of pocket, compared with less than 10 percent of costs in the overall medical system. This is the free market. And, in some ways, it has worked: People do not drive up insurance rates by seeking frivolous procedures. Patients tend to shop around for care, and prices vary according to local economies. The rate of dental inflation, although higher than the rate for the economy overall, is lower than the rate in medicine, which is typically several points above the growth rate of the gross domestic product. (You don’t hear policymakers complain about the burden of “runaway” dental costs.)

“It’s very much a free market, with a greater spread between the haves and have-nots,” said Burton Edelstein, a professor of dentistry at Columbia University and the founder of the Children’s Dental Health Project. "Dental insurance is much less widespread than medical insurance; 130 million Americans lacked dental coverage in 2009, but only 50 million lacked medical coverage," Sanger Katz-writes. "And with most payouts capped at $1,000 to $2,000 per year, insurance can’t cover much beyond basic services. Medicare does not pay for dental care at all, so 70 percent of seniors lack any dental coverage, according to an Institute of Medicine report. Medicaid also fails to provide meaningful dental access for many of its beneficiaries: The program pays dentists so poorly for treatment that only about 20 percent of them see Medicaid patients." Meanwhile, seven of 61 dental schools closed in the last 30 years, meaning 2,000 fewer dentists every year, a 33 percent drop in supply, just as an older generation of dentists started retiring.

The result is a crisis. And, in a few lucky rural towns, the result looks like this: A mobile van outfitted with a volunteer dentist comes to a rural elementary school and offers free check-ups but no fillings. Or, better yet, a volunteer army of dentists, dental students and oral surgeons in a region volunteer for a two-day event at a vast arena where everyone is welcome to camp overnight for a place in line for care. Some of the dental expertise and hospitality is donated by Ronald McDonald House, or Remote Area Medical out of Knoxville, Tenn., or local community health centers. And while are limited in their ability to do much more than prevention, others can offer real dental care but no follow-up. The result is often a brutal kind of dentistry that involves, at best, mass extraction, some advice about what not to drink and explanations about how oral health is connected to overall health.

Dr. Nikki Stone is a dentist who works in Hazard, Ky., in one of the those federally qualified community-run clinics. A native of the Kentucky mountains, she knew that children in Eastern Kentucky weren’t getting enough dental care, but she was still "staggered by the prevalence of dental disease when she began examining them in 2004," Sanger-Katz notes. "Large numbers of the kids had never seen a dentist. Half had untreated tooth decay, and nearly 20 percent had urgent needs -- more than six cavities or an active abscess. She and her staff 'cried a lot,' she recalls. Crisscrossing four counties in her van, she painted fluoride on all the teeth and sent notes home with the children who needed immediate attention. In the early years, only 8 percent of those youngsters with urgent problems got the care they needed. The job was like fighting a forest fire on a mountain, she says. 'I felt like I was standing here on the line of the fire with a squirt gun.'

There seems little hope for any change soon in rural America, even if the federal health-reform law survives. "It deems dental coverage an essential part of any health plan for children, but regulators have yet to spell out what insurers must cover to meet that definition," Sanger-Katz writes. "The law expands existing loan-repayment funds for dentists who relocate to underserved areas, but it offers no expansion of dental coverage for adults and doesn’t try to integrate dental health into the larger health care system." (Read more)

Growers of cranberries, which need sugar for sales, fear possible exclusion from schools

The federal government is expected to propose new nutrition standards soon that worry cranberry growers from Massachusetts to Wisconsin and into Canada. The effort, urged on by first lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" initiative, is the Department of Agriculture's likely new guidelines for what can be sold in school vending machines, stores and cafeteria lines. Sugar is the target, writes Larry Bivins of USA Today, and sweetened beverages like cranberry juice cocktail could be deemed unhealthy because the berry is not popular without some sort of sweetener added. That would be unfortunate and unfair, cranberry industry officials say, because the tart, deep-red fruit is loaded with nutrients and health benefits. But for consumers to avail themselves of those benefits, cranberries must be palatable. "Cranberries can be sweetened with anything," said Linda Prehn, a cranberry grower in Tomah, Wis., citing apple juice as an example. (Associated Press photo of Massachusetts cranberry worker Miguel Sandel)

Prehn, chairman of United Cranberry Growers Cooperative, a collective of 85 growers in Massachusetts, Oregon and Wisconsin in the U.S. and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, was among cranberry honchos attending the recent inaugural meeting of the Congressional Cranberry Caucus on Capitol Hill. Prehn and others are hoping the bipartisan caucus led by Reps. Reid Ribble, R-Wis., and Bill Keating, D-Mass., and Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Scott Brown, R-Mass., can help persuade agriculture officials to make an exception for cranberry products in its nutrition standards for added-sugar products.

"Given the beneficial and scientifically proven health properties of cranberries, we believe there is a need to establish clear standards that recognize cranberries as a part of a healthy diet," the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The lawmakers sent a similar letter to the first lady, pointing out cranberries "contribute to whole body health, particularly urinary-tract health and the potential to fight cancer and other diseases." At stake is exclusion from an estimated $2.3 billion school vending-machine business and an image that could have a negative impact on the marketing of cranberry products worldwide, particularly cranberry juice cocktail, industry officials say.

Weekly and daily newspaper work together to give update about national story in their area

Large daily and small rural weekly newspapers don't often work together to write special reports, but when they do, the results can be well worth the effort. The Pueblo Chieftain and the weekly Johnstown Breeze collaborated on an update about the "Mortal Kombat" killing, in which Heather Trujillo, left, and her boyfriend were charged with the murder of Heather's seven-year-old sister, Zoe Garcia, by acting out moves from the video game.

When the story broke in 2007, it got national attention and was lauded as the example for why children shouldn't play violent video games. Steve Henson of The Chieftain and Matt Lubich of the Breeze report that the story is actually more complex, starting with the fact that Garcia's death had nothing to do with Mortal Kombat. It was more about Heather's violent boyfriend and her inability to stop his drunken rage that led to the beating death of Garcia.

The reporters write that the case was also about Heather's troubled upbringing, which included being born to a 13-year-old mother, at times raising some of her 10 younger siblings, many of whom had different fathers, and her struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. Henson and Lubich also report the story is about how the system sometimes fails those born into poverty with drug-addicted and neglectful parents. "To understand" this story, they write, "you need to come to terms with children having children, the numbing of logic brought on by reliance on bureaucracy, poverty, drug abuse and parental neglect." Heather is now 21 and is scheduled for release from the Colorado Department of Corrections Youthful Offender System in December.

Read part of Henson and Lubich's joint report here. The Breeze has the full story behind a pay wall, but it can be accessed for $1.