Toddlers playing with touchscreens sleep less

Two billion people drinking contaminated water: WHO

PARIS, April 15, (AFP): The more toddlers play with touchscreen devices the less they sleep, according to a study released recently that suggests the findings could be cause for concern.

For every additional hour using a touchscreen phone or tablet during the day, children aged six months to three years slept nearly 16 minutes less in each 24 hour period, researchers reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

But the study could not determine if the extra screen time was responsible for tiny tots sleeping less, or if the loss of shuteye had any adverse health effects.

One expert not involved in the research said the results “should be interpreted with extreme caution.”

Sleep is critical for cognitive development, especially during the first few years of life, when the brain and sleep patterns evolve in tandem.

Earlier research has shown that television watching and video game use are linked to sleep problems in children.

But the burgeoning use of touchscreens by an even younger cohort remained unexplored.

In 2014, more than 70 percent of families in Britain, where the study was conducted, owned a touchscreen device.

For the study, parents of 715 infants and toddlers were asked to report their child’s daytime and night-time sleep, how quickly their children fell into slumber, and how often they woke during the night. The time children spent on touchscreen devices was also tracked.

Three-quarters of toddlers monitored used a touchscreen tablet or phone on a daily basis. For children aged two or three, that percentage climbed to 92. On average, the devices were used 25 minutes per day.

Not only did more screen time correlate with less sleep, it was also associated with a longer transition into slumber. The quality of sleep, however, did not appear to change.

Several experts commenting on the findings challenged the study’s methodology and conclusions.

“There could be many possible explanations” for the link between screen time and less sleep, said Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of statistics at The Open University in Britain.

“It could be the other way round — maybe the parents of toddlers who already sleep less are more likely to let their children use touchscreens,” he said.

It was also pointed out that the average amount of lost sleep every day — about six minutes — may not be significant at an age when children sleep on average 12 hours out of very 24.

Others underlined the importance of following up.

“This is a timely piece of research given the already controversial topic of screen use in childhood and adolescence,” said Anna Joyce, an expert in cognitive development psychology at Coventry University in England.

Other research has shown that scrolling touchscreens helps develop find motor skills in very young children.

Dramatic improvements are needed in ensuring access to clean water and sanitation worldwide, the World Health Organization has said, warning that nearly two billion people currently use faecal-contaminated water.

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year because they are forced to drink contaminated water, the WHO said, urging large investments to help provide universal access to safe drinking water.

“Today, almost two billion people use a source of drinking-water contaminated with faeces, putting them at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio,” Maria Neira, who head’s WHO’s public health department, said in a statement.

“Contaminated drinking-water is estimated to cause more than 500,000 diarrhoeal deaths each year and is a major factor in several neglected tropical diseases, including intestinal worms, schistosomiasis and trachoma,” she added.

In 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — a series of aspirational targets for eradicating poverty and boosting human wellbeing, including vowing to ensure universal access to safe and affordable water and sanitation by 2030.

But according to a fresh report, published by WHO on behalf of UN-Water, countries will fall far short of this goal if they do not radically increase their investments.

The report welcomed the fact that countries had on average raised their annual budgets for water, sanitation and hygiene by 4.9 percent

over the past three years.

NEW DELHI:

Also:

A baby born with eight limbs, including two protruding from his stomach, has undergone surgery in India to successfully remove the extra arms and legs, in an operation being hailed as a world first.

Seven-month-old Karam was born in Iraq with an extremely rare condition where a conjoined twin did not fully form and was partially absorbed, resulting in the additional limbs.

The boy’s father Sarwed Ahmed Nadar flew the infant to India for surgery, where doctors performed a three-stage operation to remove the unnecessary limbs.

There are just five or six known cases worldwide of this condition, making the task more difficult for the doctors, said senior orthopaedic consultant Gaurav Rathore, who was part of the surgical team.

“He was brought to us when he was just two weeks old and his condition was quite unique. Most of the surgeries we performed had not been attempted before,” Rathore told reporters in Noida, a satellite city outside New Delhi.