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Schools nip smoking in the bud
Nurses use info, visuals to stress risks of the habit
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Waldo Pafford Elementary School nurse Mary Kelly shows first-grade students in Ruby Roberts class a model of a mouth affected by smoking as part of the Great American Smokeout on Thursday. - photo by Danielle Hipps

School nurses in Liberty County and statewide have spearheaded anti-smoking campaigns that culminated with Thursday’s Great American Smokeout.

Organized by the American Cancer Society, the event provides smokers with a date to make a plan to stop, and it also gives educators a prompt for discussing the effects of nicotine habits.

At Waldo Pafford Elementary, school nurse Mary Kelly visited classrooms to spread her message that aligns with the school’s “Fresh and Clean: Smoke-free” theme.

“Our focus is to try and teach them that it is an unhealthy habit, it is terribly addicting and to avoid the first cigarette,” Kelly said. “I read that 11,400 children in Georgia become new smokers each year, and I’m trying to cut that number.”

Tobacco use is the No. 1 preventable cause of premature death and disease in the nation and in Georgia, resulting in nearly 10,000 adult deaths in the state annually from lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases and other disorders, according to the Georgia Association of School Nurses.

The Great American Smokeout campaign is designed to inform children about the habit through visuals and lectures about how tobacco affects their bodies.

This week, Kelly hung posters with pictures of healthy lungs and ones affected by smoking, as well as photos of a smokers’ mouth. While the message may be rooted in fear, she believes it will be received. 

“By the time they’re in fifth grade here, they’re coming on 10-11 years of age, and that’s when most of them try,” she said.

And Kelly hopes the message will spread beyond school campuses.

“A couple of my posters up front are for parents picking up kids. One of them says ‘When you smoke, the whole family smokes, and it has an infant (on it),’” she said. “Kids will tell you up front, ‘Well, my mom and dad smoke,’ so I’ve been telling them they have to encourage their parents (to quit).”

The event also focuses on the effects of secondhand smoke, which has been linked to serious respiratory illness and can exacerbate colds and asthma in children.

Georgia is one of only two states without a state-level tobacco-free schools policy, but 77 of Georgia’s 181 school districts have adopted smoking bans, according to the GASN.

Still, 5 percent of middle school students and 17 percent of high school students smoke cigarettes, and another 5 percent of middle-schoolers and 9 percent of high-schoolers use chewing tobacco, according to the Georgia 2009 Tobacco Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

Because of higher usage rates, the message to older students takes a more direct tone, Kelly said. Last year she worked at Bradwell Institute.

“I addressed high-schoolers a little differently because I knew I already had smokers there,” she said. With them, she offered reasons to quit, such as how expensive the habit is and how it can make someone less attractive.

“There’s nothing cool about smelling like cigarettes,” she said. “And it’s a hassle; you can’t smoke at school so you’re always trying to sneak off somewhere.

 “What I tried to address is that it is almost as addicting as heroin, so try not to take the first cigarette,” Kelly said.

If you would like to quit smoking, call the Georgia Tobacco Quit Line at 1-877-270-7867.

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From the book 'Outliers' comes proof that good health is more than just genetics
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Friends Jim Young, left, Mike Natale, Jeff Natale and Ryan Kiernan were on Greenwich High School football team together and Jim and Mike were captains. Jim, who was the youngest in Sherry Young's family, was welcome in the homes of the other three boys who still had siblings around and grandparents near. - photo by Sherry Young
As I look back on my life and the lives of others, both personally and in the reading I have done, I am convinced of the necessity of positive human contact in our lives. We are doubly blessed when we are able to make good friends or are a part of a family where we are accepted and loved.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers tells of a time in the 1950s when Dr. Stewart Wolf met a physician who practiced in the area of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Roseto was settled by a group of Italian families from Roseto, Italy, who re-created their life again in America.

This was in the 1950s before drugs and measures to prevent heart disease became important. In their conversation the physician said, You know, Ive been practicing for 17 years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of 65 with heart disease.

Wolf was surprised by these words as, It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease.

Wolf enlisted the aid of a sociologist and friend John Bruhn to help him. They found, There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didnt have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didnt have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. Thats it.

They checked into diet, genetics and possibilities of something in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania but nothing made sense.

What they found was that Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. (Researchers) learned about the extended family clans that underlay the towns social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2,000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

What they found eventually convinced the medical establishment to look beyond the individual and understand the culture people are part of their friends, families and town they came from. They determined that the people we surround ourselves with and the values of the world we inhabit have a profound effect on who we are.

Likely, this study could have been done with other ethnicities. However, my family's experiences with the Italian families in Connecticut ring true to the study. Our hungry and growing sons, especially our youngest son, Jim, who was left home alone with two beady-eyed parents, all had some memorable experiences being fed and loved in the Cos Cob multigenerational families. Proof of the African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child.

We live in an age when the contact we have with people often is on the internet, and many of us live among strangers. Unless we make the effort to reach out, we will become isolated, especially as we age. The Rosetan study is proof that reaching out and communicating may be good for our health.
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