FOR RELEASE THE WEEK OF JUNE 17, 2001:
I volunteer at a hospice but am feeling guilty about taking time away from my children, since I also have a full-time job. Do you think the benefits of volunteering outweigh the decreased "face time" with my young kids?
They may not, if your guilt is reflecting an honest feeling that your children need your time more than the people you are serving, says Harriet Shaklee, University of Idaho Extension family development specialist.
Volunteer work is unquestionably valuable to communities. And it's very valuable to families as well, when children and parents volunteer together. According to Shaklee, research has shown that children who volunteer with their parents learn the volunteer habit for a lifetime. "It's a nice way to develop a future cadre of volunteers."
Consequently, she thinks you might benefit from identifying volunteer opportunities that are consistent with spending "face time" with your kids. For example, you might consider volunteering for school or youth sports activities, or signing up as a family to collect food for the needy or to rake leaves for the elderly or disabled. Plan to return to the hospice work when your children are a little older.
Alternatively, if your hospice work is simply too important and too fulfilling to set aside, how about arranging equally valuable "face time" for your kids with Dad or with Grandma while you're volunteering a few hours a week? "A lot of wonderful things can happen to your kids while you're doing something else," Shaklee says.
Once a week at happy hour, I stuff myself full of peanuts. Even though I just drink diet sodas with them, I almost always end up feeling crummy and wind up going home to lie down. A friend of mine suggested that the aflatoxins in peanuts may be contributing. Do you think he's right?
No, says Sandy McCurdy, University of Idaho Extension food safety specialist. The U.S. requires that peanuts be tested for aflatoxin before they enter the food supply. While that doesn't guarantee that some won't slip through, the concern about aflatoxin isn't food poisoning but cancer. Indeed, even at low levels, aflatoxin has been shown to be a carcinogen.
Aflatoxin is also a liver toxin, but in order for you to have an acute liver-disease reaction, you would have to eat extremely large quantities of moldy-tasting peanuts. Also, the reaction would follow consumption by a number of hours; it wouldn't be immediate.
"Aflatoxin poisoning does happen--but only very rarely," McCurdy says. Incidences have been reported in parts of the world where food has been scarce and rainy weather has caused excessive mold growth in the peanut crop.
What are the little metallic-green bees that attack me when I'm riding my bicycle? Are they after a blood meal like a mosquito, or am I just in the way?
Like other bees, "sweat" bees feed on nectar and pollen. They're not interested in your blood, says University of Idaho Extension entomologist Bob Stoltz. But, for a poorly understood reason, they are attracted to your perspiration.
Female sweat bees can sting, but their stings aren't generally very painful. Most stings occur when people are trying to brush sweat bees off their bodies or when the bees are caught in a bent arm or leg.
Adult sweat bees tend to be very busy bees indeed, hauling impressive loads of pollen back to the hungry young that await them in their soil tunnels. They're an important pollinator of many plants and are simply temporarily diverted by you as you pedal by.
Can my dog get Salmonella or E. coli 0157:H7 from the raw marrow bones we buy at the butcher?
Dogs are less susceptible to infection by these two organisms than are humans or some other species, says Patricia Talcott, University of Idaho veterinary toxicologist. "The risk is extremely low."
However, Talcott says she personally does "not like to see dogs chewing on bones because of the small risk of chipping off large pieces that can act as foreign bodies and cause obstruction."
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