ABC News (Sydney, Australia), December 12, 2007

COMPULSORY CHILD WEIGH-IN NOT ENOUGH: EXPERT

[Rachel's introduction: The guiding principle of public health has always been primary prevention. Now public health practitioners are beginning to see that the precautionary principle is another form of primary prevention.]

A prominent health economist says the Federal Government's plan to check the weight of every four-year-old in an effort to curb childhood obesity is a small step in the right direction.

But Dr Paul Gross, the director of the Institute of Health Economics and Technology Assessment, says not continuing the weight checks through until the age of 10 is a big mistake.

Dr Gross says childhood obesity needs to be treated as seriously as other health problems.

"When we normally have public health problems like tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS or other things that begin to intrude on us in ways that are very serious, we take public health measures of being precautionary and we start to warn people and educate early," he said.

"We use public health measures which take the precautionary principle, go on the front foot -- let's not fool around with this."

Sports program

Australian Sports Commission head Mark Peters says getting children active after school is the key to reducing childhood obesity.

Mr Peters has told a child obesity conference in Sydney that the Commission's national after-school program has grown since it was introduced two years ago to reach more than 3,000 schools.

Mr Peters says the program is helping to fight childhood obesity and he hopes it can be expanded to reach more children in future.

We certainly have over 40 per cent of the sites that are in rural and regional Australia and we have 44 special schools involved in the program as well," he said.

"We're looking to spread the program, which started as a pilot, to make sure we're capturing all the different populations in Australia." Copyright 2007 ABC Privacy Policy