Hello there, you, sitting in front of your computer! Are you feeling a little embolism-y? You might want to stand up and walk around for a minute before you read this story. Just saying.

The parents of British student Chris Staniforth are launching a campaign to "raise awareness about the health risks of playing online computer games" after their son died of a pulmonary embolism following an Xbox marathon. As anyone who has spent time reading the entire in-flight magazine while trying not to think about falling out of an airplane, long-haul flights can lead to deep vein thrombosis—a leading cause of pulmonary embolisms. But so can playing video games, all day!

Professor Brian Colvin — an expert on blood-related conditions — said it was "unhealthy" for youngsters to spend long periods in front of their consoles.

"There's anxiety about obesity and children not doing anything other than looking at computer screens," he told The Sun.

Back when we let kids work at factories all day, which was what they wanted to do—Please, sir, let us work at the turpentine factory, they used to say—we never had this problem. And we won two world wars! So the solution, as always, is to ban video games and bring back child labor.

[AFP]