Animal Planet's New Show Looks at Animal Hoarding

Many of us love animals and enjoy our pets. Animal Planet has a new show, 'Confessions: Animal Hoarding' billed as “an unflinchingly honest look at a human condition that affects people and animals.” It looks at the condition which has gone past simple love and enjoyment of our pets.
Animal hoarding is a form of compulsive hoarding in which the person collects and hoards pets rather than items such as clothing, books, newspapers. While hoarding can be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), animal hoarding has important differences with OCD-related hoarding as it does not seem to share the same array of repetitive compulsive behaviors such as washing or checking compulsions.
Animal hoarding has considerable overlap with impulse control disorders. A recent (June 2010) in-depth review by eminent psychologists explains the differences between OCD and hoarding, and suggests there is sufficient evidence for creation of a new disorder, provisionally called hoarding disorder, in DSM-V.
According to the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, the pathological accumulation of animals was first described in 1981. Animal hoarding was formally defined in the public health literature in 1999 using the following criteria:
* Having more than the typical number of companion animals
* Failing to provide even minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, shelter, and veterinary care, with this neglect often resulting in illness and death from starvation, spread of infectious disease, and untreated injury or medical condition
* Denial of the inability to provide this minimum care and the impact of that failure on the animals, the household, and human occupants of the dwelling
* Persistence, despite this failure, in accumulating and controlling animals
The basic features of animal hoarding (failure to provide adequate food and water, failure to provide necessary veterinary care to treat a disease or injury, failure to provide a sanitary environment) have been used to define animal cruelty laws in every state.
When a person hoards animals, it puts the person’s health and the animals health at risk. The extreme clutter can increase fire hazards. The increased amounts of feces and urine can damage dwellings beyond repair and release a host of potentially toxic bioaerosols and gases (especially ammonia) into the air.
Bioaerosols include a wide variety of inflammatory and physiologically active components, including endotoxin, fungal cell wall fragments, and dust particles that can reach lower airways.
Ammonia is a known irritant of the eyes and upper respiratory tract. It is produced by the decay of animal waste.
All forms of hoarding carry the risk of elder neglect, child neglect, and self-neglect. Dependent/vulnerable adults or children are found in 10-15% of hoarding cases.
With more than 3,500 cases a year, animal hoarding puts a strain on families, finances, the 250,000 animals affected annually and the health of everyone involved.

Parents Are Clueless About Teen Drug Abuse

Researchers from Wayne State University and the National Institute on Drug Abuse discovered that when teens were asked about their use of cocaine and opiates, teens often were dishonest with answers despite the fact they knew they were being subjected to hair analyses that would prove they did use those drugs.
"The basic finding is that when teens were asked about their use of cocaine and opiates, they gave socially acceptable answers rather than being completely forthright," said Dr. Virginia Delaney-Black, a study co-author and professor of pediatrics at Wayne State in Detroit.
Researchers surveyed over 400 teens and their caregivers and asked whether they used a variety of drugs, including cocaine, opiates and marijuana. Researchers later did hair analyses on them and compared the results of those tests with their survey answers. Teens and parents did not generally answer questions honestly about teens' drug use, and parents also did not answer truthfully about their own drug use. They were unable to accurately analyze marijuana use because the hair tests were not sensitive enough.
Teens and parents did not answer honestly. "All the data we have about teen use of drugs, except when [they've faced legal action] or when they're in drug treatment, comes from self-report," said Delaney-Black. "We need to rethink what we're doing from the perspective of pediatrics, and when there's need to know about drug use, and should consider biologic measures."
Teen hair analysis was 52 times more likely than self-report to identify cocaine use. For parents, hair analyses for cocaine and opiates were 6.5 and 5.5 times more likely, respectively, to identify drug use than parental self-report.
Parent can help their children confide in them if they start talking about the risks of drugs and alcohol when children are still young, help children with how to react with what they will say to peers who want them to drink or use drugs and have good communication skills with them.
"The lack of concordance between teen self- or parent-reported teen drug use and biomarkers confirm our concerns that both teen- and parent-reported teen drug use is limited, at least for youth in high-risk urban settings. Methods of ascertainment other than self- or parent-report must be considered when health care providers, researchers, and public health agencies attempt to estimate teen drug-use prevalence," the authors write.