Growing old on the job

This is particularly true for the baby boomers ?born during the post WWII-population explosion.Helping older people stay in the workforce and otherwise remain active is one of the EU key strategies to tackle the ageing population challenge.

These were among issues discussed this week at the Second European Demography Forum.With Europeans living longer and having fewer children, the average age is going up.

And with baby boomers now reaching retirement age, the issue is becoming much more urgent.Born between 1946 and 1964, baby boomers have long been the bulk of the workforce.

But there will be fewer working-age people to support them.The working-age population is still growing, but at a rapidly declining rate.

In six years, growth is expected to cease, and the number of 20?9-year-olds will begin decreasing ?by as much as 1.5 million per year.Experts agree that keeping baby boomers active and employed is crucial, but how do older people feel about that?

The report shows that in 2007, 50 percent of men and 30 percent of women were still employed at the age of 60, a share that is 10 percent more than in 2000.

Premature Births Up in Polk Since 1998

Premature births in Polk have risen from 12 out of every 100 births in 1998 to just under 14 out of 100 in 2007.The county’s 2007 rate (13.9 percent) is only slightly below the 14.1 percent statewide.

Although Polk’s percentage has been below the state’s eight of the past 10 years, that difference typically isn’t large.And the March of Dimes gives Florida, like other southern states, an F grade for babies being born prematurely.Black babies continue to have a higher percentage of prematurity - almost 1 in 5 born in Polk last year, compared with 1 in 8 for white babies.

For both races, however, the frequency of premature birth has increased in the past 10 years.Along with that, the likelihood of women getting their prenatal care either late or not at all has gone up in Polk during the past three years.

In 2005 that number was 649 women, or 8.8 percent.The 2007 percentage in Polk was noticeably higher than the state’s 6 percent who got prenatal care late or not at all that year.The local numbers worry Deborah Meade, associate executive director of the Healthy Start Coalition of Hardee, Highlands and Polk counties.The earlier we can get a mother into prenatal care, the earlier any possible conditions can be diagnosed, she said.She said Healthy Start has made an added effort this month to remind local doctors about risk factors such as smoking, drinking and lack of prenatal care.

Even women who follow all the advice for healthy pregnancies, however, can’t be sure their babies won’t be born prematurely.Fetal and infant deaths because of prematurity also have risen.

Prematurity caused 32 infant deaths in 2007, up from 28 in 2006, according to information from the coalition.Rates of babies born with low birth weight and/or born early have increased steadily nationwide since the mid-1980s, according to the March of Dimes.

457 nurse sacked for arriving pregnant

By that evening, the Tanzanian-born nurse, who had trained in Britain and worked in the US, was stunned to learn that the company she had flown halfway around the world to join had revoked its job offer because she was pregnant.

As it was supposedly explained to Ms Katula, 28, there was no way she could stay in Australia, either.

Now, as Ms Katula prepares to have her baby in her new home at Victor Harbor, south of Adelaide, her treatment in the workplace is the focus of potentially landmark discrimination proceedings in the South Australian Equal Opportunity Tribunal.

The action involving the Healthscope group, the nation’s second-biggest private hospital operator, will train more attention on the controversial foreign worker program introduced by the Howard government and retained by Labor to ease the skills shortage.

The company says it was put in an impossible position by Ms Katula’s pregnancy, exposing a serious flaw in the 457 visa system.

As a rule, business loves 457 temporary employment visas: in 2007-08, Australian companies lodged 50,050 applications to bring in workers from overseas on such visas.

The health sector is especially reliant on the 457 program, adding needle to the discrimination case brought by Ms Katula.

With Australian hospitals requiring an estimated 5000 additional nurses, she was snapped up when she applied in May for a job from the US, where she had been working with her husband, Deus Makoy, 32.

In any case, Healthscope, which manages the Memorial Hospital for its owner Adelaide Community Healthcare Alliance, never asked whether she was pregnant.

By Ms Katula’s account, she reported to the hospital on Friday morning, August 15, to pick up her welcome pack.

The clinical manager seemed unfazed, according to Ms Katula: they had plenty of sizes.

Ms Katula, accompanied by her husband, was given the bad news she no longer had a job.

The nurse says she was told that because of her pregnancy the company believed she would be unable to fulfil her visa requirements and was revoking her sponsorship under the 457 program.

According to her statement of complaint filed in the South Australian Equal Opportunity Tribunal, Ms Katula was informed by two hospital managers that she was required to attend at a travel agency the following day with the aim of immediately booking an air ticket out of Australia to Tanzania.

I was shocked, I couldn’t believe it, Ms Katula told The Weekend Australian.

They were saying I couldn’t meet the visa conditions because I was going to take time off work to have the baby.

Under federal law, Healthscope was required to pay Ms Katula a minimum salary over 12 months and, if she was not going to be at work because she was having a baby, we simply could not comply.

This created a conflict with state equal opportunity law — the impossible situation where the company was going to breach federal legislation if it kept Ms Katula on and South Australian law if it didn’t.

Ms Katula insists there was no issue because she would have taken only the leave she had accrued between starting work at the Memorial Hospital in August and the birth of her baby, due next week.

Ms Katula wonders how she could have breached migration rules when the Immigration Department had issued her visa knowing she was pregnant.

If they knew it was a problem, maybe it should have been raised with me before I was granted the visa and came here to work, Ms Katula said yesterday.

Ms Katula has a new sponsor and job, nursing at an aged care centre in Victor Harbor.

PREMIERS will demand more federal cash for their hospitals before signing on to Kevin Rudd’s co-operative federalism funding deals.

Too Many Babies Born Premature

With underdeveloped lungs, babies cannot cry out.

But hundreds of area parents each year find themselves in this crowded ward of dread and miracles.Every time they walk in the door they wonder, ‘Is my baby going to die?’

It treats 600 to 650 infants a year, about three-fourths of them premature.

It’s not.Between 1995 and 2005, Florida saw a 17 percent increase in babies born early, putting them at greater risk of dying before their first birthday or suffering lifelong health problems.

ranked Florida the 10th-worst state on its national prematurity report card.

and other advocates for maternal and infant health are trying to reverse the troubling trend with a campaign to make reducing prematurity a top national priority.More than 80 percent of the time we don’t even understand why people go into labor early, said David Dixon with North Florida Women’s Care, the largest obstetrics practice in Tallahassee.

There are still so many who deliver early that we have no explanation for.Doctors and researchers know that factors such as smoking, drinking or other drug use during pregnancy increase the risk of premature birth.

The oldest and youngest moms are also at higher risk, as are those carrying multiple babies, those who’ve had infertility treatments or previous premature births, or those who are under stress or in poor health.

Black moms also have a greater chance of preterm delivery.But no one knows exactly why one woman who has all the warning signs can have a healthy, full-term baby, while someone with no obvious problems will spend months hunched over a plastic box in the intensive care unit.They can take really, really good care of themselves and still end up here, said Shelly Frazier, a NICU nurse and family education coordinator.An increase in Caesarean sections is partly to blame.

Sappenfield, who’s working on a study of the issue, said C-sections account for about 30 percent of Florida’s increased prematurity rate.Frazier said: People in our community have gotten really comfortable with premature births.But while one baby born early might do fine, another might not.Ausley said she and her husband were not given one iota of hope that her son would survive.

But against all odds he did, and now he’s in kindergarten.But, she warned: Not all of these stories have these kinds of happy endings.Preterm birth is the leading cause of death for babies in their first month.

Those who survive are at risk for cerebral palsy, respiratory and vision problems and other ailments that can linger their whole lives.The cost of prematurity is staggering, Sappenfield said.

estimates the first-year health care costs for babies born prematurely are more than 10 times those of babies born full term.The emotional price for families is also high.

Marriages often fall apart, experts say, and mothers sometimes experience intense guilt.While much about preterm birth remains a mystery, health experts say making sure women are healthy is essential.You want to be in the best possible condition before you are pregnant, Frazier said.That’s easier said than done, some say.The health care system is imploding, Gurniak said.

As a country we are less healthy than we were a generation ago.Tackling the problem of prematurity is going to take a holistic approach.

First pick: AFL winning talent fight

Prendergast can be tortured by the complexity of choice, like a dog with two bones as Devo once sang, but as far as the AFL is concerned the truly important decisions were made by Watts and Naitanui some time ago.

That is, in the increasingly expensive struggle between sports for the best athletic talent in the land, the two teenagers chose Australian football.

Watts, who has just completed his year 11 exams at Melbourne’s Brighton Grammar School, was described by basketball insiders two years ago, when he was still a baby-faced 15-year-old, as one of the best prospects the hoops community had seen in 20 years.

He was the holder of an AIS basketball scholarship and more recently advised by basketball officialdom that serious consideration was being given to the idea of drafting him into the Boomers squad for the London Olympic Games in 2012.

When football came calling several years ago, basketball’s concern was such that the exclusive terms of his AIS scholarship were relaxed in the hope of keeping him in the program.

Naitanui, too, was an extraordinary basketball talent.

But three years ago, Naitanui was selected in the WA under-16 football side, and selected more because of his eye-popping agility and overall athletic prowess than his performances to that point, and quickly made the elite, 30-player AFL/AIS academy.

According to the AFL’s national talent manager, Kevin Sheehan: It was after those experiences that he decided he wanted to be an AFL player.

Sheehan describes Watts, Naitanui and the likes of South Australian Hamish Hartlett, an outstanding representative cricketer who is expected to be a top-five selection today, as first-choice athletes.

It is a term that was born in 1995, when the then head of the AFL’s football operations, Ian Collins, wondered whether the league was doing enough, or anything much at all other than relying on cultural tradition, to attract players to the game.

He was inspired to ask the question by the emergence of Anthony Koutoufides, the Carlton superstar who left behind a career as an elite track athlete and the thought of being an Olympian to pursue football with Collo’s beloved Blues.

Kouta chose football but we weren’t sure many others like him were or would, Sheehan recalls.

Were we getting the first-choice athletes, who might be able to play our game?

The AFL’s response was to broaden and deepen its junior development system, to cover more ground, capture more players, involve them in an elite program closer in experience to the AFL system and sell the fact that with almost 700 players on AFL lists in any season, the prospect of a career was strong.

National under 16 and under 18 championships were created, as were the AIS and state-based academies that can give players three years of representative football and more than 200 hours a year of specialist coaching and education.

It was a moment of particular satisfaction for the AFL three years ago when it was discovered that 16 of the 30 teenagers in its AFL/AIS academy had represented either the country or their states in other sports.

Like West Coast’s Shannon Hurn who, to date, has enjoyed a modest career but was described by South Australian cricket selector John Nash as the state’s best prospect in a decade before he was drafted in 2005.

Chris Masten, another Eagle, was a nationally ranked track athlete when he was drafted last year as was the Western Bulldogs’ Andrejs Everitt the year before.

Carlton’s Bryce Gibbs played junior volleyball for Australia and the number one picks in the national drafts of 2004 and 2005, Brett Deledio and Marc Murphy, were team-mates in the Victorian under 17 cricket team before football claimed them.

If this must sound and feel to other codes and sports like an assault, Sheehan says the battle is to be won subtly.

We know that the talented kids will play two or three sports and our research indicates that they will be in talent squads and state squads in two or three sports, Sheehan says.

But that’s not to say we actively discourage them from playing or considering a career in other sports.

Playing other sports can even make them better footballers.

Creative budgeting

We usually let the Christmas spirit loosen our purse strings and save our guilt-stricken, penny-pinching resolutions for later.

Last year, according to the National Retail Federation, the average consumer spent a jaw-dropping $815 on holiday-related shopping, including food, gifts and decorations.Still, tough economic times demand tighter holiday spending.

Here are some ways to carve a dollar or two off the December budget without looking like the Grinch who stole Christmas.Mississippi State University Extension Service family resource agent Tawnya Crockett has one rule to follow from the outset:Make sure you have a budget and stick to it.Certainly the easiest way to outspend your budget is to let your gift-buying get out of control.

Not only does Crockett advise against impulse buying and paying with credit, she also outlines a few practices that can ease your gift obligations.

If you sew up a storm or have a knack for woodwork, a homemade sweater or birdhouse can be a gift with a personal touch.

Instead of buying gifts for all your family members, promise to baby-sit for your cousin, walk the dog for your aunt or rake leaves for your grandmother.

Instead of buying for everyone in your family, draw names from a hat to make shopping pairs.

It’s cost-effective and certainly less exasperating than trying to find the perfect gift for everyone you know.Also, the coupon-clipping Web site the Bargainist suggests limiting gift-giving to the members of your family who enjoy that aspect of Christmas the most - your kids.You bought boxes of chocolates for your boss and co-workers, and you still have a Christmas dinner to cook for your family.

It all seems like a recipe for an expanding waistline and a sagging budget.

If you’re hosting Christmas dinner this year for your friends and family, Crockett recommends a little creativity to conserve money.

You can look at having each family member bring a food item and make it a pot-luck type thing, she said.Movies, concerts and parties galore can be a real drag on your pocketbook.

Here’s an idea: Take advantage of free Christmas events.

The Pine Belt offers a wealth of Christmas tree lightings, sing-alongs and holiday tours to fill up your holiday calendar.

4:30 p.m.

tree-lighting and Christmas Vespers, starting at 5 p.m.

at 5:15 p.m.

at 5:30 p.m.

art activity is set for 3:30-5 p.m.

Details: (601) 649-6374 will be 4-9 p.m.

Features exhibits, entertainment and food in downtown Hattiesburg.Consider using old newspaper or magazines for wrapping paper, as well as recycling your bows from year to year.

Stringing popcorn over the house is an inexpensive way of creating a Christmas mood., particularly during an after-Christmas sale.UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI students view the 30 small trees that line the university’s entrance during the 2007 Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

No post-Thanksgiving rest for weary turkey farmers

Farm owner’s son, Jamie Rischer picks up a tom turkey at Raymond’s Turkey Farm in Methuen, Mass.

After selling 10,000 birds in the three days leading up to Thanksgiving, the Rischer family will have to reload to sell another 2,000 before Christmas four weeks later.

(AP)  You’d think a turkey farmer would get a day off once the Thanksgiving bird reaches the table.

Jim Rischer gets something far less  at best.I try to work a half-day instead of a full day, said the patriarch of the family that owns Raymond’s Turkey Farm.

Then I get ready for Christmas.After selling 10,000 birds in the three days leading up to Thanksgiving, the Rischers have to reload to sell 2,000 more before Christmas.Then they have to scout out breeding stock.

And by late fall, it’s time for another holiday harvest, when they sell more than half of the 20,000 turkeys they raise each year.The same cycle plays out annually across New England at the dozens of family-owned turkey farms offering an alternative to commercial processors.People just see how busy this is this week, Rischer’s wife, Patt, said as the first customer arrived at 6:20 a.m.

Sarah Palin holding a news conference while a turkey grower slaughtered his birds in the background created an Internet sensation.

Here, birds roam in covered pens, their concrete floors buried beneath wood shavings, food and water available in automated bins.When it’s time for slaughter, the turkeys are knocked out with an electrical charge before being processed by both hand and machine.Raymond’s started in 1950, when Raymond and Claire Rischer, a plumber and nurse, were given two dozen birds by one of her grateful patients.

Raymond has since died, but Claire lives in the farmhouse attached to the red barns and concrete silo that make the farm a local landmark.It is now run by their son and his wife, Jim and Patt, and their three children, Jamie and sisters Vickie and Kim.

There was always something to do here.Jim and Jamie are in charge of the birds, and they have to carefully calculate the egg-laying and egg-hatching to ensure a steady supply of birds and to meet the peak demands at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.Eggs are incubated in a room with precisely controlled temperature and humidity, the latter important so chicks can poke through a tender shell.

Then they’re moved to the pens, where they are separated by age and sex and fed a diet that changes every four weeks.The birds are kept for about 22 to 24 weeks, longer than the 16 to 18 weeks for most commercial turkeys.Soares, from the Agriculture Department, said customers get a chance to support their local identity when they shop at a local farm.And knowing where your food is coming from is increasingly important to some people as they grow more concerned about the security of agricultural products, he said.At the farm stand, Patt, Vickie and Kim use Claire Rischer’s recipes to make stuffing, butternut squash, mashed potatoes, turkey pies and other products sold at the farm’s retail store.

Gravy is made with stock from birds roasted on site.The cooking largely stops Thanksgiving week, as the family adopts an all-hands-on-deck approach to the holiday sales rush.

This year uncooked turkeys sold for $3.09 a pound, more than triple the supermarket price, amid rising costs that included a 50-percent hike in feed prices.Each year, the activity peaks the day before Thanksgiving, when the last customer walks out the door with his bird.

But life on the farm requires that someone work the holiday, and each year, there are inevitably four or five panicked people who show up at the farm, looking for a replacement for a botched supermarket bird.Jim always sells them one, and he’s on hand as many others head to the malls the day after.

The business will steadily increase until Christmas, after which Jim and Patt leave the farm behind to their kids and spend three weeks each winter month at their condominium in Naples, Fla.Asked if he was looking forward to the break, Jim Rischer chuckled.I bought the tickets in August, he said.

Strategies: More on building your business through the Web

Today, I’ll share with you some keys to ranking high.Remember, there are two ways to appear when someone types in keywords into a search engine: Search engine optimization (SEO)  designing and writing your website to naturally rank high in search engine results.

Search engine marketing (SEM)  paying for a listing adjacent to keywords that you choose., I’ve covered the full range of marketing tactics for small businesses.

Moreover, with SEM, you pay only for those who actually click through to your website, so it makes search engine advertising particularly attractive to small companies.If you want your site to appear high in results without paying for ads, choosing which keywords to use throughout your site is critical!

But your site won’t show up high in search results because millions of other sites use such terms.Instead, use very specific keywords  such as kids algebra educational software  repeatedly.

Keep in mind that keyword stuffing  repeating a keyword without content or context  can get your site blackballed from search engines.

Meta tags (the description of the content that is programmed into the code of a website)  search engines look to see if keywords are in the metatags.

Age of site  search engines rank older sites higher, under the assumption they were not just put there to game the ranking system Links in  if many sites link to a page, search engines assume you have a good site worthy of higher rankings.

Quality of links in  if the links in to a page come from sites with higher rankings themselves or with heavy traffic, those links are considered more valuable in determining rankings.

Links out  if a page is also linking out to other sites, it is viewed as being more likely to have genuine content rather than just being a spam site.

Games software brings the great texts to life

Ways of stimulating learning.

Stimulating learning is the aim of MissionMaker from Immersive Education.

In keeping with Kartouche and Media Stage, MissionMaker is innovative, enabling students to create their own games.

Former headteacher Coral Milburn-Curtis, who heads up the Iguana Junior Learning Community at the University of Warwick, finds that the challenge and stimulation of creating a game enthuses children.

Creating a game makes children more critical of games they buy.Just as stimulating, but very different, is Comic Life (Tag Learning 11.99).

It can also be used to create good story boards for media work.

They produce Henry V and Macbeth as comic strips that might horrify some purists but as a new way of understanding the texts it deserves consideration.

The RM version (99 per text) provides the plays in a computerised graphic novel format which, by using the Comic Life software, teachers and students can add speech balloons to.Jing, a free, open-source product on the web, saves Racheal Smith, head of English at Bishop Fox’s community school, a great deal of time.

I can explain how to do something on the computer and record the explanation, which is then available so that I don’t have to keep repeating it.

It also enables students to create explanations .

Simple and ingenious.Free high-quality word processors are so common now that it is difficult to decide which to use.

While Google Docs has been taken up by some schools as their basic document producer, probably the most elegant and sophisticated is Buzzword from Adobe.

The virtue of the online word processor is that you always have the latest version and it is available everywhere that you have an online connection.Two online word processors produced especially for schools were launched last year and have been improved over the months.

J2e (Just too easy), the online word processor is already available to schools on the London Grid for Learning.

Prices for schools vary, starting from 50 each for schools of under 100 students.

Now the programme can create web pages, text analysis, online jigsaws and even offers online storage.

Teachers from the National Association for the Teaching of English (Nate) will be demonstrating the power of WriteOnline at the show (500 for a primary school first-year subscription).

Pupils can hear what they have writtenand listen to words in the Wordbar and the word predictor before writing them.

It is just as important to think about text as to create it.

If there is a better cloze procedure way of intensively analysing a text it has yet to be discovered.

(The procedure removes specific words from a text and then pupils are asked to insert what they think are the missing words.)Two new inexpensive video cameras bring media within reach of any classroom: Flip (84) and the Toshiba Camileo Pro HD (111).

Elie Ward and the AAP Fighting for the Rights of Vaccine Makers

In your letter you urge Congressperson Maloney to read Autism’s False Prophets which you go on to describe in reverential terms.

This blind and uninformed advocacy on behalf of vaccine makers is frankly, embarrassing, and discredits your entire argument.

Offit is a very rich man as result of his vaccine patents.

Offit refuses to disclose how much money he made as a result of that transaction.

Of course Offit’s book claims vaccines are always safe, he advocates for a product he SELLS.

This is confusing because you purport to be so upset by those who are making a great deal of money in autism.

The exhaustive Columbia University study you claim proves no links because autism and vaccines was a CDC study (another vaccine patent holder) that studied a dozen children.

According to you, we should blindly believe the conclusions of those who stand to enrich themselves, exponentially, as a result of their vested interest in the vaccine program and take a horribly flawed study of a dozen children as definitive proof that vaccine safety science is sound.

So much for exhaustive science, it sounds like your definition of junk science to me.That is not even the worst of it Elie.

The worst of it is that you argue that Congressperson Maloney should not listen to the constituents in her community whom she has so bravely served.

No, instead Maloney should disregard the hundreds of stories that families with sick and suffering autistic children have shared with her.

Congressperson Maloney needs to listen only to you, Dr.

Her oldest son, Christian, is severely affected by autism.

Upon the advice of medical professionals Katie and her husband were advised to pursue only high quality behavioral therapy, speech and OT for Christian.

doctors who treated the underlying causes of Christian’s descent into autism.

Before autism, Katie Wright was the Clinical Director of Sexual Assault Crisis Center in Stamford Connecticut.