Men are pretty simple. There are only two things they really want.........

Hmmm, what happened to the puking graemlin?

I'm so sorry walaal. I will pray for him...I hope that your ok.

^What's wrong with cuddly little babies? Babyist.

Sleuthing for a Danger in Toy Beads HONG KONG, Thursday, Nov. 8 — The story started with a 2-year-old boy who was taken to a suburban Sydney hospital on Oct. 5 in a shallow coma and suffering from seizurelike spasms. It ended with the latest recall of a Chinese-made toy, as the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered the recall of 4.2 million Aqua Dots in the United States on Wednesday evening. Bindeez is also sold under brand names like Aqua Dots. Dr. Kevin Carpenter with Bindeez beads. Once ingested, the beads released a chemical related to a banned date rape drug. Connecting the two events were four weeks of medical sleuthing by Dr. Kevin Carpenter, a biochemical geneticist in Sydney. Dr. Carpenter discovered that the boy in Sydney had eaten Bindeez beads, celebrated as Australia’s “Toy of the Year.” Once ingested, the beads released a chemical related to GHB, the banned date rape drug. The beads are marketed in North America as Aqua Dots. Dr. Carpenter’s story demonstrates how recalls come about, in a time when they are becoming depressingly routine. Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, outside Sydney, first believed that the 2-year-old boy, whose name has not been released, had an inherited metabolic disorder. But when Dr. Carpenter checked urine samples the next day for the chemical markers of the disorder, he found GHB, which can render victims unconscious and even cause death through respiratory failure. “We suspected at that time the child had been surreptitiously given” the drug by a family member or friend of the family, he said by phone from Sydney on Wednesday. A follow-up test two days later showed that the GHB had disappeared from the boy’s body, which confirmed that the chemical had been ingested and was not occurring because of a genetic disorder. It was then that Dr. Carpenter learned that the boy had vomited beads before and after going into a shallow coma. Dr. Carpenter obtained more of the boy’s beads and tested them in a mass spectrometer, a device that helps identify chemical compounds. “I saw a large peak of a substance I didn’t recognize,” he said. The “peak” was an obscure industrial chemical used to prevent water-soluble glues from becoming sticky before they are needed. But when ingested, the chemical quickly breaks down to become GHB. The United States tightly restricts the chemical’s sale and places GHB in the same category as heroin. Dr. Carpenter bought a small quantity of the industrial chemical, a purchase that required considerable paperwork to assure the vendor that it would not be used illegally. He contacted the toy’s worldwide distributor, Moose Enterprise of Australia, who referred him to the Hong Kong office of the manufacturer. The manufacturer provided a list of the beads’ ingredients. The list did not include the dangerous industrial chemical. Dr. Carpenter said the manufacturer was reluctant to provide details of how the beads were made. “The manufacturer was very keen that Moose not know what was in them,” apparently to prevent Moose from ordering identical beads from another manufacturer, Dr. Carpenter said. He alerted the Ministry of Fair Trading of New South Wales, the state where Sydney is located. The hospital’s poison control center then sent out a warning about the beads last Friday to poison centers around Australia. The next day, a mother living near Dr. Carpenter’s hospital found her 10-year-old daughter motionless. Then, the girl began vomiting beads. At the hospital’s poison control center, doctors recognized the symptoms immediately. “Both the children presented with a coma and seizurelike movements,” said Dr. Naren Gunja, the deputy director of the center. On Tuesday, Moose, the toy’s distributor, ordered a recall in Australia of Bindeez beads. On Wednesday, Dr. Carpenter said safety regulators should look beyond Bindeez to conduct laboratory tests on all similar craft toys. These toys, sold under brand names including Aqua Dots and Aqua Beads, contain packets of brightly colored beads that children arrange into mosaics, then sprinkle with water; the beads then stick together in as little as 10 minutes to form durable artworks. The same day, Peter Mahon, a Moose spokesman, said the company had ordered safety tests on Bindeez beads sold in more than 40 other countries, but that it was awaiting results before deciding whether to expand its recall beyond Australia. But Amazon’s British Web site, Amazon.co.uk, abruptly stopped listing Bindeez products for sale. Toys LiFung (Asia) of Hong Kong said that it had removed all Bindeez items from the Toys “R” Us stores that it operates in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Later on Wednesday, the Toronto-based company that markets Aqua Dots, Spin Master, asked retailers across North America to remove the product from their shelves, “out of an abundance of caution.” But late on Wednesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall, saying that two children had fallen seriously ill in the last several days after eating Aqua Dots. In Britain, Aqua Beads is marketed by Flair Leisure Products Plc of Britain. Peter Brown, the chief executive of Flair, said that upon learning of Moose’s recall on Tuesday, the company immediately sent Aqua Beads samples to an independent laboratory for tests. The tests did not show any sign of the precursor to GHB, Mr. Brown said. Flair buys Aqua Beads from a Chinese supplier, but not the same manufacturer or factory as Moose, he added. Flair has nonetheless begun a broader review of any possible toxic risks posed by Aqua Beads. “We are 99.9 percent sure the product is safe, but we are conducting more tests,” Mr. Brown said in a telephone interview. Hong Kong customs officials said that they had sent Bindeez toys to a government laboratory for testing after learning that the Australian distributor had used its Hong Kong office to buy the toy from its maker and ship it. Moose said that it had reviewed the ingredients of the beads and found that some batches did not match the list of ingredients promised by the supplier. “The substitution was not at any time approved by Moose, nor was Moose made aware of any substitution by the supplier,” the company said in a statement, adding that it would add a safe but foul-tasting ingredient to future beads to discourage children from eating them. Moose declined to identify the supplier. Dr. Carpenter said that during his investigation, Moose had put him in touch by e-mail with the manufacturer, whose e-mail addresses ended in @jssy.com.hk. JSSY Ltd. has the Web address with that name, and the company’s Web site describes it as a toy manufacturer with offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan and three factories in mainland China. Lavigne Law, a customer service representative at the JSSY office in Hong Kong, said she was not authorized to discuss Bindeez. During two phone calls on Wednesday, Ms. Law said that she would ask a colleague to return the call and take questions. But another company representative did not return the calls. Source --- First it was lead coated toys...now this...honeslty just give your kids rocks, sticks and wooden toys to play with. Safe and nurturing their creativity and imagination. This is just too much.

Practice abstinence. The best, safest, & most effective protection against diseases and babies. Guaranteed.

I thought u said you had the memory of a goldfish in some other thread Val. Elephant is more like it

Does anyone else here have problems with public speaking...what tips do you have to stay calm and collected during presentation? I don't think I'll ever get over this....SO ANNOYING. GRR.

It's never too late to get an education or to get married. As long as your breathing...you've got a chance.

lol don't know if ur funny or crazy...

^What do you think of free/home birth?

Rixa Freeze, 29, a doula from Iowa in the US, endured a 10-hour labour with no medical assistance. She gave birth to daughter Zari on October 31, 2006. "I was sitting on the edge of the toilet, supporting my baby's crowning head with one hand, when it occurred to me that my husband, Eric, might like to witness the birth of our first child. Having spent the entire 10 hours of labour almost completely alone, I now wanted to share her arrival. "Eric came in from our bedroom as I half-squatted on the floor, a pile of towels underneath me. Zari arrived with a swoosh and I gently lowered her onto the nest of towels. Her initial crying subsided as soon as I scooped her up to my chest. "A few moments later, Eric took a photograph of Zari and me - and when I look at it today I realise what a raw and beautiful moment this was. It was just us - no strangers and no unnecessary noise. "Two and a half hours later, when the placenta came out, Eric cut me off a small piece to eat; the mild taste was surprising. Later that afternoon, as the three of us relaxed together in our bed, a family for the first time, Eric told me I was right to give birth this way. Initially, he had expressed doubts, out of concern for the baby and me, but now he too realised it was the right choice. "For me, it was the only decision. When I first heard about freebirthing, or unassisted birth as it's also known, it was as an academic, in 2003. I was in the first year of a postgraduate degree in American Studies, researching birth-related issues, and a midwife I met mentioned it to me. At first, I reacted like most people. The idea of giving birth without any medical assistance on hand sounded scary and a bit radical, especially for someone like me who didn't exactly grow up in a particularly alternative family. "My curiosity piqued, I read as much as I could on the subject and grew to really respect the women who had chosen this path. I discovered that we have such a culture of fear when it comes to birth. Look at how films portray it - a woman on her back screaming as a doctor comes to save her and deliver the baby. That makes it hard for people to imagine any other way than a medical birth. THE DEBATE THE CASE FOR Janet Fraser, national convenor of Joyous Birth, an Australian homebirth network, argues that giving birth is as natural as having sex. "We come from a culture that says birth is a medical emergency," she explains. "It's not. Basically, a spontaneous, normal, physiologically unhindered birth is really safe." In Australia, less than one per cent of babies are born at home and while there are no figures on freebirthing, Lisa Schuring, from Unassisted Pregnancy & Childbirth Australia, reports an increase of hits on her website, www.purebirth-australia.com, from just 350 a month in March 2006 to around 3000 in June this year. Fraser quotes Australian GP Dr Sarah Buckley as evidence that this is "not just hippie bullshit". In her book, Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering (One Moon Press, $36.95), Dr Buckley argues that a non-medical approach to birth is best for mum and baby. "A caesarean section involves major abdominal surgery and increases the risk of maternal death by up to four times," she writes, citing UK research. Fraser argues that our high caesarean rates make our birthing outcomes some of the worst in the developed world. "We had a higher caesarean rate than the US in 2005," she states, adding that routine obstetric care is part of the problem. Fraser believes there is an atmosphere of fear and anxiety around birth. "We don't feel that it belongs to us anymore, that we will know what's going on in our bodies, but we do," she says. "Our grandmothers freebirthed, though it wasn't called that." However, Joyous Birth encourages a high level of personal responsibility. "Everyone has a back-up plan," says Fraser. "If something is genuinely wrong, then you go to hospital. Who wouldn't? But there are few things that actually go wrong in birth and a lot of what we think of as emergencies are just variations of normal - breech babies are normal, they're just not given the time to turn in hospital." To Fraser, discussion about freebirthing is a moot point. "It's not about what professional bodies think of this stuff," she argues. "It's about what consumers want. If [a woman] wants to do something off her own bat that's safe for her and her baby, then I'm happy to support it." THE CASE AGAINST "Babies are precious, mothers are precious and I don't think we should deny the risks associated with childbirth," asserts Dr Christine Tippett, president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Some of those risks include breech birth, placental praevia (where the cervix is blocked by the placenta), foetal distress (where the baby may not be receiving enough food or oxygen) and haemorrhaging. Women would reconsider freebirthing if they witnessed the medical difficulties faced by women in Third World countries, where "one woman dies from post-partum haemorrhage every minute and one in 10 babies dies", points out Dr Tippett. "Here, women are free to make choices, but I think if a mother or her baby lost their life because she didn't access medical help in Australia in 2007, that would be a tragedy." And given that there are several different models of care within the Australian health system - from private obstetrician to midwife care through a birth centre or, more difficult to organise, at home - Dr Tippett believes women can find a solution that suits them while also having medical personnel on hand in an emergency. The number of caesarean sections continues to rise in Australia. In 2004, the number of women who had a C-section was 30.2 per cent compared with 19.3 per cent in 1995. Dr Tippett says a number of factors are driving this trend, including a greater acceptance of it in society and the perception among older and IVF mothers that it's better. One other factor that may weigh in is that obstetrics is a high-risk specialty carrying high insurance premiums. "Litigation is very real," she reveals. "Women won't sue over a C-section, but they will over a vaginal birth gone wrong." Medicine has improved over time - including anaesthetics, blood transfusions and antibiotics - and made caesareans safer, explains Dr Tippett. "Intervention is usually done with the best intentions," she argues. "It's called modern medicine." She urges women to consider the risks of freebirthing very carefully. "If there's a tragedy, there's no-one else to blame and they're the ones who have to come to terms with that," she states. Source

^hahaha You guys need to do the 'talk'. I swear I had this image of you writhing on the floor while he's hitting your back...

On what?

^Make sure u're husband learns First Aid & CPR...thumping on back loool

I hate it that admitting to a having a problem or seeking help is seen as 'shameful'. People are scared of what others would think of them or say behind their backs...pisses me off. I also noticed that a lot of women don't return to their shape of close to it after having kids. We live on a diet of meat, subag and white flour every single day. We hardly walk anywhere and most aren't informed about good nutrition or maybe they just don't care? I still have problem imaging a Somali girl suffering from an eating disorder. There may be extremes of weight but can't imagine having disorder. It's sad though to think those that would have seeked help are too scared to.

No sucking up please

I'm doing a presentation about the effects of negative body image on young girls/women in my health class and I was wondering...have u heard of any cases of somali girls with anorexia/bulumia or other eating disorders or just doing extreme dieting? I haven't...and maybe it's because the older generation automatically assumes someone's sick if they're too thin. My little cousin is very tall and very thin...but that's how she is naturally and people constantly ask her mother 'what is wrong with her? gabadha ma jirantahey'?. Maybe we don't have that in our community because thin isn't seen as 'beautiful'. Or is it? So is it worse for a girl to be too thin as opposed to too fat? Is there as much pressure for somali girls to loose weight & have the 'perfect' body in the west? No this isnt my topic...but I'm interested in how this is effecting us. And since I don't live in a place with a big somali community...I have no idea. [edit]. What's the prevalence of obesity in the somali community anyway? Where is the line between 'big boned & plump is sexy' to being 'too fat'? Is there no stigma for being fat I wonder? I've never seen anyone being made fun of for being fat or being outcasted...or maybe that's just my experience.

Originally posted by Shyma: Here we go again... Dumar iyo Qurux, maxaa is daba dhigay :confused: Inner Qurux, Outer Beauty...it's all about Confidence and Self Esteem at the end of the day. LoZ Ishaaq ka riday Shayma, please don't give false hope

Qat chewers always make me think of cows.

If they're too close...I cough in their face. They almost always back off a few feet hehe

^are u serious? Temporary marriage...that's not allowed in Islam. Reminds me of the 'halal' dating thread a while back.

^lol same here...that's why i fidget istaqfurullah...my right calf and knee just go into a cramp or something. We've had an Imam come from Egypt to our center for the last two years. Great reciter mashallah. Beautiful.

If I was gonna be paid to have a child...that payment better be exceeding the amount I would have to spend raising that child until he/she is married and out of my house/hair. Hadii kale...rip off!!!