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New Electronic Pass System Limits Students to 7 Bathroom Breaks per Week
Students at a high school in Wisconsin are upset about their district’s new electronic pass system that limits the number of times a student can use the bathroom during the school day and week. The new ePass system at Arrowhead Union High School, located in a suburb of Milwaukee, functions as an electronic hall pass that students must use to take bathroom breaks during school hours.
Students are restricted to three bathroom visits per day and seven total visits per week.
“I feel like this system should not have been implemented,” said JP Moen, an Arrowhead student who recently addressed the school board about the issue.
Moen, a cross-country athlete, said the system penalizes him for staying hydrated for his sport.
“Say I drank a lot of water that day, and I try to go to the bathroom two periods in a row, you can’t go. It’s messed up,” Moen said. The system also limits how many students can check out passes simultaneously, creating additional barriers for bathroom access.
“You only get three a day and seven a week, and if you are having extenuating circumstances, it doesn’t matter, you literally can’t go to the bathroom,” said another student, Gabi Eggers.
Student Mariela Scarpaci described how crowded conditions further complicate bathroom access. “If there is a line, I’m just like I will wait, and I end up not going to the bathroom all day,” Scarpaci said.
Why We Know so Little About Medicines During Pregnancy
One evening in 2019, when I was a pediatrics resident, I admitted a two-month-old to the hospital for observation after a minor surgery. I explained to the baby’s mother that I planned to order acetaminophen — commonly sold over the counter as Tylenol — every six hours, because the baby had an obvious source of pain. If pain still kept the baby from eating, sleeping, or calming down, the mother could ask for an opioid. I was just leaving the room when the mother stopped me to ask about the acetaminophen.
“Doesn’t it cause autism?” she said.
“I’m not familiar with any research linking Tylenol to autism,” I told her. “But I’ll look into it and get back to you.” In the meantime, we agreed to use both the acetaminophen and the opioid as needed, instead of administering them on a schedule. Small studies had associated acetaminophen exposure in utero with a baby’s risk of developing autism. But this wasn’t the same as saying that Tylenol caused autism. Perhaps whatever the drug was treating — for example, fevers, infections, or painful chronic conditions — contributed to autism, and acetaminophen did not.
For babies under three months, as for pregnant women, Tylenol is considered the safest medicine for fever. (Ibuprofen and similar medications, NSAIDs, have been associated with kidney injury in babies.) I continued to order it for patients, if a little more cautiously.
Then, in 2024, a more rigorously controlled study of more than two million children born in Sweden found no connection between acetaminophen and neurodevelopmental disorders. As the epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina has written, “the evidence leans heavily towards correlation, not causation. (Tylenol is not the cause.)” Now doctors are reporting that pregnant women are hesitating to use the medicine, even when professionals recommend it for pain or for fever.
Autism Should Not Be Seen as Single Condition With One Cause, Say Scientists
Autism should not be viewed as a single condition with a unified underlying cause, according to scientists who found that those diagnosed early in childhood typically have a distinct genetic profile to those diagnosed later.
The international study, based on genetic data from more than 45,000 autistic people in Europe and the U.S., showed that those diagnosed in early childhood, typically before six years old, were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, including problems with social interaction, but remain stable. Those diagnosed with autism later, typically after the age of 10, were more likely to experience increasing social and behavioral difficulties during adolescence and also had an increased likelihood of mental health conditions such as depression.
“The term ‘autism’ likely describes multiple conditions,” said Dr. Varun Warrier, from Cambridge’s department of psychiatry, senior author of the research. “For the first time, we have found that earlier and later diagnosed autism have different underlying biological and developmental profiles.”
Whooping Cough Surges in North Carolina; Fading Vaccine Immunity Likely Plays a Role
North Carolina Health News reported:
Most people likely know pertussis by its more common name — whooping cough, which comes from the “whoop” sound made as the person tries to catch their breath in between violent coughing spells. The Corbin family in Chapel Hill is well acquainted with the other nickname for pertussis — the “100-day cough.” Earlier this year, 11-year-old Alex Corbin spent at least two months struggling with a cough that made him vomit, kept him up at night and left him breathless.
Months later, he still suffers from coughing fits, although they are nowhere near the intensity they were initially, said his mother, Jennifer Corbin. A spate of whooping cough cases cropped up at Alex’s elementary school at the end of last school year, Corbin said. She was surprised when Alex became sick because he was vaccinated.
Cases are climbing across the state, including in Buncombe County in western North Carolina, and some of that is likely due to waning immunity in vaccinated kids, according to county health officials. They said the vaccine starts to wane around ages three to four and again around ages nine to 10 years old, before children typically get the next booster shot.
More Kids Using Sodium Nitrate in Suicide Attempts
Amid an uptick in U.S. adolescents attempting suicide by using sodium nitrate and nitrate — chemical compounds commonly used in food preservation — researchers found several trends regarding affected youth, in a recent study. Kids who died by sodium nitrate poisoning skewed older compared with kids who used other means (62% were 17- to 21-year-olds vs 36% in the non-sodium nitrate group).
White kids comprised the majority of both groups (62% vs 73%, respectively), but Asian kids had the second highest prevalence in the sodium nitrate group (24%) while Black kids did in the non-sodium nitrate group (12%), according to Frank Pleban, Ph.D., of Tennessee State University in Nashville. Notably, a higher proportion of kids in the sodium nitrate group had been hospitalized for mental health concerns in the year prior to their death compared to the non-sodium nitrate group (20% vs 9%).
They were also more likely to have seen a healthcare provider within a month of their death (13% vs 8%) and more likely to have had a mental health emergency department visit in the year before their death (13% vs 9%), Pleban reported at the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting.
Kids who died by sodium nitrate poisoning were also less likely to have received mental health services than those who died by other methods (21% vs 26%), and were less likely to have had a history of substance use (6% vs 22%), or to have experienced maltreatment (6% vs 21%).
We Shouldn’t Let Kids Be Friends With ChatGPT
The number of kids getting hurt by AI-powered chatbots is hard to know, but it’s not zero. Yet, for nearly three years, ChatGPT has been free for all ages to access without any guardrails. That sort of changed on Monday, when OpenAI introduced a suite of parental controls, some of which are designed to prevent teen suicides — like that of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old Californian who died by suicide after talking to ChatGPT at length about how to do it.
Then, on Tuesday, OpenAI launched a social network with a new app called Sora that looks a lot like TikTok, except it’s powered by “hyperreal” AI-generated videos.
It was surely no accident that OpenAI announced these parental controls alongside an ambitious move to compete with Instagram and YouTube.
In a sense, the company was releasing a new app designed to get people even more hooked on AI-generated content but softening the blow by giving parents slightly more control. The new settings apply primarily to ChatGPT, although parents have the option to impose limits on what their kids see in Sora.
