Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Smoking and Africa: the coming epidemic.

1980; BMJ; Volume: 280; Issue: 6219 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bmj.280.6219.991

0959-8138

Ahmed E. Taha, Keith Ball,

Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology

of overt safeguards (in England) for the parents at the crux of the action, especially the dull and mentally handicapped.We believe that arrangements for reporting care actions in under-5s should be changed, separating out all instances of statutory removal of the newborn and children in their first three months of life.This would allow more detailed scrutiny of very early care actions and maternal abandonment for research and would enable better evaluation of a practice that has emerged tentatively over the past ten years.It would also provide more answers to questions about the drastic use of statutory powers and would, we believe, place the procedure in the context of all child care.proceedings.We believe that removal at birth is occasionally necessary and appropriate, but that more information is needed before proper criteria can be recognised and agreed.We had, for instance, wrongly assumed that psychotic illness or severe mental handicap only would justify removal of first-born children.Care will be needed in avoiding some extremes of intervention in the perinatal period, when all that may be required is to hold the mother and baby together while further inquiries and assessment are set in motion, as advocated recently by Dr Christina Cooper.'4Donald Bross, in a paper presented at the 2nd International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect in 1978, suggested ways in which various US State laws might be used to bring about some control over a woman in late pregnancy and at childbirth.In Britain wardship might be tried13 to treat mother and baby as one entity, a particularly relevant possibility as more mother-and-child residential assessment units are developed.