AGE OF AUTISM

Winner Signed ARC of David Kirby's Animal Factory

Congrats to our winner Lin Wessels. The contest is closed.

Visit the website HERE. Order your copy at Amazon HERE.


"A propulsive chronicle. Thanks to Kirby’s extraordinary journalism, we have the most relatable, irrefutable, and unforgettable testimony yet to the hazards of industrial animal farming." BOOKLIST

"Immensely readable, should be required reading for anybody concerned with how CAFOs are changing the nature of livestock farming." LIBRARY JOURNAL

Swine flu. MRSA. Unusual concentrations of cancer and other diseases. Massive fish kills from algal blooms and flesh-eating parasites. Recalls of meats, vegetables, and fruits because of deadly E-coli bacteria contamination.  Recent public health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market.  In Animal Factory, bestselling investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms, and tracks the far-reaching fallout that can contaminate our air, land, and water supply. 

The Train

By Deb Mylander

Anytime the natural order of life is altered or skewed human beings, in general, have a difficult time accepting the different reality.  For instance: parent's are supposed to die before their children.  My Grandma lost her son (my father) to cancer when he was 44.  That was 17 years ago and her heart still feels the pain where part of it was severed and buried with her child. Another example: children grow up and move away.  However, having a child with a disability means this specific “natural order” is broken.

Typical lives follow a rhythm of milestones and anniversaries. In one week my son will mark one of those milestones, his 12th birthday.  The final year before he officially becomes a teenager. This birthday, more than the 11 others before it, is causing me a lot of fear and trepidation.  In six short years he will technically be an adult.  What will adulthood look like for him?  Will he be able to drive? Hold down a job?  Manage a house on his own? Will he ever  have a girlfriend?  At 12, on his best days, he has the mental capacity of a 6 year old.  So does that mean at 18 he will act  like a 12 year old?  I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but they are replayed in my mind with a steady rhythm much like the sound of a train moving down the track. 

I see old women in the grocery store with their adult disabled sons and I often feel like it is a window into my future.  I think of these as my “crystal ball” moments.  There stands a woman hunched over and frail trying to give verbal instructions to her son who has a  middle-aged body and a child's mind.  There is a reason that we are meant to have children when we are younger, it's because the amount of work that is involved in rearing them requires youthful energy and stamina.  When a child has a disability, like my son, the child rearing gets stuck forever in first gear, yet the car (the parent) continues to age and decay.

Journal of Child Neurology Reports 16 Year Old GIrl Blinded After Merck Gardasil Vaccination

I assume this headline, "Girl Blinded by Gardasil Vaccine!" is in your newspaper today, on the front page, as every case of measles, mumps and chicken pox is reported. Will the doctors at Connecticut Children's Medical Center be hailed as heroes or villains, and run out of town on a rail for publishing this report? Take note of a similar case from 1978, reported following trivalent MMR vaccination in a 6 year old boy in 1978 at the end of this post.

How dreadfully sad for this child and her mother, who I'm sure is heartbroken and guilt ridden. Let's pray the damage is reversible. The .pdf from the journal is HERE.

A 16-Year-Old Girl With Bilateral Visual Loss and Left Hemiparesis Following an Immunization Against Human Papilloma Virus

Francis J. DiMario, Jr, MD

Departments of Pediatrics1 at Connecticut Children's Medical Center, Hartford, Connecticut, fdimari@ccmckids.org, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, Connecticut

Mirna Hajjar, MD

Department of Neurology at Hartford Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut

Thomas Ciesielski, MD

Department of Pathology at Hartford Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut

We report the course of a 16-year-old girl who presented with near complete visual loss associated with chiasmal neuritis and a biopsy proven tumefactive demyelinating lesion on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in association with a recent immunization against human papilloma virus.

Key Words: demyelination • tumefactive • blindness • chiasm • HPV
Journal of Child Neurology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 321-327 (2010)
DOI: 10.1177/0883073809349322

In case you've never heard of blindness following vaccination, here's another report. From 1978...

Am J Ophthalmol. 1978 Oct;86(4):544-7.
Optic neuritis complicating measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination.

A 6-year-old boy developed bilateral optic neuritis with decreasing visual acuity 18 days after administration of live attenuated trivalent measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. The patient was treated with oral corticosteroids. The optic neuritis resolved within several weeks and normal vision returned. An afferent pupillary defect persistent in the more severely involved eye for 14 months following vaccination.

 

Age of Autism Comment of the Week: 2/26

Our commenter of the week is Amy Trail on the post VA Denies Insurance Coverage for Autism.  As a parent of a child with Autism in the state of VA and as an Educational Advocate for special needs children - The current midset of our legislators in VA is beyond crazy.I would love to see a vote as to how many Delegates in the House have prescriptions for medications that are not necessary. Answer - probably MANY. How many of them are currently rehabing a family member after a stroke? Probably a few - well people that is all we were asking for. My son, lost all skills at 18 months, they call it Autism - I call it a Stroke but he is denied the quality rehab services that he needs but the Delegates family member who is receiving stoke rehab has the best services in the state - I am sure. I have families here in the VA that are standing in lines at food banks to feed their kids because they have spent every dime they have to provide the therapies that the children have to have.

STOP INSURANCE DISCRIMINATION AND FREE THE CHILDREN.

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National Vaccine Advisory Committee Meeting Friday 2/26

Click HERE for complete details.

National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) Meeting
Public Teleconference
Draft Agenda
Current as of February 15, 2010

Friday, February 26, 2010 3 - 5 pm EST
Participants call-in: 1-888-677-1385, Passcode: NVAC

Chronic Illness on the Rise in Children: LA TImes

This article from the LA Times explains that children today are chronically sicker than their counterparts 50 years ago. Despite "well" visits at 2 weeks, 2,4,6,9,12,15,18,24 months and then yearly, our kids appear to be headed downhill as far as their health goes. How will they fare as adults? And how can you say that children with asthma, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, food allergies, autism, learning disabilities aren't "less healthy?" The article points out that there are fewer congential defects (perhaps the result of prenatal testing leading to abortion and the addition of Folic Acid to stave off spina bifida) infectious disease, (yes, there is less chicken pox and measles and mumps, the traditional childhood diseases from which most children recovered) and accidents. Is it a necessary tradeoff? What has happened to childhood in America? Sounds to us that Ms. Roans is saying we are MAKING OUR CHILDREN SICK. Wow.

By Sahri Roans

More than a quarter of all U.S. children have a chronic health condition, new research suggests, a significant increase from the rate seen in earlier decades and a statistic that looms large for the nation's efforts to subdue rising healthcare costs.

But the report doesn't suggest that children are less healthy. The comprehensive look at children from 1988 through 2006 also revealed that health conditions themselves have changed.

Fewer children today are affected by congenital defects, infectious diseases and accidents than they were 50 years ago; instead, cultural, lifestyle and environmental conditions appear to be the root cause of many pediatric illnesses.

Grandin Is an Inspiration, but She's Not at All Typical

Age of Autism Media Editor Anne Dachel had a letter to the editor run in the Wall Street Journal this week on their article, Life Among the Yakkity Yaks:

Bari Weiss gives us some information in "The Weekend Interview with Temple Grandin" (Feb. 20) that should at least raise concern among parents. "As many as one in 110 American children are affected by autism spectrum disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control." (In the 1970s, autism affected only one in 10,000.) "Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. But what causes this developmental disorder . . . remains a mystery."

Maybe we should pay attention to Ms. Grandin's comment, "Scientists need to study 'the kids where they seem to have language and then they lose it at 18 months to two years of age.' She adds: 'I've talked to too many parents that have talked to me about regressions that I can't just pooh-pooh that off.' "

Ms. Grandin notes that severe autism has increased and she cites toxins as possible factors. The CDC now acknowledges that the increase may be due to some unknown environmental factor. However, the CDC sees a problem but not a crisis with autism.
Ms. Grandin reports that GFCF diets can help, yet health officials deny they're effective in reducing signs of autism.

Most important of all is the fact that Temple Grandin's story doesn't come close to what's ahead for most children with autism today. The vast majority will never hold jobs successfully, even those with Aspergers. Ms. Grandin may be working on her fifth doctoral degree and be a national figure, but most Americans with autism will each cost the taxpayers at least $3 million for lifetime care cost, according to a Harvard study from several years ago.

I'm happy for Ms. Grandin's success and her story offers hope, but we cannot continue to ignore the reality of autism for so many children in this country, children who can't talk, can't even make eye contact, and are in diapers as teenagers. We can't continue to ignore the very real autism epidemic.

Anne Dachel
Chippewa Falls, Wis.

Old News About Age and Autism

By Anne Dachel

Most of us have observed the appearance of endless new studies on autism.  They’re announced with lots of fanfare by the media, but the information contained in the details is typically much different from what the headlines seem to say.  This month was no exception.
 
At the beginning of February came the news that scientists link maternal age to an increased risk for autism based on a study from the UC-Davis. 
 
The NBC station in San Diego put out the story Older Moms at Higher Risk of Having Autistic Children on Feb 9. In it we read, “A woman’s chance of having a child with autism increases as she ages. That’s according to a new study released today.”  
 
The ordinary reader might think that researchers have learned something really critical about autism, the actual story however tells us nothing significant.  Dr. Bruce Hensel reported that they looked at 5.6 million babies born in California and found that if the mother was older than 40 the risk of autism was about 50 percent more likely than for a mother in her twenties, however, “the risk is still small no matter what a woman’s age.”

HuffPo Reports on Time's Jenny McCarthy Story

Please pop over to Huffington Post to comment on the Jenny story in Time. They've just posted about it there and as you can imagine, it will soon be a Trollfest of vaccine injury and treatment deniers.  Thanks.

Karl Taro Greenfeld in Time "The Autism Debate: Who's Afraid of Jenny McCarthy?"

Head over to TIME HERE to leave a comment telling story of how Jenny has helped you, and how your autism journey mirrored hers in terms of lack of medical guidance and frustration of trying to find the right treatments for your child. The author of the article is Karl Taro Greenfeld, who wrote 2009's Boy Alone about growing up with a profoundly autistic brother in the 1970s. Pay attention to the last line of the Time article. It's imporant. Click over to TIME HERE and leave a comment, please. Thanks. KIM

The Autism Debate: Who's Afraid of Jenny McCarthy? (Photograph by Jeff Minton for Time.)

...In 2005, McCarthy's son Evan, then 2, began having seizures so severe he required repeated emergency hospitalization. McCarthy had noticed that Evan had some developmental delays, compared with his peers in a playgroup they attended, and he exhibited some atypical behaviors: arm flapping, repetitive actions and fixation on strange objects. She describes her panic at Evan's diagnosis in her memoir Louder than Words: "I wished to God the doctor had handed me a pamphlet that said, 'Hey, sorry about the autism, but here's a step-by-step list on what to do next.' But doctors don't do that. They say 'sorry' and move you along." McCarthy began to try almost every treatment that turned up on Google. Evan went through conventional, intensive Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy as well as a host of alternative approaches, including a gluten-free and casein-free (GFCF) diet, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, chelation, aromatherapies, electromagnetics, spoons rubbed on his body, multivitamin therapy, B-12 shots and a range of prescription drugs. McCarthy says she made a deal with God. "Help me fix my boy," she prayed, "and I'll teach the world how I did it."

She believes she did fix her boy. A psychological evaluation from UCLA's neuropsychiatric hospital, dated May 10, 2005, was "conclusive for a diagnosis of Autistic Disorder," and yet here, running toward us on a warm California afternoon, is Evan, shouting out, "Are you here to play with me? When are we going to play?" McCarthy's boy is a vivacious, articulate and communicative child who seems to have beaten the condition. He is an inspiration, the fact of him as incontrovertible as any study done in any laboratory in the world...

Read more: HERE.