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Wristbands are used for recognition, team sports, political campaigns, fundraisers and awareness. Silicone wristbands have become popular and attract the attention of a specific cause, promoting a company or organization. Silicone wristbands are comfortable to wear, durable and inexpensive.

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Silicone wristbands are also useful for business purpose, holidays, memberships, personal purpose, religious purpose, schools and sports.

Wristbands also called as awareness bracelets are used by charitable organizations for supporting their cause and raising fund. One of the first organizations to make it popular is Lance Armstrong Foundation offering yellow live strong wristband created in 2004. After this many other organizations jumped into this phenomenon. Compare the cost of producing an awareness bracelet with a hat or t-shirt. Also compare the cost of shipping a few thousand wristbands with a few thousand hats or t-shirts. From a cost analysis point of view, awareness bracelets will save you more money in production and shipping. Also think that if thousands of supporters can buy customized wristbands how much money can be raised from simple, inexpensive and cheap wristbands.

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Leukemia cancer wristbands Definition of leukemia:

Cancer that initiates in blood-forming tissue such as the bone marrow and sources for a great number of blood cells to be formed and penetrate in the bloodstream.

Anticipated latest cases and deaths from leukemia in the United States in 2009:

New cases: 44,790
Deaths: 21,870

Some types in leukemia:

Types of leukemia are based on its growth and development it's either acute or chronic. In acute it develops very fast get worst very soon in the chronic type it develops very slowly. It can also be classified on type of the white blood cell it affects. This usually commence in lymphoid cells or myeloid cells.

Leukemia that has an effect on lymphoid cells is termed as lymphoid, lymphocytic, or lymphoblastic leukemia. Leukemia that has an effect on myeloid cells is termed as myeloid, myelogenous, or myeloblastic leukemia.

Some Factors:

Smoking: Smoking cigarettes raise the danger of acute myeloid leukemia.

Ancestor's history of leukemia:

It's uncommon for more than a person in a family to have leukemia. On the other hand, only a small number of people with chronic lymphocytic leukemia have a father, mother, brother, sister, or child who is also having this disease.

Human T-cell leukemia virus type I (HTLV-I):

Person with HTLV-I infectivity is at augmented danger of an exceptional type of leukemia identified as adult T-cell leukemia.

Symptoms:

Swollen lymph nodes, Fevers or night sweats, frequent infections, Feeling weak or tired Bleeding and bruising easily, Swelling or discomfort in the abdomen, Weight loss for no known reason, Pain in the bones or joints are some of the symptoms.

You can create awareness of this leukemia cancer you can do it by wearing a wristband with a message on it "stop smoking". You can distribute among your friends and relatives to create awareness. Wristband connection offers you this cancer awareness bands in orange color. It comes in many styles like embossed, debossed, screen printed, laser. There are various sizes available and very reasonably priced.

Today many charities have found their donations dropping because people are holding on to their money out of fear.

Those charities are finding hope in businesses that buy awareness bands from ebspromo.com and donate them as a donation motivator!

Fear and uncertainty have not discouraged the good neighbors and businesses.

The holiday season is fast approaching and many charities will have great difficulties helping the people that need it most but with help from caring thoughful individual silicone wristbands can help make a difference.

It is human nature to help but giveaways with that donation will motivate more people to help.

That same motivator also can be a conversation start. The custom silicone bracelet that your company donated to the organization of your choice can reach many people in your community.

The message debossed on that silicone bracelet will be talked about among friends and even strangers in the grocery store when they see the beautiful colors or interesting message they’ve never heard.

Be a hero to a local school or charity this holiday and donate silicone wristbands to help raise much needed funds.

Done properly it is a tax deduction and it will make you feel great to know that you helped someone deserving.

PORT ST. JOE, Fla. — A mysterious photo of a young boy sent to police and media here has rekindled interest in a 20-year-old mystery surrounding a Polaroid of a young boy and girl, seemingly bound behind their backs, their mouths covered with tape.

The recently received picture shows a young boy with black marker etched across his mouth and face, as if it had been taped shut. The boy is similar in appearance to one of the youths in a Polaroid found here in 1989 that spawned national attention from police and the media.

"I think we were just dumbfounded," said Gulf County Sheriff Joe Nugent, who was a deputy 20 years ago when the Polaroid was found. "It is kind of weird these photos came in near the anniversary of the original case, but if somebody is trying to send us a clue, send us one we can act on."

The development sparked memories for many and revived several unanswered questions: Who are the children in the pictures, are they dead or was it a hoax, and what is the connection to Port St. Joe?

"It obviously is two kids with terror written all over them," Nugent said of the 1989 Polaroid. "It's kind of a bad time when you have to look at something like that."

Port St. Joe Police Chief David Barnes received two letters, postmarked June 10 and Aug. 10 from Albuquerque, N.M. The children in the 1989 picture are believed by some to be two children Tara Calico and Michael Paul Henley reported missing in New Mexico.

One letter contained a photo, printed on copy paper, of a young boy with sandy brown hair. Someone had drawn a black band in ink on the photo, over the boy's mouth, as if it were covered in tape like the 1989 picture. The second letter contained an original image of the boy.

On Aug. 12, The Star newspaper in Port St. Joe received a third letter, also postmarked in Albuquerque on Aug. 10 and depicting the same image, of a boy with black marker drawn over his mouth.

None of the letters contained a return address or a note indicating the child's identity.

Nugent said investigators as recently as this spring had looked at the case file again, so he immediately made the connection between the latest picture and the Polaroid photo found June 15, 1989, in Port St. Joe.

A witness at the time noticed the photo on the ground in the parking lot of a convenience store a Junior Food Store at the time, now an Express Lane after a white van, driven by a man with a mustache, thought to be in his 30s, exited the parking lot.

Although the witness did not know if the photo dropped from the late 1980s Toyota cargo van, and there remains no substantive proof it did, Nugent said, police

staged an unsuccessful road block to intercept the vehicle.

Nugent remembers the case causing a stir in Port St. Joe, the region and the country.

"I'd just started and that was the biggest thing we worked around here," Nugent said. "Months and months of people calling and giving tips, and psychics calling, and we were never able to track anything down for sure."

The case file contains "stacks and stacks" of letters and clues gathered during the investigation.

The original Polaroid received national attention when it aired on the television program "America's Most Wanted." Two stories about it appeared in The News Herald in August 1989.

Though the Federal Bureau of Investigation never positively identified the young girl and boy in the photo, they were initially thought to be Calico and Henley.

Calico, then 19, was last seen on the morning of Sept. 20, 1988, riding a pink bicycle in Valencia County, N.M.

Henley, 9, also of New Mexico, disappeared in April 1988, while hunting with his father in the Zuni Mountains in northwestern New Mexico.

Henley's parents believed the boy in the 1989 photo might be their son, but his remains were found the next year not far from where he disappeared, and there were no signs of foul play.

With the arrival of the Internet era, the mystery not only has lived on, it has become the subject of numerous discussion boards and Web sites, particularly as it relates to Calico.

One site, forthelost.org, talks about Henley and Calico, and suggests another missing boy is actually the person in the picture. Another site, charleyproject.org, makes the case that Calico is the girl and talks about two other disturbing pictures that cropped up over the years with a girl resembling Calico in distress.

There even is a Wikipedia page dedicated to Calico and this case.

Albuquerque, where the latest letters were mailed from, is about 35 miles from Calico's hometown of Belen, N.M., and 111 miles from the Zuni Mountains, where Henley's body was recovered.

Nugent could not tell whether the boy in the photos sent in the recent letters is the same boy in the 1989 Polaroid, and it's just another mystery for investigators to solve.

"Unless something just pops up (from the investigation of the recent letters), I don't know why these letters were mailed here," Nugent said.

He does believe the letters' New Mexico postmark and arrival near the 20th anniversary of the day the original Polaroid was found might be more than a
coincidence.

Nugent also is intrigued with the timing of a phone call received the same day The Star turned over its letter to the Sheriff 's Office. A woman claimed she had been having visions about the case over the years and said she believed Calico to be buried in California. Nugent said the woman related that she worked with a runaway in a strip club in California and that the runaway was later reported murdered and buried.

Nugent said the woman described seeing a light blue Oldsmobile car and the name of Tara Calico in a vivid dream she has had over the years.

Thus far, California authorities have dismissed the woman's claims, Nugent said, but added the timing of her call and the letters is strange.

"It's all just very weird," Nugent said.

All the letters have been placed in evidence bags and have been sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab in Pensacola where they will be submitted to testing for fingerprints and DNA. The FBI is not involved in the latest development.

Nugent said those tests likely will take at least a month and any new evidence gleaned from the letters would be passed on to New Mexico authorities where the case of the missing children remains open.

"If anybody has any information, we'd be happy to contact the New Mexico authorities and pass it on to them," Nugent said. "Somebody somewhere knows something about it."

And he hopes someone is finally willing to share what they know.

"Nobody knows for sure if it was a setup," Nugent said. "Some people think it was a staged photograph, but it was a real look of fear to me."

On Saturday afternoon, Medford police dispatcher Kerri Hill fielded calls during a major search for a missing 84-year-old Alzheimer's patient that set in motion the "A Child is Missing" program.

When her shift ended around 7 p.m., she was driving home around Cedar Links Drive and Foothill Road and observed a man walking on the roadway. "It was unusual to see somebody walking in that area," she said.

Hill, who has been a Medford dispatcher for five years, turned around and approached the man, who appeared to match the description of the missing patient.

She said it didn't take long to realize that it was Howard Parton, who had wandered a couple of miles away from his east Medford home around 3 p.m. Saturday.

"I told him people were looking for him all day," she said. "He was very, very sweet. He was very, very concerned about his wife."

Hill persuaded Parton to sit in the car and chatted with him while help arrived, and she learned that he had become upset because his dog had just died.

"I don't think I did anything special — it's just part of my nature," said Hill. "I guess little kids and those who are not able to care for themselves better are in the back of my mind all the time."

Parton was taken back to his house, mildly dehydrated but otherwise in good health.

Hill said the disappearance of Parton set in motion a little know program known as "A Child is Missing," which places 1,000's of robocalls within minutes within the area that a child or senior citizen becomes missing.

Officers who were off duty stayed on duty because they didn't want to give up the search, she said.

If Parton had wandered any further, he could have ended up in the pear groves, which would have hampered search efforts.

"At the location where he was at, he could have very well been put in harm's way," she said.

The "A Child is Missing" program is relatively new to Hill, but it is extremely new to the public.

Because of the robocalls, the dispatch center got inundated with calls wondering if it was a hoax or a scam.

She said dispatchers assured callers the situation was real and that they were looking for Parton.

Don Lane, Medford police master officer, said he and other officers have a pretty clear idea how they will conduct the search for an Alzheimer's or dementia patient.

"I would treat it a lot like a child gone missing," he said.

First, officers check the house and immediate vicinity. In the case of children, he said they are sometimes found fast asleep in the back of a car.

"A lot of times people just panic when someone goes missing," said Lane.

If the child or senior citizen is not found, officers check with neighbors and slowly work their way out of an area.

Law enforcement manpower needs are about the same whether it is a child or an Alzheimer's patient — many of whom require medication or other assistance, he said. However, if a child has been reported as abducted that sets into motion an even more vigorous search.

Even though Alzheimer's patients are confused, Lane said they are usually cooperative when approached by an officer, though some might run into bushes or behind trees.

"Most of them I've dealt with are pretty cordial," he said. "They are not scared of us, but they are not aware of what's going on."

Teams of volunteers inspected roadsides, wooded areas and creeks Saturday as part of the ongoing effort to find Lindsey Baum, the 11-year-old McCleary girl who disappeared the evening of June 26.

Saturday was the second consecutive day in which volunteers fanned out into outlying areas and neighboring towns, hoping to find clues. The search continues today.

At the request of Lindsey’s mother, Melissa, two nonprofit groups – the Laura Recovery Center of Friends­wood, Texas, and Klaaskids Foundation of Sausalito, Calif. – organized the search. Both groups have been involved in high-profile missing-­child cases before, including the disappearances of Elizabeth Smart of Utah and Elaine Sepulveda of Oak Harbor.

About 120 people searched Friday, and about 40 people had taken part before noon Saturday, said Brad Dennis, director of search operations for the Klaaskids Foundation. The search is being staged from the McCleary Community Center, and although organizers have enough volunteers to handle administrative duties, they need more searchers, Dennis said.

“We need people to come out and be a part of this,” he said.

Baum disappeared about 9:15 p.m. June 26 as she embarked alone on about a half-mile walk from a friend’s house on Maple Street to her home on Mommsen Road. Her mother, who moved to McCleary from Lacey about two years ago, said Saturday that she is doing all she can so her daughter won’t be forgotten, such as putting up flyers and making buttons with Lindsey’s picture. She thinks her daughter is alive, although “getting through the nights” is the hardest part, she said.

“My main focus is just finding her and then we can deal with the rest,” Melissa Baum said.

Volunteers who showed up Saturday were separated into groups. Team leaders were selected and groups were given directions on how and where to search. The team leaders also were provided with global positioning systems to note the locations of their searches, as well as clipboards with paper so they could jot down possible clues.

Patty Thorsen and Judy Enz of Olympia, plus team leader Mike Davis of Gig Harbor, spent about an hour exploring Niels Lane, a rock-covered road that overlooks state Route 8 about 4 miles west of McCleary. All three decided to volunteer because they are parents, but Thorsen and Davis also were moved by Melissa Baum’s story after hearing her interviewed on a Seattle radio station. Mike said the combination of listening to Melissa Baum and hearing news about Jaycee Dugard, the California woman recently discovered after she was missing for 18 years, prompted him to act.

“I said, ‘Well, I can give up a Saturday,’ ” he said. Davis, too, has five children, including three girls. All three got into his truck, drove to the end of the road and then worked their way back, stopping frequently to look down hillsides, peer into the woods and inspect roadside debris. The three also discovered a black garbage bag filled with clothes, including a pair of denim jeans, the same kind of clothes Lindsey last was seen wearing. After that discovery, it was determined that the clothes and trash likely belonged to a transient and not Lindsey, although Dennis praised the group’s efforts in finding the bag.

Davis marked the site with orange fabric so investigators could inspect the site. Once volunteers return to the community center, they are debriefed and their information is shared with law enforcement, Dennis said.

She should have been in high school and going on first dates, maybe leaving home for college, finding her first apartment, falling in love - growing up.

But Jaycee Lee Dugard, now 29, spent her formative years in captivity. Kidnapped at age 11 in South Lake Tahoe, she gave birth to two daughters when she was just a teenager, and likely lived with the near-constant threat of fear and abuse for 18 years.

She was found Wednesday in Antioch, and Thursday saw her mother for the first time since June 1991. But her recovery has barely started, say experts in child psychiatry and post-traumatic stress.

How well she progresses, along with her two children, depends on the quality of professional help she receives, and the strength of her support network.

"Someone asked me if I think she'll ever have a normal life. I'm not sure 'normal' is the word," said Paula Fass, a history professor at UC Berkeley and author of the book "Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America." "But let's hope she can still live decently and reconnect with that earlier life. The challenge will be to try to integrate these two parts of her life - before she was taken, and her children now - in a way that can be meaningful."

Few cases like it A case like Dugard's is virtually unheard of. There are examples of children being taken and held captive for months or even years, but none as long as Dugard, and none who were taken as children and returned as adults.

The fact that Dugard now has two children - both the offspring of her accused captor, Phillip Garrido, according to police - further complicates her case. Several child psychologists and kidnapping experts compared Dugard's captivity to the case of an Austrian woman who was found last year after being imprisoned by her own father for 24 years and giving birth to seven of his children.

Dugard "was kept for 18 years, and through an important period in child development, when kids are busy becoming their own persons. It's a difficult period of time to miss out on," said Dr. Stuart Lustig, a UCSF child psychiatrist.

Dugard almost definitely suffered from Stockholm syndrome, a condition in which captives become sympathetic to their captors. Dugard's stepfather, Carl Probyn, told media outlets that she has expressed guilt for bonding with Garrido.

It's common for kidnapped children to feel some compassion for their kidnappers, who abuse them but also become their only caretaker, child psychiatrists said.

That creates a cognitive dissonance that isn't easily resolved, especially for children who don't have the life experience to understand what's happened to them.

"Children in this situation need to protect themselves, and the person who is the perpetrator is the one providing the comfort. Identifying with the aggressor feels like protecting yourself," said Dr. Victor Carrion, an expert in post-traumatic stress in children at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. "This is not a conscious decision.

It's something that happens in survival mode."

It's also likely that Dugard is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder - starting with the initial trauma of being kidnapped and kept up over years of abuse and confinement, Carrion said.

According to police, Dugard has lived in an encampment of tents and sheds in Garrido's backyard for most of the last two decades, with little interaction with people other than her captors and her children.

Her daughters, too, were isolated from the outside world - they never attended school or visited a doctor, police said. Just as Dugard must find a way to reintegrate with her family and society, so must her children, child psychiatrists said.

The children, ages 11 and 15, will need to be evaluated - psychiatrists will look at their developmental progress, such as their ability to learn, their language skills, and how they relate to others. The children may also complicate Dugard's recovery because they'll serve as a constant reminder of her captivity, child psychiatrists said. It may be difficult for Dugard to separate her love for her daughters from her complicated feelings toward Garrido.

But it's also possible, Fass said, that having raised two children may help Dugard in her recovery. The children could give her focus in the years ahead, and they may have offered her some small strength while she was held captive, by allowing her to care for someone else.

"Let's assume that the children were her company, and allowed her to exercise her caretaking ability," Fass said. "I would think those are two strengths that could be played on in her recovery. She wasn't entirely isolated, she wasn't just by herself. She was taking care of the children."

The key to reuniting Dugard with her family, experts say, will be to take it slowly. Her mother and stepfather can't expect her to be the 11-year-old girl who was taken 18 years ago, and at the same time Dugard can't expect her family to be the same.

When families are reunited, it's common for everyone to feel some guilt, said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The children feel guilty for not being able to escape or for bonding with their kidnappers, and the parents feel guilty for losing them in the first place.

Allen said it will be critical for Dugard and her family to be patient with one another, and especially with Dugard's daughters.

Must start over "Parent and child typically want to return things to the way they were, and what we've found is that - particularly with these kinds of spans - families have to start all over getting to know each other," Allen said. "The single most important thing for a parent, even when your child is 29 years old, is to love your child unconditionally."

Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped seven years ago at age 14 and returned to her family nine months later, said in an interview on CNN on Friday that spending quiet time with her family was critical to her recovery. She believes it's possible to be happy and free again and to not let "this horrible event take over and consume the rest of your life."

Allen said recovery will be difficult, but he's hopeful for Dugard and her family.

"Despite the 18 years that have been lost, despite the theft of Jaycee's childhood, she's alive. She's young, and she has hope for the future," Allen said. "It's a very complex situation, but we really believe there's real hope here."