I was delighted to read the new USDA guidelines requiring schools to serve meals with twice as many fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sodium and fat, and no meat for breakfast. The guidelines were mandated by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act signed by President Obama in December 2010 and will go into effect with the next school year.

The new guidelines offer a welcome change from the USDA’s tradition of using the National School Lunch Program as a dumping ground for meat and dairy surpluses.

Not surprisingly, 90 percent of American children consume excess fat, only 15 percent eat recommended servings of fruits and vegetables, and one-third are overweight or obese. These early dietary flaws become lifelong addictions, raising their risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

In recent years, the Hawaii, California, New York and Florida legislatures asked their schools to offer daily vegetarian options, and most school districts now do. The Baltimore public school system offers its 80,000 students a complete weekly break from meat.

Parents should continue to insist on healthful, plant-based school meals, snacks and vending machine items. They can consult www.fns.usda.gov/cnd, www.healthyschoollunches.org, and www.vrg.org/family.

Paul Mahn

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Portland

 

Hospice and palliative care can aid young patients, too

 

My work as a rehabilitative aide has helped me recognize the toll that chronic childhood illness takes on the patient and family. More than 25,000 children died in 2005, the most recent year for which data could be located. Three-fourths of these deaths were considered nonpreventable, meaning the child died as a result of a life-threatening or life-shortening condition.

These statistics don’t include individuals aged 20 to 24 who died as a result of a pediatric chronic condition.

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Hospice and palliative care are frequently used as a resource for the family and patient as adults approach death. Unfortunately, pediatric palliative and hospice care services are not widely offered in the state of Maine.

Such services differ from adult services, where most often the adult has reached emotional and developmental maturity prior to diagnosis. Pediatric patients require different types of clinical treatment, psycho-social support and funding sources.

Currently, our culture and medical communities are ignoring a vulnerable population. Medical advances allow these children to live longer lives, yet the knowledge of death constantly hangs over their heads. Medical advances carry an ethical responsibility that obligate us to meet the needs of our patients, biologically, socially, psychologically and spiritually.

For more information on childhood palliative and hospice care, visit the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization at www.nhpco.org. I encourage you to contact the administration at your local hospital and remind them of their ethical obligation to their pediatric patients. We need to speak up for our children and establish formal systems of palliative and hospice care to meet their needs.

Heather Martel

Saco

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Post-conviction review process also under review

 

Since I was once a reporter and because the media did not cover it, I wanted to inform readers that the University of Maine School of Law held a groundbreaking conference on Maine’s post-conviction review process Feb. 4.

Approximately 100 attorneys and academics, including the attorney general, Supreme Judicial Court justices and the original Dennis Dechaine trial judge, Carl Bradford, were given a critical look at the process faced by defendants claiming innocence and seeking exoneration.

Descriptions of the post-conviction review process from as far away as Finland emphasized the difference between places like Maine, where the focus is often lopsidedly on procedural details — as illustrated by Dechaine’s retrial motion remaining unresolved after more than three years — and those where the emphasis is on fact-finding and the search for truth.

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Professor Christopher Johnson of the University of New Hampshire School of Law described how Finland imposes no limits on the nature of admissible evidence. Dechaine’s attempt to bring before the court time-of-death opinions supporting his claim of innocence, plus the possibility of alternative suspects, would fare better in Finland than here in Maine.

Mary Kelly Tate, director of the Institute for Actual Innocence at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia, described wrongful convictions from the point of view of the harm they do to public confidence in the judiciary.

Two details of interest emerged:

Until sometime in the 1990s, Maine typically assigned post-conviction reviews to new judges in place of the original trial judge, presumably to avoid a conflict of interest like that faced by Judge Bradford.

And the attorney general mentioned the possibility of changes to Maine’s post-conviction review process, as contained in recent recommendations he had received from the Criminal Law Advisory Council.

Maine is finally waking up. Maybe there’s hope for Dechaine and others wrongfully convicted. Stay tuned.

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Bernie Huebner

Waterville

 

Improvement in economy not just Obama’s ‘luck’

 

I’m writing in response to a column by Dana Milbank published on Feb. 10, regarding President Obama’s “sudden run of luck.”

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Why, when things are going wrong in the country, is the president blamed for poor policies and lack of leadership, but when there are glimmers of hope for recovery, he’s having a “sudden run of luck”? To me, this is where the old adage “the harder I work, the luckier I get” comes in.

White-collar crooks strangled our economy, and an inept previous administration nearly ran our country into the ground, along with a Congress that can’t seem to get its act together to do the job they were elected to do for the people who elected them. Then there are the huge social and cultural challenges that all presidents must deal with.

Wouldn’t common sense dictate that it’s going to take awhile to right this great ship of state we call America? I believe that President Obama will continue to make these course corrections and deserves a second term to help bring prosperity to this country and all of its people, not just the privileged few, once again.

Roberta Watson

Sanford

 


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