Author Topic: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.  (Read 463 times)

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Offline DalesCarpentry

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Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« on: July 23, 2008, 04:37:22 AM »
I think that Shaken-Baby Syndrome is a terrible thing. In just a few seconds you can kill or brain damage a baby for life. What are these people thinking? I think these people should receive the death sentense. Here is an article on it. Dale                                                                                       (July 22) - Pablo Cano-Lopez told detectives he was at "the breaking point" when he lifted his crying stepson, 4-month-old Elijah Llanos, and shook him four or five times. The baby stopped crying and whimpered before falling asleep.       Six hours later, Elijah's lips had turned blue. He was rushed to a hospital, but by the next day, Feb. 19, 2006, he was pronounced dead.
"He just kept on crying again, and that's when I … I just got irritated, man," Cano-Lopez told police, according to transcripts. "That's when I shook him."
Lopez, 23, of Lake Worth, Fla., confessed and was convicted in May of manslaughter and aggravated child abuse. He was sentenced July 11 to 20 years in prison.
"It's hard to understand," says Robert Gershman, Cano-Lopez's defense attorney. "He loved his children and, in a moment, shook the child out of not only frustration but irrational thinking. Not until it's over does he realize it's wrong, and he should have walked away."
Armed with data linking shaken baby incidents to periods of increases in infant crying, researchers in North Carolina and Pennsylvania are teaching parents how to cope with crying babies instead of simply saying, "Don't shake your baby."
"We don't think that shaken baby is the same kind of child abuse as battered-child abuse," says Desmond Runyan, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who is leading the state's prevention efforts. "It's somebody who lost it for 30 seconds and changed their life and life of the child.
"We're trying to prevent that unfortunate event."
Horrific Damage
When a child is shaken, the head whips back and forth and the brain crashes against the skull. Typically, there are no outward signs of abuse, but the child may have bleeding in the brain or eyes.
Shaken-baby syndrome kills 15% to 35% of all victims. Half the survivors often suffer severe brain damage, such as the 10-year-old girl named Winter who was shaken by her father when she was 9 weeks old.
The father told investigators Winter had stopped breathing and he shook her to revive her, says Chris DeMartino, the district attorney in San Antonio who prosecuted the case. The father was convicted in 2000 of felony child neglect, fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years' probation.
Winter cannot speak, eat solid food and is blind because of damage to her optic nerve. She needs oxygen to breathe at night and medication to sleep.
"He made a horrible, tragic mistake, and in the five seconds it took to shake Winter, he ruined her life," says Care Burpee, Winter's mother.
Official numbers are hard to come by, but since the National Center for Shaken Baby Syndrome launched a victim database in 1998 by cobbling together information from news reports, 3,286 victims have been identified in the USA.
'The Right Time' for Action
"Parents already knew that violent shaking was a bad thing," says Mark Dias, a neurosurgeon who developed prevention programs in New York and Pennsylvania. The program has parents review information about the syndrome, and they have one-on-one counseling with a nurse after the baby's birth. "They needed to be reminded in the right time and in the right setting."
Researchers are hoping to replicate results of a pilot program created by Dias in upstate New York that reduced such cases by 47% from 1998 to 2003.
In North Carolina, every family with a new baby now receives a DVD and a booklet describing the "period of PURPLE crying," an acronym that helps parents understand all children increasingly will cry uncontrollably from about 2 weeks old until about 5 or 6 months. P stands for peak of crying; U for unexpected; R for resists soothing; P for pain-like face; L for long-lasting; E for evening.
The message is repeated by a nurse after the birth and again by a pediatrician at the child's checkups at 2 months and 4 months.
Message Received
"We're trying to get people — the whole society, not just mothers and fathers … to understand early infant crying is not because the baby is bad or because the parents are bad," says Ron Barr, who created the PURPLE program and studied the link between shaken babies and crying.              The programs encourage parents to put a crying child in a safe place and walk away before they get too frustrated.
"What I see here is the relief when a parent hears (uncontrollable crying) is normal," says Cindy Brown, a pediatrician at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., one of the first medical centers in the state to distribute the prevention materials.
Both programs, which are financed for five years in part by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will track infant head traumas until 2012.
Says Runyan, "It's our view that the majority of shaken babies are not premeditated but a desperate parent who has run out of gas who needs the kid to be quiet."


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Offline rex6666

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2008, 04:44:29 AM »
Gotcha covered there these are grown people making these decicions.
Lets also add the ones that FORGET their children in the car while they go to work or what ever.
Rex
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Offline DalesCarpentry

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #2 on: July 23, 2008, 04:49:25 AM »
You are right. I hear every summer of a parent that left their baby in a 140 degree car while they went into the crack house or bar for a few hours. They literaly cook these children to death. I think they should lock them in a car and do the same!!!!!! Dale
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Offline rex6666

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #3 on: July 23, 2008, 04:52:39 AM »
The day-care centers in Dallas are leaving kids in the van all day, 2-3 in the last 2 summers.
and no one is charged ACCIDENT.
Rex
GOD GUNS and GUTS MADE AMERICA GREAT

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Offline yooper77

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #4 on: July 23, 2008, 05:21:22 AM »
It's unfortunate that the babies/children suffer, when idiots make poor choices.

It's also unfortunate that people get to continue to live their life after they take a life.

Its not accidents, its incompetence. ignorance or simply no caring for a human life.

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Offline Sourdough

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #5 on: July 23, 2008, 10:54:33 AM »
While I agree totally, I caution towards going too far.  I was arrested in 1993 for child abuse.  I was totally innocent, but they were all for pressing charges against me.  That is still a skeleton in the closet that comes back and haunts me occasionally.  Let me explain.

My son was born in 1989 in an Army Hospital in Fairbanks Alaska.  At birth the annotated a Brandywine birth mark on his right side just above the pelvis extending to the ribs.  We moved to DC in 1992.  We had one strict and firm rule, the child was never to step off the curb without holding his Mom's or My hand.  Infraction of that rule got him a smack on the behind.  That is the only time we ever spanked him.  This occurred maybe four or five times in his entire life.  When arriving at DC we placed him in the day care facility on Bolling AFB.  He had been going there for about five or six weeks, when there was cause to change his clothes one day.  The attendent noticed what she thought was a large bruise on the side of his abdomen.  She called Security Police and notified them of suspected Child Abuse.  Security Police took custody of the child and transported him to the base clinic.  There he was examined by a pediatrician, who confirmed that it was a bruise.  Under questioning the child affirmed he got spanked.  Who spanks you? Daddy.  Does Mommy know?  Yes.  BOOM!  In their eyes I am guilty.  They came to my work location and arrested me on Child Abuse charges.  They took me in and held me for transfer to the DC jail.  They refused to tell me anything other than the charge. 

When the wife arrived at the Clinic to take the child and talk to the staff, she looked up the PA that we usually saw when we went to the clinic.  He had never been notified about what was going on.  My wife explained what was going on to him, and he followed her to the room where Security Police and the Doctor were waiting to confront her for not reporting this herself.  My wife did not know what to say, she just sat there confussed and scared.  Luckily the PA, who happened to be a Full Bird Colonial, picked up the childs medical records and looked at the very first page.  He stopped everybody, asked the Pediatrician if he could read?  Then he pointed out that the child had a birth mark noted on his records.  Pointing to the chart in the records and lifting the childs shirt pointed out that the so called bruise was in actuallity a birth mark.

The Colonial demanded that I be released, he apologized to the wife, and told the Pediatrician (a major) to report to his office.  The Security Police released me with no explanition as to what was going on, and refused to give me a ride home.  I had to walk eight blocks home, and got there just as the wife was arriving.  She explained to me what had happened.  I went to see the Colonial and he assured me he had ordered the records be purged.  Somehow six months later those charges made their way back into my son's medical records.  And the arrest record keeps showing up also.  Therefore I caution about jumping to conclusions, or setting rules or laws that may go too far.

Also I know three men that are registered sex offenders that are totally innocent.  They got involved in a bad marriage to a gold dogger, and in every case there was a teenage daughter involved.  When the wife announced she wanted a divorce and she wanted everything he had, he said no.  He had gotten everything before he had met her.  And in two cases most of the things had belonged to his deceased wife.  When he disagreed the daughter made accusations of abuse, so he would get kicked out by the police.  Once those accusations were made the state took over from there.  Here is these guys sitting in jail, charged with sexual abuse of a minor.  their attorneys tells them it don't look good.  So to get out of jail and to just keep from going to prison they cop a plea of guilty, not realizing the total consequences of doing that will be.  One of these guys is a Salt Of The Earth kind of guy, but he shows up on the internet as a Sex Offender, and he lives with a friend, two blocks from me.  I have had several people ask me if I know about this weird guy living near us?  They think he should be run out of the neighbor hood.  Just the fact he is on the register makes him guilty in their eyes.

Oh and the XXtch that made the accusations, laughs about it.  She got the house, the shop, the truck, the car, and the bank account along with his savings and investments.
Where is old Joe when we really need him?  Alaska Independence    Calling Illegal Immigrants "Undocumented Aliens" is like calling Drug Dealers "Unlicensed Pharmacists"
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Offline yooper77

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #6 on: July 23, 2008, 11:29:38 AM »
Not making any accusations.

babies/children are dead at the hands of adults, not about being bruised or assaulted that a whole other issue.

I do understand that people get falsely accused.

yooper77

Offline torpedoman

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Re: Shaken-Baby Syndrome.
« Reply #7 on: July 23, 2008, 06:30:32 PM »
The day-care centers in Dallas are leaving kids in the van all day, 2-3 in the last 2 summers.
and no one is charged ACCIDENT.
there are no accidents just premeditated stupidity. (think of the last accident you had)
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