Vast Problem Whose Effects On Children's Health Remain Largely Unstudied

With a focus on how to improve the lives of children victimized by or affected by forced labour, this article from the BMJ although dated, concentrates on the care and development of these children from a medical lens. In criticizing inadequate policies, the article highlights the importance of health for children engaging in such labour as crucial to their development and sustenance, alongside access to stable and appropriate education.

Child Labour: Vast Problem Whose Effects On Children's Health Remain Largely Unstudied

Author(s): Thomas J. Scanlon, Vivien Prior, Maria Luiza Nobre Lamarao, Margaret A. Lynch and Francesca Scanlon

Source: BMJ: British Medical Journal, Vol. 325, No. 7361 (Aug. 24, 2002), pp. 401-403 Published by: BMJ 

At two recent symposiums, the United Kingdom's chief medical officers have sought to educate senior health service managers and clinicians in better trans fusion practice and the alternatives to allogeneic trans fusion. Without reinforcement of their message, however, sustained change seems unlikely. By contrast, the French government has, since a highly politicised blood scandal in the mid-1980s, implemented a policy of national haemovigilance that has brought about a substantial reduction in the previously high rate of allogeneic blood use. A similar haemovigilance is in place in the Irish Republic after a costly failure to over see national arrangements for the preparation and supply of anti-D immunoglobulin. A haemovigilance programme is overdue in United Kingdom, with mandatory local participation, new funds to pay for training, innovation, and audit, removal of incentives to supply and use blood, and an independent body to administer the programme. Although it may turn out to be more expensive to use blood sparingly in the short run, lower consumption of allogeneic blood will both minimise the danger from variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease and alleviate the growing problem of recruiting loyal volunteer donors. If the threat of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease transmitted by transfusion materialises it will be hard to defend the casual practices in the use of blood that linger from an era when it was believed that British blood was by definition safe. The remedy is not to wait for the unscheduled arrival of yet another screening test, but to bring allogeneic blood use under firm control now.