NATION 6F www.hpe.com SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2009 THE HIGH POINT ENTERPRISE
Newest Halloween costumes include bite-size gore fest
211 W. Lexington Avenue, Suite 104, High Point, NC
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BY LEANNE ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
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alloween has morphed into a gore fest that has kids as young as 6 unleashing their inner monsters in ultra-violent costumes – bloodsmeared chain saws and spiked killing gloves sold separately. Options include Leatherface from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Jason (“Friday the 13th”), Freddy (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”) and Michael (“Halloween”). Costume sizes can run so small that many wearers might be too young to have seen the slasher movies under film industry guidelines. Fanged creatures feasting on brain stems. Possessed babies chomping on arms. Not all parents think it’s OK for the holiday second only to Christmas in the minds of many kids to be more a celebration of the most deranged characters pop culture has to offer. “Bloody, sadistic, nightmare-inducing Halloween costumes are indeed being made and marketed for kids, and no one seems to care,” said Joel Schwartzberg, a parenting writer and Montclair, N.J., dad of a 10-year-old boy and twin 7-year-old girls. Schwartzberg is fighting back at tooscarycostumes.com, which he hopes will raise awareness about how
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PINEWEST OB-GYN, INC Welcomes NATASHA DWAMENA, MD Dr. Natasha Dwamena was born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree with honors from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California followed by her Medical Degree from University of Medicine and Dentistry - New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. She completed her Obstetrics and Gynecology Residency at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. FILE | AP
This Oct. 31, 2008, file photo shows children wearing Halloween masks receiving candy and sweets during the “Trick or Treat” tradition. Halloween has strayed from “sickly sweet to just plain sick.” No puritan, he said he loves a good horror flick and has even written some himself, but what’s the point of all the realistic gore – for the very young, anyway? “I think wearing these costumes and being exposed to human depravity, even in a ‘fun’ context, doesn’t scar kids so much as desensitize them to brutal violence,” Schwartzberg said. “Kids
are less able to distinguish between real world and fictional brutality than grown-ups.” Some schools are also concerned, toning down Halloween celebrations or banning them altogether because of complaints about the gore factor, along with religious objections and concerns about too much candy and potentially dangerous props like pointy toy swords and vision-impairing masks.
But it’s Halloweeeeeeeeeen, costume companies and other parents argue, urging the bothered among them to exercise the privilege of saying “No” to violent, realistic gore. “It’s one night a year – let them have fun as long as it’s something that’s not dangerous or putting their life in jeopardy,” said Big Lake, Minn., mom Cindy Chapman, who has a 9-year-old daughter.
Dr. Dwamena has a wide range of interests regarding Women’s Health. She is very interested in minimally invasive gynecologic surgery, high risk pregnancy, as well as preventative health care. Dr. Dwamena is Board Eligible in Obstetrics and Gynecology and is a Member of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Dwamena currently resides in High Point and is an admirer of the performing arts, enjoys travel, cultural dance, photography, reading political history and cultural anthropology. Dr. Dwamena will be available to see patients starting September 16, 2009. For an appointment, please call
(336) 885-0149 487048©HPE
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) – The memory still bothers Ken Keller: A panicked ambulance crew had a critically ill patient, but the man weighed more than 1,000 pounds and could not fit inside the vehicle. And the stretcher wasn’t sturdy enough to hold him. The crew offered an idea to Keller, who was then an investigator with the Kansas Board of Emergency Medical Services. Could they use a forklift to load the man – bed and all – onto a flatbed truck? Keller agreed: There was no other choice. “I’m sure it was terribly embarrassing to be in his own bed, riding on the back of a flatbed with straps tying him down, going to the hospital, and then have a forklift at the hospital unload him,” Keller said. As the nation battles the obesity crisis, ambulance crews are trying to improve how they transport extremely heavy patients, who become significantly more difficult to move as they surpass 350 pounds. And caring for such patients is expensive, requiring costly equipment and extra workers, so some ambulance companies have started charging higher fees for especially overweight people. The move to modify ambulances is just the latest effort to accommodate plus-sized patients. Some hospitals already offer specially designed beds, wheelchairs, walkers and even commodes. Transporting extremely heavy people costs about 21⁄2 times as much as normal-weight patients.
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Ambulances start charging extra for obese patients