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For those of you who have already gone through Redress, and those yet so to do, the following paragraphs will be of enormous interest, horror, bewilderment and anger. Of interest to you since a lot of you, (including me) until recently, were not aware of the consequences of a bad diet when we were growing up in Institutions. Horror due to what is foreseen to occur in later life as a consequence of Malnutrition. Finally, anger. For those of you who have signed the document which disbars one from taking any Court action in the future, it is only then that you will realise why. It will become clear to you when you are in agony from Arthritis or some other debilitating disease which was just waiting to appear as a direct consequence of the really bad food we were given in early life by the religious people, anger at the state for hiding these facts from you, fully knowing what would happen in later life and finally, anger at oneself for not stopping to ask the question - If I am being held equal before the Law - why is there a need to (1) not disclose the settlement figure, and (2) Why sign away any future litigation? People held equal before the law do not need to sign away their rights.
You are signing away your right to future litigation for 2 reasons. 1, you were short changed in the monetary sense at Redress, and 2, it is going to cost the individual and or family or both an absolute fortune in Doctors, Hospital visits and drugs etc, the government have known this for some time and want to save the enormous expense that this will incur. Of course, there will be those of you who are already incurring these costs.
The bottom line is the government, in giving Redress is not actually living up to the true meaning of Redress, since at some point in the future you will actually give the money back (via Doctors etc) to the state in some form or another.
Read the following paragraphs on Malnutrition, a few of many from an 83 page document on just that subject.
Malnutrition: Causes, consequences
Violates children's rights in profound ways
Compromising their physical and mental development
Sound nutrition can change children's lives, improve their physical and mental development, protect their health and lay a firm foundation for future productivity.
Malnourished children often suffer the loss of precious mental capacities. They fall ill more often. If they survive, they may grow up with lasting mental or physical disabilities.
This human suffering and waste happen because of illness - much of it preventable. Its ravages extend to the survivors who are left crippled, chronically vulnerable to illness - and intellectually disabled.
Malnutrition is not, as many think, a simple matter of whether a child can satisfy her appetite. A child who eats enough to satisfy immediate hunger can still be malnourished.
Research indicates a link between malnutrition in early life - including the period of foetal growth - and the development later in life of chronic conditions like coronary heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, giving the countries in which malnutrition is already a major problem new cause for concern.
Among children, malnutrition is especially prone to strike those who lack nutritionally adequate diets, are not protected from frequent illness and do not receive adequate care.
Illness is frequently a consequence of malnutrition.
There is no one kind of malnutrition.
Vitamin A deficiency, which affects about 100 million young children worldwide, was long known to cause blindness. But it has become increasingly clear that even mild vitamin A deficiency also impairs the immune system, reducing children's resistance to diarrhoea. At its most basic level, malnutrition is a consequence of disease and inadequate dietary intake, which usually occur in a debilitating and often lethal combination. But many more elements - social, political, economic, cultural - are involved beyond the physiological.
Malnourished children, unlike their well-nourished peers, not only have lifetime disabilities and weakened immune systems, but they also lack the capacity for learning that their well-nourished peers have.
In young children, malnutrition dulls motivation and curiosity and reduces play and exploratory activities. These effects, in turn, impair mental and cognitive development by reducing the amount of interaction children have both with their environment, and with those who provide care.
Robbed of their mental as well as physical potential, malnourished children who live past childhood face diminished futures. They will become adults with lower physical and intellectual abilities, lower levels of productivity and higher levels of chronic illness and disability.
And investments in basic education by governments and their partners are compromised by malnutrition's pernicious effects on brain development and intellectual performance.
Some 67 million children are estimated to be wasted, which means they are below the weight they should be for their height - the result of reduced dietary intake, illness, or both.
The effects of malnutrition also cross generations. The infants of women who are themselves malnourished and underweight are likely to be small at birth.
The power of good nutrition.
The devastation of malnutrition is hard to overstate, but so is the countervailing power of nutrition. Not only is good nutrition the key to the healthy development of individuals, families and societies, but there is also growing reason to believe that improving the nutrition of women and children will contribute to overcoming some of the greatest health challenges facing the world, including the burden of chronic and degenerative disease, maternal mortality, malaria and AIDS.The most obvious proof of the power of good nutrition can be seen in the taller, stronger, healthier children of many countries, separated by only a generation from their shorter, less robust parents, and by the better diets and more healthful, nurturing environments they enjoy.
Stronger children grow into stronger, more productive adults.
Well-nourished girls grow into women who face fewer risks during pregnancy and childbearing, and whose children set out on firmer developmental paths, physically and mentally. And history shows that societies that meet women's and children's nutritional needs also lift their capacities for greater social and economic progress.The right to good nutrition.
However far-reaching the benefits of nutrition may be, ensuring good nutrition is a matter of international law, articulated in variously specific language in international declarations and human rights instruments dating back to the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924 (Panel 4).
Under the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, for example, States parties must ensure that women receive full and equal access to health care, including adequate nutrition during pregnancy and lactation. And the 1990 World Summit for Children, with a Plan of Action that recognized the devastating effects of malnutrition on women and their children, set specific nutritional goals for children and women, including access to adequate food during pregnancy and lactation; the promotion, protection and support of breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices; growth monitoring with appropriate follow-up actions; and nutritional surveillance.
But the right to nutrition receives its fullest and most ringing expression in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose 191 ratifications as of late 1997 make it the most universally embraced human rights instrument in history.
Under the Convention, which commits States parties to realize the full spectrum of children's political, civil, social, economic and cultural rights, virtually every government in the world recognizes the right of all children to the highest attainable standard of health, to facilities for the treatment of illness and for the rehabilitation of health - specifically including the right to good nutrition and its three vital components: food, health and care.
Under the Convention's pre-eminent guiding principle, good child nutrition is a right because it is in the "best interests of the child."
Article 24 of the Convention specifies that States parties must take "appropriate measures" to reduce infant and child mortality, and to combat disease and malnutrition through the use of readily available technology and through the provision of adequate, nutritious foods and safe drinking water.
The world is obligated to ease child malnutrition on the basis of international law, scientific knowledge, practical experience and basic morality.
The ravages caused by malnutrition on individuals, families and societies are preventable. The measures needed to reduce and end it are becoming increasingly well understood. And the gains for humanity from doing so - in greater creativity, energy, productivity, well-being and happiness - are immeasurable.
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