Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Leading Causes Of Infant Deaths

http://dying.about.com/od/pediatriccare/tp/leading_causes_infant_death.htm

The leading causes of infant death haven’t changed in the last several years despite the advanced technology and increased focus on prenatal care. The infant mortality rate has actually been stable since 2000. The overall rate of infant mortality in the U.S is 6.86 deaths per 1,000 deaths. The five most leading causes of infant mortality are: congenital defects, preterm birth and low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome, maternal complications of pregnancy, and complications of the umbilical cord and membranes.

I thought that this website would be a very big help in writing the background information on infant mortality. The website is not very detailed but has links on the site that could give more detailed information about one of the causes. The website is not bias at all. All it does is give information on the top five leading causes. They also give a infant birth rate of a certain year.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Hot Zone Reflection

I honestly thought that “The Hot Zone” was a good book. It was actually pretty simple. The whole theme of the book was talking about viruses and other diseases that could be deadly to the world. When I started off reading the book, I had an idea of how I wanted to read it. I wanted to take my time and get the fundamental background of the book. If I don’t get that then I will be lost throughout the whole book, until something happens that is just so interesting to me. What I thought was good about it was that every time a new character was introduced in the book, they gave some kind of background on the person so that you could get the feeling of who they was and how they would react to certain things. Also what stood out to me was that, normally when I read a book and they introduce a person they say their whole name one time. Then if they are brought up again in the book they either call them by their first name or their last name, but in the book they repeatedly said their full name.

The Hot Zone was very in-depth. They described a lot of the thoughts that the characters were thinking about they actually went day by day and sometimes even hour by hour to tell the story that was going on. I noticed how the book had a lot of repetition in it. The stories were all the same but with a different disease or virus. They would find out about the virus. The person that would be running test almost gets infected by it or does get infected. They do a bunch of studying on it, and then the outbreak occurs. Some people die from the virus/disease and some don’t. Some people get infected by it and some don’t.

The book actually made me wonder if it was really like that. Like if that is how things really take place in those kinds of labs. Like the part when they was transporting the monkeys that was infected with the Ebola virus; I thought that they would have more security with things like that, and not just put them in the trunk of an old car. The book made me think about a movie called Dooms Day. It was about a virus that broke out and they ended up ceiling off a piece of the continent with a wall and had ships in the ocean to keep everybody on the land. They had people that were immune to the virus and I even remember it being a hot zone in the place. Anyways the whole thought of that and quarantines scare me. I always get the thought of “What if?” or “Suppose this or that?” happens.