Activism Alerts - November 2003

• No Rest for the Wicked [1]
• Eight Essential Questions to Ask Before you Vaccinate [2]
• Protect Your Child's Privacy in School [3]

No Rest for the Wicked

The Nestle Boycott is still on. According to statistics sited by UNICEF, in countries with unsafe water, a formula-fed infant is 25 times more likely to die from diarrhea than a breast-fed infant. Yet Nestle continues to target its marketing at poor families in just such areas worldwide, a direct violation of the World Health Organization's International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes,

For more info on what you can do: www.babymilkaction.org [4]

Eight Essential Questions to Ask Before you Vaccinate

The National Vaccine Information Center a non-profit educational organization founded in 1982, is dedicated to preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. They also provide assistance to parents whose children have suffered vaccine reactions; and promote vaccine research to investigate vaccine safety and effectiveness. Through their research they have identified 8 factors which place individuals at high risk for suffering vaccine reactions and caution parents to educate and ask themselves these 8 essential questions before proceeding with vaccinating their children:

1. Is my child sick right now?
2. Has my child had a bad reaction to an immunization before?
3. Does my child have a personal or family history of:

• Vaccine reactions?
• Convulsions or neurological disorders?
• Severe allergies?
• Immune system disorders?

4. Do I know if my child is at high risk of reacting?
5. Do I have full information on the vaccines side effects?
6. Do I know how to identify a vaccine reaction?
7. Do I know how to report a vaccine reaction?
8. Do I know the vaccine manufacturer and lot number?

And don't forget to ask your doctor to make sure that all your child's vaccines are Thimerosal-Free (rithiolate).

For more info: www.909shot.com [5]

The National Vaccine Information Center
421-E Church Street
Vienna, Virginia 22180
Phone: 703-938-DPT3

Protect Your Child's Privacy in School

Support parental notification from schools regarding Channel One and other companies that use public schools to extract personal information from children.

Channel One is the prime example of commercialism in the schools. It is a controversial in-school marketing program that shows about ten minutes of news, banter, music and filler, and two minutes of ads, to captive audiences of roughly eight million children as young as eleven years of age, in 12,000 schools each school day.

Channel One misuses the compulsory attendance laws to force children to watch commercial advertising, wastes school time and tax dollars spent on schools, and promotes junk food, violent & sexualized entertainment, and materialism to children. It also collects children's personal information on its website.

U.S. Senate and House conferees are finishing up work on the Elementary and Secondary Education bill (S.1/H.R. 1). One remaining issue is the fate of a provision to require schools to notify parents about the collection of personal information from their children in public schools. This provision would alert parents to corporations that use schools to invade their children's privacy.

Capitol Hill sources say that Primedia Inc., the owner of Channel One, is lobbying hard to exempt Channel One from the parental notice requirement. Primedia has enlisted Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-AR) to help keep parents in the dark about the personal information that Channel One collects from schoolchildren.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:
Please contact Senator Tim Hutchinson:
Senator.Hutchinson@hutchinson.senate.gov [6]
Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT):
senator@dodd.senate.gov [7]
and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA):
senator@kennedy.senate.gov [8]

Ask them (politely):
1. Not to exempt Channel One or so-called "educational news programs" from the parental notification provision in the Elementary and Secondary Education bill.
2. To reject any provision in the bill or conference report that would endorse or legitimize Channel One.

Please also ask any Senate education conferees from your state to do the same. The Senate conferees are: Senators Kennedy (D-MA), Dodd (D-CT), Harkin (D-IA), Mikulski (D-MD), Jeffords (I-VT), Bingaman (D-NM), Wellstone (D-MN), Murray (D-WA), Reed (D-RI), Edwards (D-NC), Clinton (D-NY), Lieberman (D-CT), Bayh (D-IN), Gregg (R-NH), Frist (R-TN), Enzi (R-WY), Hutchinson (R-AR), Warner (R-VA), Bond (R-MO), Roberts (R-KS), Collins (R-ME), Sessions (R-AL), DeWine (R-OH), Allard (R-CO) and Ensign (R-NV).

To find the local phone numbers and e-mail addresses of your senators, see http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html [9].

The congressional switchboard phone is 202.225.3121.

For more information, see Commercial Alert's web page on Channel One at: http://www.commercialalert.org/channel_one/index.html [10].

You can see Channel One ads at: http://www.obligation.org/ch1videopage.html [11].