By creating this new category on DonorsChoose, we want to support these students and give voice to their teachers, tapping their frontline wisdom. You can see those projects here. Jamel Holmes did grow up to become a teacher.
He earned a master's degree and now teaches special education for sixth graders at East Bronx Academy for the Future, the same school he attended. Holmes uses DonorsChoose to help his students get what they need both inside and outside school. He has crowdfunded technology tools for his classroom as well as personal care items for his students. He drives through the Bronx to give school supplies, clothing, laundry essentials and food to kids whose families are in need, and even takes students to get free haircuts.
He wants to be a role model students can turn to. Courtesy of Jamel Holmes. Schools are charged with providing a safe, nurturing and equitable environment for students and teachers. Supporting educators who are trying to create that environment by helping fund their racial equity projects is a good place to start. In the midst of grief, we find ourselves doing odd things. Though our efforts will never result in bringing a lost loved one back, we'll do anything to feel as though they are even a fraction closer to us.
Even if that means leaving a voicemail we know will never be heard. Doing an innocent spring cleaning on her phone, one woman discovered she had hundreds of voicemails left by a stranger, all the same person. Unbeknown to her, she had been receiving these messages since July In the video, which now has more than 3 million views, the caption reads: "All the voicemails consist of 'I miss you' and 'I hope you're okay' and long pauses and what sounds to be soft crying? Seconds later, we discover that the messages came from an older woman who lost her husband, and that since , she had been calling his number which is not his number anymore to let him know she still misses him.
The phone revealed she had consistently rang multiple times a day. One of the voicemail clips plays, and we hear "It's just me, you've been on my mind. I'll catch you later, bye. The TikTok user, unsure of what to do, asked for advice in the comments section, writing "should I answer her calls or maybe just let her keep leaving voicemails—this might be her way of coping. As many shared their own experiences, it became clear that this coping strategy is quite common.
Feeling like a loved one is still just a phone call away somehow makes the pain a bit more bearable. One person commented: "I'm still paying my dad's phone bill 1. He's been gone 2. One of the things we lose when a loved one dies is the chance for real conversation.
So many things get left unsaid. We can look at old photographs, sure, but never again will we be able to ask "How was your day? These are the moments that seem to die as well. So it's no wonder we cling onto something as simple as a phone number, if it means that we get to really share how important someone was. And still is. The TikTok user decided to follow the advice, and let the woman hold onto the small piece of comfort by allowing her to keep calling.
It's a small act of kindness that clearly means the world to someone else. Imagine how different the world would be if cis-gendered men had the ability to give birth? Would the state of Texas attempt to ban abortions after six weeks or would they be available on-demand?
Would we live in a country without mandatory paid maternity leave? How much more affordable would childcare be? The paper was also a case report. To be sure, these reports can be useful, but they are certainly not the evidence on which you want to make bold claims about something like the vaccine-autism link.
Many children have autism and nearly all take the MMR vaccine. Finding in this case that among a group of a dozen children most of them happen to have both is not at all surprising.
And it in no way proves the MMR vaccine causes autism. See the pop-up chart in this report for details. Wakefield also had major financial conflicts of interest. Among them, while he was discrediting the combination MMR vaccine and suggesting parents should give their children single shots over a longer period of time, he was conveniently filing patents for single-disease vaccines.
Finally, Wakefield never replicated his findings. At the very bedrock of science is the concept of falsification: A scientist runs a test, gathers his findings, and tries to disprove himself by replicating his experiment in other contexts.
He has declined to do either. In the most recent analysis, published March 5 in the Annals of Internal Medicine , researchers at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark linked vaccine information to autism diagnoses, sibling histories of autism, and autism risk factors in more than , children born in Denmark between to Before that, researchers writing in JAMA looked at nearly , children who got the shot and their family histories of autism. The researchers again found the MMR vaccine was not associated with an increased risk of autism, even with children who had older siblings with the disorder.
All together, the idea that the MMR vaccine may cause autism has been debunked by large-scale studies involving thousands of participants in several countries. So how did such a shoddy idea gain such outsized influence?
One of my favorite writings on the Wakefield debacle comes from the British journalist-researcher Ben Goldacre. In a column for the Guardian and in his book Bad Science , Goldacre pointed out that journalists were complicit in helping perpetuate the notion that vaccines cause autism:.
And in , a year-old male who was not vaccinated died from measles; prior to that, the last death from acute measles was in , it reports. What is your take on this issue? Do you feel the panel was justified in striking Wakefield from the medical register? Almost immediately afterward, epidemiological studies were conducted and published, refuting the posited link between MMR vaccination and autism.
The next episode in the saga was a short retraction of the interpretation of the original data by 10 of the 12 co-authors of the paper. However, the Lancet exonerated Wakefield and his colleagues from charges of ethical violations and scientific misconduct. The Lancet completely retracted the Wakefield et al.
This retraction was published as a small, anonymous paragraph in the journal, on behalf of the editors. The final episode in the saga is the revelation that Wakefield et al. Readers may be interested to learn that the journalist on the Wakefield case, Brian Deer, had earlier reported on the false implication of thiomersal in vaccines in the etiology of autism.
The systematic failures which permitted the Wakefield fraud were discussed by Opel et al. Scientists and organizations across the world spent a great deal of time and money refuting the results of a minor paper in the Lancet and exposing the scientific fraud that formed the basis of the paper.
Appallingly, parents across the world did not vaccinate their children out of fear of the risk of autism, thereby exposing their children to the risks of disease and the well-documented complications related thereto. Measles outbreaks in the UK in and as well as pockets of measles in the USA and Canada were attributed to the nonvaccination of children.
Scientists who publish their research have an ethical responsibility to ensure the highest standards of research design, data collection, data analysis, data reporting, and interpretation of findings; there can be no compromises because any error, any deceit, can result in harm to patients as well harm to the cause of science, as the Wakefield saga so aptly reveals.
0コメント