OHIO SCHOOLS Families thankful for defibrillators

There are 25 to 50 episodes of sudden cardiac arrest in young athletes each year.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Fifteen-year-old softball player Cadie Clark slid into third base, barely beating the throw. She looked up and saw the umpire call her safe. Then she slumped over and everything went black.
Instead of pumping blood, her heart was fluttering uselessly.
She lay on the infield at the city park in Mantua for four minutes before an ambulance arrived. The crew shocked her five times with a defibrillator, which helps restore a normal heart rhythm.
Now 19, Clark, her mother and other families struck by sudden cardiac arrest came to the state capital Tuesday to thank lawmakers and Gov. Bob Taft for a law that includes $2.5 million for schools to buy automatic external defibrillators.
"Thank you for placing value on the young lives that were lost," said Linette Derminer of Geneva, whose 18-year-old son, Ken, died four years ago after collapsing during football team calisthenics.
Raised money
After her daughter's collapse, Cindy Clark worked 18 months to raise money for seven machines for Mantua's Crestwood Local School District.
Cindy Clark said she's thrilled the state money will help low-income school districts.
"It's a very hard fight," she said. "There are a lot of people who are still not believers."
Several other districts have used community donations and corporate grants to buy the $2,000 to $3,000 machines. The new state money can't pay for machines in all schools in the state's 613 districts.
The Ohio Department of Health will use guidelines from the American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and other sources to determine how to award the grants, and will develop a bidding process for a vendor, spokesman Jay Carey said.
Sudden cardiac death can be brought on by an abnormal heart rhythm from an undetected defect or by a sudden blow to the chest of a healthy person. An American Heart Association report estimates there are 25 to 50 such episodes among U.S. high school athletes each year, but says it is a leading cause of death for adults 35 and older.
One-fifth of the American population is in public schools on any given day, the report said. They're used as polling places, community group meeting centers and emergency shelters.
Greatest need
The association recommends putting the devices in schools with a "documented need," such as having a teacher or student with a diagnosed heart condition or where emergency medical crews can't arrive in five minutes or less.
The machines alone won't save a life, said Mary Fran Hazinski, the report's lead writer and a clinical nurse specialist at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital in Nashville, Tenn. Staff need to be trained how to use it and in other lifesaving techniques.
"If people don't know an AED [defibrillator] is present, they won't respond in an effective manner to save a life," she said.
The victims also need CPR immediately. Once the device gets the heart's electrical signals operating correctly, it doesn't always get the muscle pumping again, Hazinski said.
Sen. Ray Miller, a Columbus Democrat, questions the large expenditure without enough data on how many deaths could be prevented. He said there should be better health screening in school sports and efforts by coaches not to work athletes too hard.
"I'm in schools all the time," he said. "I have yet to have anybody in a school say to me we need these electronic defibrillators that are being pushed so aggressively. What they do say is we need books, we need computers we need basic supplies for our classrooms."
The Heart Association donated 10 of the devices to Columbus schools. Parents donated most of the money needed to equip most of the schools in the rapidly growing Lakota Local district in Liberty Township north of Cincinnati. Boosters, nonprofit foundations and an insurance company pooled the money for seven defibrillators at the high school and middle schools in Newark.
"I can't foresee that panning out for everyone, particularly in smaller communities where grant money might not be available," said Mark Doughty, head athletic trainer at Newark.
As the machines become more common, the public will demand them and question administrators who haven't bought the devices if a student is stricken, Doughty said.
The parents said they hope the state money will educate more people about the need for the devices and open up more private funding.
Derminer said she didn't even know the machines existed when her son died. When she asked a doctor whether defibrillation could have saved her son, he said there was no way to know.
"That's not good enough," she said. "You should know you did everything you possibly could."