Elementary school staff cares enough to make a difference in life of a child

Elementary school staff cares enough to make a difference in life of a child
EDITOR:
You see the commercials advertising the ease of dealing with diabetes and it makes life managing the disease look so simple. You touch a meter to your skin and that's it! For some this may be so, but as a parent of a six year old, I can attest to the fact that it's not that easy watching your child prick her finger with a lancet and squeeze a drop of blood to be tested four times a day. It's distressing to administer a shot to her tiny arm three times a day. It's depressing to take her for a quarterly checkup and watch the needle enter her arm and the blood flow from her tiny vein, and it's absolute horror to witness a seizure from insulin shock. I admire any diabetic, especially the little ones, who have to deal with this malady.
As a parent, I have dealt with the misfortune of waking up to find that a healthy infant was taken during the night and later on watching as my son convulsed and lay comatose at Tod's, not knowing whether he would survive from a bout with encephalitis.
For the aforementioned reasons, I am extremely protective of my children and critical of bogus teachers, coaches or others in authority who play politics instead of treating my kids as I feel they should . And as an impartial critic, I must recognize and offer my most heartfelt appreciation to Mrs. Boyce, Mr. Mastropietro, Mrs. Viets and the rest of the staff at Currie Elementary for taking extremely good care of my daughter while in school. One can do just enough to get by or they can truly care and make a difference, and these good folks do the best. It is a strain on any parent when yet another problem is added to the many of raising a family and it is a burden lightened, in my case, by the caring folks at Currie. May God bless you all .
JOHN F MINTUS
Brookfield
Young people should know the truth about 'safe sex'
EDITOR:
An article in the Nov. 26 Vindicator berated the teaching of abstinence as part of the nation's sex education programs. Instead, the article favored teaching more about "safe sex." That is defined as using a condom in one's indiscriminate sexual pursuits.
Calling a condom a means to safe sex is like calling Russian Roulette a safe sport because your six-shooter only has one bullet in the chamber. Condoms were first developed to prevent pregnancy and bacterial sexually transmitted diseases. For the most part, they were successful in that endeavor because sperm and bacteria that cause gonorrhea and syphilis are larger than the pores in a condom, yes, I said pores. Condoms are porous and those pores are larger than the most common viral transmitters of sexually transmitted diseases.
Human pappilloma (HPV), which causes the benign, yet troublesome venereal wart, also causes cervical cancer in women. The herpes simplex virus causes painful, recurring and highly transmissible lesions on the genitalia. Herpes infections are chronic, recurrent and incurable. They can be controlled but the medication to do so is extremely expensive. The hepatitis B and C viruses cause chronic active hepatitis, cirrhosis and even liver cancer.
Last but certainly not least is HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS and is ultimately fatal. It is time to stop reassuring people that they can engage in a dangerous and promiscuous lifestyle without having to pay some very serious consequences. It is time to tell our young people the truth.
CHARLES H. McGOWEN, M.D.
Howland