Eighty percent of the drowning deaths occur between May and September. The end of the school year is here and families are preparing for the seasonal water related activities. YMCAs urge swim safety for children and encourage families to be vigilant as they head toward the water.

-In the time it takes to cross a room or pool deck for a towel – 10 seconds – a child can be submerged.

-In the time it takes to answer a phone – 2 minutes – a child can lose consciousness.

-In the time it takes to answer the door – 4 to 6 minutes – a child submerged can sustain permanent brain damage.

Children drown silently and quickly – in a matter of seconds. Adults present when a child drowns are often distracted in some way – talking on the phone, chatting with other adults etc . . .

The important message is to never leave a child alone near a pool, spa, bathtub, toilet, bucket or any standing water in which a childs nose or mouth may be submerged. (One inch of water that covers a childs mouth and nose can cause drowning.) A drowning can happen anywhere.

The YMCA has outlined several important precautionary measures that should be taken to ensure childrens safety around water. Additional information is available at www.ymcahouston.org.

Create layers of protection between the water and your children: Proper fencing and gates around pools, sturdy pool coverings, install alarms on doors and windows that lead to the pool and have rescue equipment mounted by the pool.
Proper parental or adult supervision at all times. Provide reach supervision – always be within arms reach of a child who isnt an experienced swimmer.
When there are several adults present and children are swimming, designate an on-duty adult to ensure supervision at all times.
Stress the importance of never swimming alone.
Swim safety lessons for all children who will be exposed to water.
Learn to swim: If you get tired, knowing that you can turn over and float on your back to catch a breath, may mean the difference between life and death.
Let someone know when you are going to swim
Never swim in a pool that you cannot see the bottom
Posting and enforcement of pool rules
Be ready for an emergency; have the proper water rescue devices, a first-aid preparedness kit and be able to perform CPR. Never try to go into the water to save someone. Use something that you can reach the victim with like a noodle, pool buoy, pole etc . . .
Have phone access near the water area.

The YMCA, Americas Favorite Swim Instructor, has been teaching children and adults to swim for more than 100 years. The Y invented group swim lessons! Learning to Swim at the YMCA is more than just stroke development, techniques and skills. We include personal safety, personal growth, water sports and games, and rescue techniques as well as providing a positive experience.

The South Montgomery County YMCAs offers swim lessons throughout the summer and all year long. The Summer Swim Program includes Parent/Child classes for ages 6 – 36 months, Pre-School classes for ages 3 – 5 years, and Youth classes for children ages 6 years and older. The YMCA also has classes available for adults. Weekday Morning and evening classes are available as well as Saturday and Sunday classes for youth. For those swimmers who need individual attention, private lessons are available. The summer sessions begin June 4.

In addition to swim lessons, the Y also offers stroke booster class, youth swim league, youth swim team, masters swim, lifeguard training and water aerobics classes.

Swimming is a life skill that all children should have the chance to learn. Safe swimming saves lives. The YMCA strives to turn no one away for the inability to pay. Financial assistance is available to families, that substantiate a need, based on available resources. The YMCA is committed to providing programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for everyone.

For more information on Y Swim Lessons and other YMCA Classic Summer Fun programs, please call the South Montgomery County YMCAs in The Woodlands at 281-367-9622 or visit
www.ymcahouston.org/south-montgomery-county

No, it’s not. I rather like to think of CRM as the embrace-all, the make-sense-of-all. It’s a tool for bringing together both the standing pools and rushing streams of data and enabling you to see and seize the opportunities that occur in so many places and at so many often overlooked moments.

The Center of Things

I’ve written before about using CRM to deliver highly personalized services, and to enhance customer intimacy. Ideally, we aim to meet customers with precisely the right offer, delivered at precisely the right time, and at precisely the right price and conditions. CRM solutions can facilitate this, but only if the right information is coming into the solution. Moreover, it can facilitate this only if it can sort through and connect all that information and expose the opportunities that you seek.

The more raw data you have coming into your CRM solution, the more possibilities there are to expose opportunities. The more powerful and intelligent your CRM solution, the more likely it is to be able to see and seize the opportunities that are out there.

What kind of data are we talking about? That depends on your business and your customers. The history of your interactions with your clients–what they’ve purchased, with whom they’ve interacted, the history of on-time payments and the like–that’s simply a given. It’s what you bring into the CRM solution on top of that that provides you with new insights and opportunities. That might be feeds from social networks; it might be the record of particular customer preferences or quirks; it might be something completely external: long range weather forecasts, stock and commodities prices, or something else entirely.

Indeed, the datastreams into your CRM solution might include all these things and more.

Moving Away from the Center

Needless to say, you’ll require a high-performance CRM solution to ingest and process all this information. You also must have tools that are sophisticated enough to discover correlations and connections among huge amounts of information–and to do it quickly.

But just as important as the processing power at the center of your CRM solution is the movement of relevant information away from that center. If your CRM solution is over there and if the personnel who could be acting upon the opportunities are over here, you may as well not even have a CRM solution. You need to make sure that the people and systems in a position to seize the opportunities have the information they need to do so.

Previously, I mentioned that Virgin Atlantic would impress me to no end if it simply took the next step and went from being able to provide me with the milk and ice that I always request at take-off to remembering my preference for that beverage and offering it to me proactively.

Clearly, Virgin Atlantic could capture and store that nugget of information into its CRM solution if it wanted to. But if it stays in there, it does them no good. The real trick is to make sure that said nugget of information is in the mind of the cabin attendant when the attendant is making the rounds of the cabin for drink orders.

Does that present itself as an iPad app that interacts with the CRM solution? As a proactive prompt in a Bluetooth headset that is tied in with a location sensor in the plane? How that information gets to the cabin attendant is a matter for the clever people at Virgin Atlantic, but the real opportunity to delight me arises by getting that information to the attendant on my flight.

And that’s why delivering inspiring customer interactions takes more than CRM. Inspiring customer interactions may depend on a huge volume of information, coming from a wide range of both traditional and non-traditional sources. Even more importantly, inspiring customer interactions require an information infrastructure that can push the opportunities from the CRM solution out to the person or system that can seize that opportunity most effectively.

Here at SAP, that’s where our technology innovation is taking us. The HANA in-memory Big Data solution enables us to help clients make sense of all the datastreams they use and to find those golden nuggets of information that can lead to an inspired customer interaction. We’re coupling that with innovations in mobile, leveraging our Sybase know-how to ensure that those nuggets get to the people who can capitalize on this information–at the right time and in the right circumstances. Keep a look-out for the new SAP Customer Briefing app that we’re developing for the B2B market. Why? I’ve been playing with it–and it showcases like nothing else how we can deliver truly engaging CRM to meet the needs of today’s organizations.

###

County leaders this weekend are hoping for a little dancing in the streets.

Well, maybe some strolling, cycling and playing alongside the dancing, too.

For a third year, San Mateo County is urging the community to ditch the cars and head into the streets and parks. The now-annual Streets Alive! event is getting a small tweak into Streets Alive! Parks Alive! For both days this weekend, cities will block off roads, host physical activities running the gamut from dancing at the Burlingame Farmers Market to kickball in a Colma gym. Regardless of what people decide to do, event brainchild Supervisor Carole Groom said the goal is just getting them to do something beyond sitting in traffic.

We just want to showcase that this county is healthy and were all on board with keeping it that way, Groom said.

Last year, Groom said her favorite activity was watching line dancing at the San Bruno farmers market.

It just struck me, isnt this terrific? she said.

But dont expect Groom to personally take up the electric slide; she prefers to leave the dancing to others although she certainly looks forward to enjoying from the sidelines all the styles to be showcased this weekend.

Most of the events are on Sunday but some do fall the previous day which make it easier to check out more than one, and several have moved locations from last year to accommodate bigger crowds or put a greater focus on the El Camino Real area.

The goal is transforming streets and parks into safe destinations where people can be active, spend quality time with loved ones and neighbors, rediscover their neighborhoods and even boost small businesses throwing open their doors for participants.

Groom kicked off the event in April 2010 to coincide with World Health Day and while vehicles stayed away, something else didnt comply quite so well rain. Heavy rains dampened attendance and several events but organizers didnt hesitate to try again last year, albeit a month later.

Now in its third year, the weekend has added the emphasis on parks in health and quality of life.

The event was always about using the outdoors in healthy ways, Groom said.

My mantra was the parks can be our fitness center and theyre free, she said.

With the extra attention given through Streets Alive!Parks Alive! Groom hopes any future tax measures earmarked for parks would fare better than the two prior failed attempts.

Thats not really the reason we do this event but it does raise awareness and lets people see that there are all these beautiful assets, she said.

Looking to the future, Groom would like to give residents the thrill of walking down a bit stretch of El Camino without cars but understands the economics arent good for that right now.

Besides, in the meantime, weve got a lot to keep us occupied everywhere else, she said.

Weekend events, which are all held between 10 am and 4 pm Sunday, May 6 unless indicated otherwise, include:

bull; Belmont, Caltrain parking lot located at El Camino Real and ONeill Street;

bull; Burlingame, Park Road between Burlingame Ave. and Howard Ave.: live music, fitness and dance at the Burlingame Farmers Market;

bull; Cantilde;ada Road between Edgewood Road and State Route 92, Cantilde;ada Road Bicycle Sunday: Cantilde;ada Road will be closed to automobile traffic for car-free bike

riding;

bull; Colma (noon to 4 pm Saturday, May 5), TR Policita Field amp; Gym, 550 E. Market St., Daly City: Activities include soccer, basketball, kickball, relay races and field games at the new gym and field;

bull; Daly City (noon to 4 pm Saturday, May 5) Serramonte Center, Daly City: Health and Safety Fair;

bull; El Granada, Quarry Park, Santa Maria Avenue and Columbus Street: guided hikes and kids relay races;

bull; Foster City (both days), Leo Ryan Park: Polynesian Festival and Half Marathon;

bull; Menlo Park, North Fair Oaks, Siena Youth Center, 2625 Marlborough Ave.: games, activities, zumba;

bull; Pacifica, multiple locations;

bull; Redwood City, 2600 block of Broadway between El Camino Real and California/Perry streets: Broadway will be closed for crafts, games and an inflatable playland;

bull; San Bruno (Saturday, May 5), San Bruno City Park, 251 City Park Way: fitness, dance, art and enrichment classes;

bull; San Mateo, Laurelwood Park, 3471 Glendora Drive: guided hikes and outdoor games;

bull; South San Francisco, Orange Memorial Park and Centennial Way, (10 am to 1 pm): Activities include Zumba, Tai Chi, yoga, line dancing and trike-a-thon; and

bull; Woodside, 3300 Tripp Road, Old Woodside Store Day (noon to 4 pm)

Sponsors of this years event include the San Mateo County Hospital Consortium, SamTrans, the Peninsula Health Care District, San Mateo County and more than a dozen participating cities and communities. A full list of activities and details are available at www.streetsalivesmc.org.

Michelle Durand can be reached by email: michelle@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 102.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is currently showcasing images obtained by its scientists using an array of advanced techniques. The exhibition, Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies, features more than 20 sets of large-format prints from the many disciplines represented in the Museum including Invertebrate Zoology, which produced the image of the goblin spider.

Associate Curator in the Museums Division of Invertebrate Zoology Lorenzo Prendini, an arachnologist, uses UV fluorescence imaging to study scorpions, in this case ten different species of Opistophthalmus. (Image: copy; AMNH\L. Prendini and S. Thurston)

The striking exhibition takes as its starting point the artistic impulse often on display in scientific papers. Theres a wonderful aesthetic that goes with a scientists choice of images that find their way into scientific publication, said Mark Siddall, the exhibition curator and curator in the Museums Division of Invertebrate Zoology. Its not always the most informative image that is chosen, often it is the most visually compelling. It was my hope to capture the artistry of the scientific eye in this exhibition.

Nadine Duperre, a scientific assistant in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, uses a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to view goblin spiders in minute detail. This detailed study allowed Museum Curator Emeritus Norman Platnick and Duperre to define two new genera, or groups, of spiders: Niarchos and Scaphios. (Image: copy; AMNH\N. Duperre)

Picturing Science features images from the Museums Divisions of Anthropology, Invertebrate Zoology, Physical Sciences, Vertebrate Zoology and Paleontology, as well as from its Richard Gilder Graduate School. A number of imaging technologies are represented: simple photography and microscopy, remote satellite sensing, and fluorescence imaging techniques including in situ DNA hybridization and confocal fluorescent microscopy. Also on display: a series of images from the Hubble telescope stitched together, in which every square millimeter has at least one star.

Tiny bacteria make their home inside leeches, providing their hosts with essential nutrients. Museum microbiologists Mark Siddall, curator in the Museums Division of Invertebrate Zoology, and Susan Perkins, associate curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, use a technique called fluorescence in situ hybridization to uncover this relationship. (Image: copy; AMNH\S. Perkins)

Siddall sees the exhibition as part of a unique moment where the gulf between art and science isnt nearly as great as we might once have presumed indeed where the two freely intermingle in an ever broader cultural space. Were in an interesting period in which there is quite a bit of art that is science-referential like Charles Lindsays work and where theres a lot of science and technology being brought to the creation of art, he said. Picturing Science is something different from these, though. Its not art about science or the science of art, but rather the artistry of science.

Does he have a favorite image? I like the diversity most, he said. I do have a fondness, of course, for the one depicting endosymbiotic bacteria in leeches in full fluorescent regalia.

The exhibition, housed in the Museums second-floor Akeley Gallery, runs until June 24th. Check it out if youre in town.

SEATTLE, WA, May 02, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
Varolii Corporation, a market leader in customer interaction
management, today announced its new Varolii Mobile Solutions, which
provide cloud-based customer interaction solutions for smartphone
applications. These solutions help companies enhance the smartphone
experience by making companies’ existing smartphone applications more
relevant, useful and visible with smartphone push notifications, rich
text messaging and mobile Web applications.

With half of U.S. consumers currently owning at least one smartphone,
companies need a more effective mobile strategy to reach and engage
with their customers. However, B2C smartphone application adoption
and usage remains a challenge, as the vast majority of applications
are abandoned or uninstalled within weeks of being downloaded.

“Smartphone apps provided by major corporate brands can be valuable,
but only if consumers are aware of and use them,” said Sharath
Dorbala, vice president of product management and strategy at
Varolii. “Varolii’s Mobile Solutions ‘wake up’ an application based
on real-time events that impact that customer’s relationship with the
business. Then, it pushes information to the customer — rather than
waiting for customers to choose to interact — enabling the customer
to take action through Web applications, text and voice, with options
to integrate with the company’s contact center.”

Varolii’s Mobile Solutions “interaction-enable” existing smartphone
applications by adding push notifications and rich text to
proactively engage customers based on key events and triggers.
Leveraging Varolii best practices and the Varolii Interact platform,
the solutions are also designed to further automate key customer
service touch points that most impact a customer’s relationship with
companies. By turning smartphone applications into a richer
information delivery and engagement channel, applications become more
relevant to the consumer, usage increases and customers have more
opportunities to self-serve.

“In order to capture and engage a mobile audience, companies need to
put timely, relevant and personalized information at the consumer’s
fingertips. Built on the Varolii Interact platform, Varolii Mobile
Solutions provide a way for companies to turn existing smartphone
applications into a powerful new customer interaction channel to more
effectively communicate and build lasting relationships with their
mobile customers,” said Dorbala. “And, working with Varolii’s
Interaction Design team, companies can build better brand exposure
and establish a superior experience that will drive customers to
download their smartphone applications and keep them coming back for
more.”

In addition, companies have historically not fully utilized the
convergence of voice, email, text messages, smartphone applications
and mobile Web applications into a single mobile communications
strategy to maximize reach and engagement to consumers. Varolii
Mobile Solutions also help break down siloed interactions across
text, email, voice and smartphone push notifications with
communications that are intelligent and personalized while helping
ensure regulatory compliance and increase customer reach. Companies
can also improve interaction response rates by automatically learning
and applying consumer preferences as well as enabling more
self-service options for consumers that will help companies reduce
costs.

Varolii Mobile Solutions will be provided by the Varolii Mobile App
software development kit (SDK) and hosted Varolii Interact Web
applications. With the free SDK, Varolii will create an open mobile
application ecosystem where systems integrators and smartphone
application developers can enable push notifications from their
smartphone application that links to Varolii Interact Web
applications to increase smartphone application engagement.

Other key Varolii Mobile Solution features include:

— Smartphone Mobile Alerts: Engage customers through push notifications
that “wake up” a downloaded smartphone application and launch a
Varolii Interact Web application that delivers personalized content
and a richer consumer interaction.
— Varolii Interact Web Applications: Hosted Web applications that
complement Varolii’s voice applications to address particular business
pains around customer engagement. These empower companies to share
links to their Web applications via text messaging or e-mail so they
can deliver cross-channel interactions to mobile consumers regardless
of the type of mobile phone they own.
— Personalization Beyond Segmentation: Leverage Varolii ID(TM) to
automatically personalize and refine customer interactions beyond mere
segmentation, enabling true personalization for each individual
customer or employee.
— Varolii Mobile Consent: Simplify mobile phone number collection and
expressed consent or opt-ins for texting consumers, ensuring
regulatory compliance for all text message interactions.
— Varolii Performance Insight: Enable unified analytics and reporting to
make better strategy decisions faster and maximize business results
across voice, text messages, email, Web applications, and smartphone
push notifications.
— Easy Integration with Systems of Record: Seamless integration with
customer data for existing Varolii clients, reducing time to deploy
new consumer channels such as texting and smartphone push
notifications.

Varolii enables more than 400 organizations to reach consumers or
employees in a smart, personalized and cost effective way with its
award-winning Varolii Interact Platform. Varolii works with Fortune
1000 companies, including two of the three largest U.S. banks, three
of the five largest health plans, five of the top 10 airlines and 30
of the largest U.S. utilities. Varolii applications generate more
than four million interactions each day.

About Varolii Corporation
Varolii is a leading provider of customer
interaction management applications. Our cloud-based communication
service help organizations more effectively interact with large
numbers of customers and employees through voice, text messages,
smartphone applications and email, reducing cost of operations and
improving service. The company's award-winning Interact platform
enables companies to deliver personalized communication on a large
scale, achieving better results from fewer interactions. More than
450 companies trust Varolii to manage more than four million
interactions every business day. For more information, visit

www.varolii.com .

For more information:
Jessica Kendall
Edelman PR
206-268-2231 (office)
210-859-6971 (mobile)
Email Contact

SOURCE: Varolii

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct?id=CBB906FCA9261ED7

Copyright 2012 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

Financial Glossary

Words used in this article:

Moreover, a large number of PPIs share the same number of reported occurrences, making it impossible to distinguish the reliability of these PPIs and rank-order them. For example, for the data analyzed here, we found that the majority (>83 %) of currently available human PPIs have been reported only once.

Results:
In this work, we proposed an unsupervised statistical approach to score a set of diverse, experimentally identified PPIs from nine primary databases to create subsets of high-confidence human PPI networks.

We evaluated this ranking method by comparing it with other methods and assessing their ability to retrieve protein associations from a number of diverse and independent reference sets. These reference sets contain known biological data that are either directly or indirectly linked to interactions between proteins.

We quantified the average effect of using ranked protein interaction data to retrieve this information and showed that, when compared to randomly ranked interaction data sets, the proposed method created a larger enrichment (~134 %) than either ranking based on the hypergeometric test (~109 %) or occurrence ranking (~46 %).

Conclusions:
From our evaluations, it was clear that ranked interactions were always of value because higher-ranked PPIs had a higher likelihood of retrieving high-confidence experimental data. Reducing the noise inherent in aggregated experimental PPIs via our ranking scheme further increased the accuracy and enrichment of PPIs derived from a number of biologically relevant data sets.

These results suggest that using our high-confidence protein interactions at different levels of confidence will help clarify the topological and biological properties associated with human protein networks.

Author: Xueping YuAnders WallqvistJaques Reifman
Credits/Source: BMC Bioinformatics 2012, 13:79

Published on: 2012-05-04

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Air pollution can be a major problem for children with underlying respiratory illnesses.

AIR pollution is a problem for everyone, not just people with respiratory diseases.

Hence, when the days get hazy and the air is full of pollutants, we can all be sure that staying indoors is something we look forward to.

We are not the only ones facing this problem. Many other neighbouring countries have to cope with it too.

The haze is caused by particulates or fine particles that are suspended in the atmosphere in high concentrations, which cannot be seen by the naked eye.

The general health effects of haze on a healthy child are usually mild and can be treated easily. At most, they may bring symptoms like irritation of the eyes or nose, or skin rash.

However, if your child has a history of respiratory problems, sinusitis and allergic skin conditions, he or she may be more vulnerable. If your child has asthma, then the symptoms may be more severe.

An asthma attack occurs when a child suffers recurrent attacks of shortness of breath and wheezing caused by the swelling of the bronchial tubes, which in turn, narrows the air passage and reduces the flow of air in and out of the lungs.

The main reasons haze can severely affect children with asthma are because:

They play outdoors;

They have faster breathing rates;

Their lungs are still developing; and

Their lungs are more sensitive.

Symptoms to watch out for include wheezing, coughing during sleep, difficulties in breathing, and tightness in the chest area.

Your child may experience restlessness during sleep, flared nostrils, breathing through pursed lips, fatigue, breathlessness, vomiting and fast breathing.

There are also many audible warnings for asthma, including heavy wheezing, frequent throat clearing, and coughing without having a cold. It is important to watch out for all these signs.

In severe cases, the airways narrow so severely that your child is unable to breathe adequately, and this may lead to a potentially fatal situation.

These symptoms are caused by the narrowing of the air passages, resulting in reduction of air flow in and out of the lungs.

Studies show there is a consistent correlation between the quality of air and the severity of asthmatic symptoms. During hazy days, it has been proven that the increase in air pollutants reduces lung function by inflaming the lining of the lungs. The airways over-react to the trigger, and set off a number of changes that are associated with inflammation.

This explains the increased frequency of flare-ups and upper respiratory infections during hazy months.

Because asthma is a chronic condition, it cannot be cured and requires treatment with a combination of one inhaler for immediate relief and one preventer for long-term control.

A reliever medication is an inhaler that relaxes the airways, and is used whenever an attack occurs. A preventer is an inhaler which is used daily (even when there are no attacks) to reduce inflammation in the airways, thereby helping to prevent future attacks.

Therefore, it is extremely important for teachers and coaches to be aware of the potential risks that children with asthma face during hazy months.

Physical education teachers can help their students participate fully and safely in sports by rescheduling physical activities to certain times of the day when the air is clearer.

If the level of pollution in the air is high, outdoor sports may be substituted with indoor physical activities, depending on how the child can cope.

Here are some helpful hints to shield your child against the haze:

Stay indoors as much as possible. Avoid any outdoor sports and activities to reduce exposure to pollution.

Watch the weather forecast. Many such forecasts give information on air quality index and other conditions that might affect your asthmatic child.

Try to keep your doors and windows closed. If you are using air-conditioning, clean the filters regularly to improve and maintain air quality at home.

If you need to go outside, remember that handkerchiefs tied over the nose and mouth are ineffective as the particles are fine enough to pass through normal cloth. Always use a mask when the haze is bad. It will block out fine haze particles and protect you from inhaling them. Change your mask when it becomes soiled or distorted.

If your child is facing eye irritation, then apply a few drops of saline solution (available at most pharmacies) to help relieve irritation.

Practise good hygiene through regular showers and frequent hand-washing when you step indoors.

Maintain hydration by drinking water regularly. Ensure your children get enough liquids and adequate rest.

Another good way to boost your baby?s immune system is by breastfeeding. Breastfed babies generally have milder symptoms when it comes to ailments such as colds and flu.

Don?t smoke, and stay away from smokers. Make sure you keep your child and yourself well away from smokers.

Stop wearing contact lenses when the haze is severe.

Keep your reliever or rescue medicine with you at all times. You can?t always predict when you?ll encounter a trigger, which is why doctors prescribe controller medications for children with asthma. Taking these medications as prescribed can prevent flare-ups and help you handle triggers better.

Lastly, talk to your GP about your child?s asthma management plan. Having a personal action plan and following it will help you get your symptoms back under control.

Talk to your doctor or asthma nurse about getting one if you do not have one already. If this does not work, try looking at your child?s medicines, triggers and lifestyle to see if anything can be changed.

As parents, we want the best for our children; therefore, avoid exposing your child to dangerous air pollutants in order to protect his or her little lungs, and life.

> Dr Norzila Mohamed Zainudin is a consultant paediatrician and paediatric respiratory physician. This article is courtesy of the Positive Parenting Asthma Campaign Programme by Malaysian Paediatric Association. The opinions expressed in the article are the view of the author. The information provided is for educational and communication purposes only and it should not be construed as personal medical advice. Information published in this article is not intended to replace, supplant or augment a consultation with a health professional regarding the reader?s own medical care. The Star does not give any warranty on accuracy, completeness, functionality, usefulness or other assurances as to the content appearing in this column. The Star disclaims all responsibility for any losses, damage to property or personal injury suffered directly or indirectly from reliance on such information. For more information, please visit www.mypositiveparenting.org

Islam is like other religions in that the majority understand what place ancient, scriptural law has in modern society. There are laws that can be universally useful to everybody, like ?Thou shalt not kill.? There are laws that don?t affect the general public, like that you?re not supposed to let different breeds of cattle graze together. Then there are the laws that are both unethical and illegal. For example, in Deuteronomy people who discover that a neighboring city employs a different religion are called to kill everyone in said city including the animals.

So now you have legislative bodies trying to make the Islamic version of Mosaic law illegal. This is the other side of the coin in defending the precepts of liberty espoused in our Constitution; when we defend the collective right to something we individually disagree with. This is where we separate idealist Americans from paper tiger Americans. Whether you subscribe to Islamic law or not, to make the conceptuality of religious doctrine illegal violates the constitutional free exercise of religion. Besides that, such laws are superfluous and unnecessary.

There is more than a passing similarity to where Islam is now and where Christianity was in the past. Say around the time of the Inquisition. Christianity at that time punished apostasy along the same lines and for the same reasons that fundamentalist Muslims do now. Islam is proportionally young compared to the other Abrahamic religions, and is still in the heat of ? may we say ? its adolescent self-confidence. A phase all religions seem to undergo at some point or two in their histories. Bottom line is that there are extremists in every religion in existence both today and throughout history. This fact seems to be inescapable, but I see individual or even small-group extremism as a function of individual psychosis rather than sinister intent on the part of the institution itself. Whether the extremist has been brainwashed, coerced or simply came off the assembly line with a few crossed wires, the need for legislation against the greater religious body isn?t necessary.

The overriding consideration in this issue is that the function of law in our republic wins the final argument. So while you could deplore religious doctrine to justify the stoning of an adulterer, our existing laws make such activity a crime.

Law is reflective of a country?s mores, which is why it acts as the reference point between religious laws people follow, and which ones they don?t. You could argue that it?s the chicken before the egg situation, but one can be relatively certain that nobody is safe to follow the letter of their religious laws. It would be illegal to do so. We don?t need special legislation against particular faiths when the action of the individual is already governed by law.