Article On Technology Dependant Children

I found this article the other day on technology dependant children and when I read the title I assumed it was about children who were addicted to technology but i was ver wrong. This article is about children whose lives are dependant on technology in order to survive. Their lives rest in the hands of technology and in turn so do the lives of their parents.
Some of these technology dependant children require feedings which are administered by a mechanical pump into their veins or their intestines which is not necessarily life threatening but some children are much more dependant. Some children are on ventilators to help them breathe. What happens then in the event of a technology malfunction? What happens to these children if there is a power cut? Every member of their family has to be specially trained to use the technology and also to trouble shoot the technology if it fails, but what happens to the child while their carer or parent is trying to fix the machines and they can't breathe?
This would also affect children who are on dialysis machines. What would happen to them of the technology failed during dialysis? At any given time during dialysis there is around 1 pint of blood outside your body. How could a child survive during a malfunction with immediate blood loss and unclean blood inside the body?
This is not the only issue for these dependant children. What about the cost? These machines are evidently expensive to have and surely expensive to fix if something goes wrong. Also as technology develops day by day there will be no doubt be more advanced machines which will naturally be more expensive. In this sense, with bills ranging from $75,000 to $300,000 in the U.S.A, the lives of the parents of these children is being dominated by technology also.
How many of these children are in society at the moment? Sadly there aren't a lot of figures however studies in the U.S.A show that twenty years ago there were 50,000 children dependant on technology, 2,000 of which were on ventilators. In 2006 a surves showed a 25% increase in the number of technology dependant children.
The question is, is it safe to put the lives of children in the hands of technology? For the moment we don't have any other choice.


The link to this article is http://www.chrisjohnsonmd.com/blog/2008/08/13/technology-dependant-children/