When I was about 9 or 10, an historic event developed, which since that time has been known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. As I recall, Castro had obtained missiles from Russia, that were in the process of being positioned pointing at the continental US. There was an unbelievable amount of tension in the air. There must have been for a 10 year old to remember it, and still feel a pit in my stomach at the age of 60.
I lived in Los Angeles, and there are a number of air bases in and around the area. Hearing an occasional "sonic boom" was not an unusual event.
However, combine these two things--the volatility of the political situation, and the loudest sonic boom I have ever heard in my life, and it created an interesting event one afternoon at school.
As we sat in our 5th grade classroom one morning, a bone-rattling "boom" rolled across the sky and thirty 10-year-olds hit the floor in a well-coordinated "drop drill". We dove under our desks in unison, and we each curled in a ball under our desks and shielded our heads with our arms. I remember being wrapping my arms over my head on the floor and hearing the windows shake and the chalk rattle in the chalk trays. All I could think about was that I would never see my Mother again, and that we were all going to die in a nuclear attack, right then. The seconds slowly passed. After about 20 or 30 seconds, I heard my teacher scramble out from under her desk, and breathe deeply. "OK," she said, "I think everything is OK now, come out from under your desks. I think it was just a sonic boom." Slowly, we each clambered out from under our desks, and brushed ourselves off. No one said anything. We pulled our chairs back toward our desks, and slowly sat, still silent.
I don't remember anything else about that day, until I was telling my Mother about my day at school. "Your class is really well-trained," she said, thoughtfully. She hugged me, and told me she loved me, and that everything was going to be all right.
I thought about that day when I listened to news reports about the children in Newtown, Connecticutt, who had trained for emergencies, and obediently sat in silence with their teachers, hiding from a madman as he murdered their friends and schoolmates. They practiced for the terrors of their generation--a school shooting-- just as we rehearsed our "drop drills" to protect us from nuclear attack--the terror of my childhood in the 50's and 60's. Now, looking back, I wonder how hiding under my desk with my arms over my head would have protected me from inevitable death. I wonder what, in a couple more generations, will terrorize our children. Will their mothers be able to hug them, and tell them "everything is going to be all right?"
The study also said that the reduction in premature births would save those countries about $3 billion a year in related medical and economic costs. Nearly half of those savings would be in the United States, where there are more than half a million preterm babies delivered every year.
The researchers assessed the impact of five evidence-based interventions to reduce premature birth: reducing the use of elective cesarean sections and induced labor; getting pregnant women to stop smoking; limiting multiple embryo transfers in assisted reproductive technology; progesterone supplementation; and cervical cerclage, which is a surgical procedure that can prevent preterm birth in some women.
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The impact of these interventions on premature births would vary from an 8 percent reduction in the United States to a 2 percent reduction in the U.K., according to the study, published Nov. 15 in The Lancet.
The average 5 percent reduction that could be achieved by implementing the five interventions is "shockingly small," study author Dr. Joy Lawn, of Save the Children, said in a journal news release. She added that more research is needed to find better ways to prevent preterm birth.
Each year, about 15 million babies are born preterm (before 37 weeks of pregnancy) and about 1.1 million of them die. Most of those deaths occur in poor countries, where the infants die from lack of simple care. The issue is the focus of World Prematurity Day, on Nov. 17.
In an editorial accompanying the study, two experts agreed that more research is needed to find more effective ways to reduce the number of premature births.
"Until considerable strides have been made in our understanding of how, why and when preterm births occur, and the effects that this has on both mother and baby, preterm births will remain a major public health problem, from which no country in the world is immune," Jane Norman and Andrew Shennan, of Tommy's Centre for Maternal and Fetal Health at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, said in the news release.
More information
The U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has more about preterm labor and birth.
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