Hot Docs: Scaling Back Holiday Gift Spending, Infectious Diseases in History

Consumers to Scale Back This Holiday Season: American consumers are expected to cut back holiday gift spending by about $50 this year, according to a survey of 5,000 households conducted for the Conference Board. The nonprofit business group found that U.S. households will spend $418 on gifts this year compared to last year's estimate of $471. Lynn Franco, head of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center, said this "is shaping up to be one of the most challenging holiday seasons in years." Other findings in the survey include that 39 percent will buy gifts online, and that books are the most popular gifts for those shopping online, followed by toys and games, apparel and footwear, and movie videos and DVDs.

A History Lesson on Infectious Diseases: Infectious diseases cause 26 percent of worldwide deaths each year and "remain among the principal challenges to human survival." In a paper published in the November issue of the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases consider what "fundamental determinants" have enabled the rise of emerging diseases through the ages. The authors present 10 examples from history, from the Plague of Athens to the AIDS epidemic. They find a number of common threads, among them travel and trade, poverty, and a population susceptible to the illness. In modern times, they observe, technology, globalization, and global warming have sped up disease transmission, and "an increasingly complex modern world will probably provide increasing opportunities for disease emergence." They cite the E. coli and salmonella outbreaks of recent years as examples of how quickly "emergence can occur and escape control measures."

"Breaking Down Walls" to Fixing U.S. Infrastructure: In the United States, many pieces of public infrastructure like roads, bridges, and waterways are badly in need of repair or modernization, but money is not the sole issue preventing their renovation, a new paper argues. Anthony Shorris, from the progressive public policy group The Century Foundation, identifies four "institutional barriers" to such projects' success: time, the large scale of the projects, the politics of budgeting, and the involvement of private industry in public works. In describing how these factors have contributed to slow or halt badly needed infrastructure improvements, Shorris argues that they have worsened over time—in contrast to modern projects, which can drag on for decades: "the (then) tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building, was finished in 18 months." He suggests creating a "national infrastructure entity" charged with directing resources to public works to help remove some of these impediments. "We have to create new decision-making approaches at every level of government that force us to ask new questions, crossing those intellectual and political silos that keep us from making sound choices," Shorris concludes.

More Than 2 Million Juveniles Arrested in 2006: In 2006, 2.2 million people under the age of 18 were arrested, according to the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The Juvenile Arrests 2006 report found that after about a "decade of substantial decline, the number of juveniles murdered with firearms increased in 2004, 2005, and 2006." In addition, juveniles accounted for 17 percent of violent crime arrests.

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