Get ready for your kids to start begging you for the swine flu — the swine flu stuffed animal that is. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gift shop in Atlanta is actually selling the stuffed toy pictured above, according to the Examiner.
The doll is nominally a teaching tool to help educate kids about the swine flu, but how representing the flu with a stuffed toy that’s pink and plush that you can hug does that, you’ve got us.
In other swine flu news, Kesley Young, a 20-year-old mother of a week-old newborn, died of swine flu last Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, according to the Columbus Post Dispatch. Something tells us that no one will want to buy a swine flu doll for that little girl, who has mercifully survived.
The judge wanted Lisa Marie Morris to be a lesson to all other parents — if you forget your child in a hot car, you go to jail.
Morris, 26, was sentenced last week to five years in prison followed by five years on probation for leaving her baby inside her car. Morris and her cousin had returned to her Augusta, Ga., area home after running errands on Aug. 7, 2008, and Morris says she thought the cousin had brought the child inside. Instead, Dalton Morris, who was just six weeks old, died in the car, where temperatures reached up to 126 degrees.
Morris pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and asked the judge not to send her to jail because she needs to take care of her 5-year-old daughter.
But Judge Michael N. Annis showed no mercy, the Augusta Chronicle reported. He said that Dalton’s death was completely preventable.
Thanks to her fast-texting fingers, an Atlanta-area teenager alerted her friends to rescue her from a sexual assault.
The 16-year-old girl was walking home when a stranger jumped out of a car, grabbed her and forced her into the woods, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While her head was being held down, the teen managed to text a friend for help, police said. As the girl’s buddies arrived, the suspect and two other men fled the scene.
On Tuesday, police arrested Jose Hernandez-Ruiz and charged him with kidnapping and sexual battery for the Aug. 20 attack.
Parents, be suspicious if your teen is suddenly really, really nice to you after a fight over curfew. A 15-year-old Montana girl made Jell-O for her father after an argument with him. Inside the treat: lamp oil. For three days, the girl tried to get her father to eat it, but he didn’t bite.
On Monday, the girl pleaded guilty to simple assault for the attempted poisoning in June, the Associated Press reported. A judge put her on probation until she turns 18. When the girl was asked by the judge what she thought was going to happen if her dad ate the Jell-O, she answered: “That he’d have diarrhea and stuff.”
A spokeswoman for a poison control center in Montana says that ingested lamp oil wouldn’t cause that many problems. However, breathing it could cause inflammation in the lungs.
Two months before her due date, Valerie Post was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with swine flu. Doctors performed an emergency C-section and delivered a healthy baby girl, Nora. But Post, 24, has been in a medically induced coma since the Aug. 7 delivery.
Swine flu usually causes only mild problems in otherwise healthy people. But it can strike harder in pregnant women, and doctors are urging them to get the vaccine once it’s available in October. The hospital in Tampa, where Post is being treated, reports that an average of one pregnant woman a week has been hospitalized for the flu. Usually it’s about two per season, reports the St. Petersburg Times.
Cases as severe as Post’s are rare, but doctors are urging expecting moms are urged to call immediately if they have a fever, cough or sore throat. For the latest updates on swine flu, click on the Centers for Disease Control Web site.
Pop quiz: When you encounter a crying toddler in Wal-Mart do you: (a) Thank goodness it’s not your own? (b) Move discreetly to another aisle to get away from the squawking? (c) Inform the mom that if she doesn’t shut that baby up, you will, and then proceed to slap the tot four or five times in the face?
Incredibly, Roger Stephens, 61, allegedly chose option number three at a Wal-Mart in Gwinnett County, Georgia on Monday, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Stephens was arrested and charged with felony cruelty to a child. He’s being held without bond. The two-year-old victim sustained “slight redness to the face.”
Tiffany Shepherd was fired last year from a Florida high school after officials saw photos of her in a bikini, working part-time on a fishing charter. Now, the 31-year-old ex-biology teacher has turned to porn to make ends meet.
Shepherd told Page2live.com, a news blog based in Palm Beach, that she wasn’t able to get any other job despite sending out 2,500 resumes. “I’m an educated woman, but I never thought it would come to this,” she says. “No one gets brought up thinking they’ll be a floozy.”
Shepherd, a divorced mom of three kids who formerly taught at Port St. Lucie High School, uses the screen name Leah Lust. She’s made five porn films so far; one is titled “My First Sex Teacher.” She doesn’t seem too worried that her ex-students will see her films, telling the web site, “They’d be adults now anyway.”
More than half of all children engage in some sexual behavior before age 13, according to one study. But what’s normal exploration, and what’s a problem?
A new report by two physicians published Monday in the journal Pediatrics tries to resolve this sticky question. The conclusion: Many childhood sexual behaviors are within the realm of normal. Kids often behave sexually out of curiosity or as a way of testing interpersonal boundaries.
However, any behavior that is “persistently intrusive, coercive … or abusive” is a red flag that something may be wrong, according to Dr. Nancy Kellogg of the University of Texas Health Science Center, who is one of the co-authors of the study. Sexual abuse, domestic violence or exposure to lewd content in the media can all be linked to problematic sexual behaviors.
There are many sexual behaviors in children that many parents may not be comfortable with, which aren’t actually a sign that anything is really wrong, a Chicago Tribune story on the study pointed out. For instance, when your three-year-old son sticks his hands down his pants in the grocery store, don’t freak out. Just redirect him to a more socially acceptable activity, like begging for sugary cereal.
A teacher’s aide apparently forgot to take her seven-month-old girl to a babysitter and instead left the child in a school parking lot while she worked on Friday. Addeleena Sanchez died after being left in the car for five hours on Friday at Bowie Elementary School near Dallas, the Corsicana Daily Sun reported.
The child’s mother, 23, called her babysitter around 1:20 p.m., and that’s when she realized that she had forgotten the girl in the car. The temperature then in Corsicana, Tex., was 89 degrees. Police are investigating and have not yet decided whether to charge the mother.
So far this year, 29 kids have died after being left in hot cars. See stories about the tragedies here.
A man told police that he mixed crushed aspirin tablets into a jar of baby food at a CVS drug store in San Jose and may have poisoned more baby food at another store.
Cops have recovered a possibly contaminated jar of Gerber apple-flavored oatmeal. They’re asking customers to be careful with any baby food jars that appear to be tampered with, the San Jose Mercury News reported this weekend.
David Conklin, a 29-year-old transient, has been arrested and is being held ona charge of suspicion of felony poisoning. He had called police to tell them that he had done a “bad thing.”
