This story in the Sunday Express has details of how thousands of children leave care for an unknown reason every year.
What concerns me is that there is no proper independent auditing of what happens to the children. Given that hundreds of younger children are simply lost to the system each year I don't think this is acceptable. Independent auditors are used to track where the money is, but not what has happened to the children.
To that extent improving the SSDA903 return is a useful first step that the government should take, but it is not in itself sufficient. There needs to be some system whereby there is in independent audit of what happens to the children.
The child protection system is chocabloc with conflicts of interest whereby people who are responsible for the care of children are also responsible for ensuring that the care is adequate. That systemic problem lies behind the inaction relating to the abuse of chidlren in care.
Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin...
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