Health

One in five Australian children has an anxiety disorder, thanks to modern conveniences such as mobile phones and shopping centres.

Fast-paced living - too little sleep, too many gadgets, too much sugar, too many demands and too little family support - is making children overly anxious, an international expert in childhood disorders told an Australian psychiatry conference yesterday.

A common genetic variant may be partly to blame for poor reading ability, research suggests.

The variant, carried by more than one in seven people, has already been associated with dyslexia.

Tests by the University of Oxford found people carrying the key sequence tended to perform worse than average in tests of their reading ability.

Finding enough volunteers to keep the canteen running is a challenge for schools of all sizes.

In devising a solution for Killarney Heights Public School, two enterprising parents have also paved the way for canteens to become more profitable and for lunch orders to be healthier, cash-free and parent friendly.

Every school in Victoria needs a school nurse to cope with the rising number of anaphylactic children, the Victorian teacher's union has said.

The Australian Education Union state president, Mary Bluett, said teachers were anxious that they had insufficient training or time to cope with the numbers of children with allergies at dangerous levels.

The children - a girl aged 11 and two ten-year-old boys - each took one tablet yesterday at a primary school at Windang on the NSW south coast.

The children were treated at Shellharbour Hospital and released when they became unwell after eating the tablets.