Most People Will Call 9-1-1 Only Once Or Twice During Their Lifetimes

PATHFINDER PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT REQUIREMENT: (SOCIAL) #3 Explore at least two issues of public health. Subjects may include: AIDS, contagious diseases, blood supply, or Medicare . This is a relatively simple requirement that can be addressed in a number of ways. Our Troop leaders have asked the youth on both occasions how they wish to address this requirement and in both cases we have been asked to bring in a guest speaker.

PROGRAM ACTIVITY Our Troop has run this activity twice, each time bringing in a guest speaker that discussed different topics. GUEST SPEAKER#1: Public Health Worker: Discussion on Contagious Diseases. In this particular instance, our Guest speaker talked about the issue with “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” (SARS) and how it affected Canada. The guest speaker talked about the spread of disease and how vaccination clinics that were setup in all communities in Canada were influential in stemming the spread of the disease.

Two interesting side note came out of this discussion. First: A scout youth asked about the annual Winter Flu shot program and what that was supposed to do and whether all youth should be vaccinated. The speaker was engaging the youth were surprised to find out that Flu shots only protected against specific strains of flu viruses and may not protect against a new strain Second: The youth were surprised to find out that flu viruses can adapt quite to quickly thus rendering flu shots to be quite in effective. A lively discussion ensued on how viruses can adapt to changes.

The youth then quickly jumped on the topic of viruses living on other planets and living for millions of years and then landing on earth and causing killer diseases. The discussion was ended at that point.

Overall this was an engaging and interesting discussion that was held with the youth and they certainly got lots out of it.

GUEST SPEAKER#1: Nurse: Canadian Blood Services and a discussion on Blood Donation. In this discussion there was considerable interest from the youth as to why people are asked to donate blood and how it is given. The nurse brought in equipment that would be used to take blood and this held some fascination with the youth as the equipment was passed around. The Blood Services representative asked the youth what they knew of the Canadian Blood Services and what services it provided. All the youth easily guessed that blood was donated for victims of car crashes and for operations, but none realized the extent of the services that were provided:  Blood donations  Bone Marrow donations  Plasma donation  Platelet donation  Stem Cell donation  Blood donation for research. PATHFINDER PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT REQUIREMENT: (SOCIAL) #3 Explore at least two issues of public health. Subjects may include: AIDS, contagious diseases, blood supply, or Medicare . The youth gained a brief oversight into the following:  Blood is comprised of Red blood cells, white blood cells, Plasma and Platelets.  White blood cells may carry diseases and viruses that can be harmful to the recovery of the recipient  How blood is generated through the marrow in your bones  How quickly your body regenerates the blood that you have donated.  The rules and regulations on what will stop you from donating blood. Examples given were:  You have a cold  Had visited a dentist within the last 72 hours  Body piercing/Tattoo within six months  Weigh at least 110lbs (which disqualified some of the scout youth)

My thanks and appreciation go to Scout Leader Robert Gregory (1st Stittsville Scouts) for providing program ideas implementing program activities and providing directions to the scout youth on how they can earn this requirement.

 To acquaint the scouting youth to health and health care issues.

Methods:

 A health care professional can be brought in to explain the various subjects  The scouting youth can be challenged to research the issues in patrols and present in the troop meeting the results of their research. The subjects could be any of those listed above and can be about the funding, administration, community outreach programs, etc. of health care.  The larger picture issues such as the blood supply and how important it is to operations can be extremely long to go through - having them draw process flow charts may help. A discussion on how the blood supply helped an individual go through an operation may also be useful.  A scout or group of scouts may discuss a health care issue that a parent or someone they know may bring an element of empathy – almost everyone goes through a stage of their life where there will be a significant health issue. PATHFINDER PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT REQUIREMENT: (SOCIAL) #3 Explore at least two issues of public health. Subjects may include: AIDS, contagious diseases, blood supply, or Medicare . PROGRAM IDEA: Supplied by Dave Caughey: Nepean Scouts. Copied from Scouts Canada Linkedin Web page: http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=92051&type=member&item=43235510&goback= %2Egna_92051

V. Personal Development - Public Health Measures Activity I just tried a different tact on the V. PD requirement #12 which deals with public health measures, including immunization.

First, I discussed the backlash against the MMR vaccine due to the now-discredited correlation with autism, discussed in the following article. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/andre-picard/medical-fraud-revealed-in-discredited- vaccine-autism-study/article1859560/ and I cite the number of unnecessary deaths that have been attributed to the scare http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/andre-picard/doctors- discredited-vaccine-autism-link-leaves-a-legacy-of-preventable-death-and-disease/article1867998/

I then posed a question of how a few scared parents refusing to get their kids immunized could suddenly result in a surge in cases of measles and whooping cough? So, I ran an activity that demonstrated the importance of having many people being immunized...

I handed out green "immunization" cards to about 50% of the troop (in my case, 7/15). I then picked one "unimmunized" youth, and gave them a red card to indicate that they had an infectious disease. I also gave them a slip of paper with two names on it (I had a bag full of these randomly generated name pairs). On each turn, the "infected" youth then sought out a person on his list of names. If the target youth had no immunity (i.e., was not carrying a card) they became "infected" and got a red card and a slip with two names on it. At the next turn, all the "infected" youth sought out the next target name on their slips. After finding both of their potential targets, an "infected" youth turned in his red card for a brown card, indicating they now had infection-based immunity, but were no longer carriers.

I ran the game for about 7 or 8 turns, by which time 6 of the 8 originally "unimmunized" youth had become "infected". In other words, the disease had spread like wild fire.

I then restarted the game, but handed out green cards to about 3/4 of the troop (11/15), and picked a new youth to be my initial infector. Well, it turns out that the infected youth's slip had names of youth that were both holding green cards, so the infection just died. We tried it a couple of more times with new slips of paper, and were able to infect one other youth before the disease died out.

But it demonstrated to the kids that once enough people are immunized, it's very hard for a disease to spread through a community (a.k.a., "herd immunity"). And I pointed out that frequently, it's not the people who get immunized who are actually at-risk... it's infants, the elderly, pregnant women who are frequently most vulnerable, and that by getting ourselves immunized, we stifle the spread of the disease and therefore protect those who are most at-risk.