AGE OF AUTISM

David Kirby's "Animal Factory" Is Back Up At Amazon!

Our friend David Kirby’s new book, “ANIMAL FACTORY – The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment,” was removed from sale at Amazon.com for over a week, because of fighting over the price of e-books between Amazon and Macmillan, which owns St. Martin’s Press. You can read the advance reviews below the jump.
 
We are happy to announce that David’s book and all Macmillan titles are back up for sale today at Amazon. If you haven’t yet, please show your support by pre-ordering Animal Factory prior to the publication date of March 2, 2010, at Amazon or any of these online retailers:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books a Million

Borders

IndieBound

Powells

Alibris

Animal Factory is also available as a Blackstone Audio Book. To hear a brief reading from David’s work, please click here. http://tinyurl.com/animalaudio
 
Don Imus said on his show the other day that David’s book is “going to be an enormous best seller,” and we agree! In the book, David follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms.  These farms (known as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs), confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of fecal and biological waste as well as other toxins.
 
Here is David’s preliminary media and public appearance schedule, with many more to come. More information will be available soon when the Animal Factory website is launched at www.animalfactorybook.com .
 
Please let people know that David is available for speaking engagements nationwide.
 
February 25 – (TBA) – Panel Discussion with Nicolette Hahn-Niman at the Public Interest Environment Law Conference, Eugene, Oregon - http://www.pielc.org/pages/home.html
 
Feb 25 – 6PM PST – Book signing, Public Interest Environment Law Conference, Eugene, Oregon -
 
March 2 – 7:30AM EST – Imus in the Morning – WABC-AM, Fox Business News, etc.
 
March 3 – (TBA) – The Leonard Lopate Show – WNYC-FM

David Kirby: The Lancet Retraction Changes Nothing

Read and comment on David Kirby's Huffington Post piece, "The Lancet Retraction Changes Nothing" HERE.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield is one of the most vilified medical practitioners of recent times, and now he carries the extremely rare dishonor of a retraction in The Lancet, on the paper he coauthored in 1998 suggesting a potential link between autism, bowel disease and Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

I believe that the public lynching and shaming of Dr. Wakefield is unwarranted and overwrought, and that history will ultimately judge who was right and who was wrong about proposing a possible association between vaccination and regressive autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).

Wakefield's critics can condemn, retract, decry and de-license all they want, but that does nothing to stop or alter the march of science, which has come a long way over the past 12 years, and especially in the last year or two. The evidence that autism is increasing at alarming rates, and that some thing (or things) in our environment is wreaking havoc on a vulnerable one-percent of all US children is now so irrefutable that, finally, the federal government is climbing aboard the environmental research bandwagon - way late, but better than never...

David Kirby is author of Evidence of Harm, a  regular contributor to Huffington Post and a contributor to Age of Autism.  His next book, Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment will be released within the year and is available now for pre-order at  Barnes & Noble.

The Bloomington Alternative Presents Part 3 with David Kirby

Read Part 3 of Steven Higg's Bloomington Alternative Blog with David Kirby.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Anyone with a passing knowledge of Indiana’s political and business cultures would not be surprised to learn state leaders played feature roles in one of the first great scandals of the George W. Bush administration. Or that the episode involved perhaps the greatest environmental disaster of the postmodern age -- the intravenous exposure of an entire generation of children to a powerful neurotoxin.

After all, “leaders” like Dan Quayle, Evan Bayh and Mitch Daniels have led their state to the No. 49 ranking in Forbes magazine’s 2007 comparison of state-by-state environmental quality. Of Indiana and other bottom-dwellers like No. 50 West Virginia, the business magazine said, “All suffer from a mix of toxic waste, lots of pollution and consumption and no clear plans to do anything about it. Expect them to remain that way."

Steven Higgs Interviews David Kirby for The Bloomington Alternative

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Two days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its newest data on U.S. autism rates, author David Kirby consented to a two-hour, videotaped interview in his street-level brownstone apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. The government, the former New York Times reporter said, always drops its worst news late on Fridays, assuming the attention-addled mainstream media will forget it by Monday, when people actually pay some attention.

While the release of new autism data on the Friday before Christmas would normally trigger nervous anticipation in the whirlwind of Washington spin, this year's holiday news dump was anticlimactic. The CDC had revealed the gist of its autism findings in October, after a study in the journal Pediatrics said its incidence had reached 1 in every 91 children.

To inoculate the public against the 65 percent increase the Pediatrics study represented over the CDC's last estimate of 1 autistic child in every 150 born in 1994, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius herself intervened the day it came out. In a hastily arranged conference call with the autism community, Sebelius announced that preliminary numbers in the third in a series of CDC studies show the ratio was 1 in 100 for kids born in 1996.

"A 50 percent increase in a birth cohort two years apart is really cause for concern," Kirby said. "We really need to go back and look at what happened in those two years."

Dec. 18 would hold more than one surprise for Kirby, whose best-selling first book, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy, was published in 2005.

By the time the CDC released the new data that Friday afternoon, the new incidence rate had been adjusted down to 1 in 110, still a 36 percent hike between 1994 and 1996.

Read the full post at The Bloomington Alternative HERE.

David Kirby Reports Leading Federal Official Says Environmental Exposures Are Factor in Autism Rise

David Kirby is now on HuffPo with, Rising Autism Numbers -- Leading Federal Official Says "No Question" That Environmental Exposures Are A Factor.  Please pop over and comment.

Autism - CDC Avoids The Elephant in The Room

Atlanta, GA – A study released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that autism prevalence has increased a staggering 57% from the 1994 rate of 1 in 150  to 1 in 110 for children born in 1998. SafeMinds is extremely dissatisfied with CDC’s lack of commitment to researching environmental causes and the timing of their announcement. 

Mark Blaxill, SafeMinds Director told FoxNews.com , “I would say that releasing something the Friday before Christmas is about as deep as you can bury something.”

CDC’s Catherine Rice said, “We know there are multiple complex genetic and environmental factors which result in multiple forms of autism and we have much to learn about the causes.” However, absent from press conference and subsequent call with autism advocacy groups were specifics on the types of environmental exposures to be investigated. They skirted questions about potential environmental causes and avoided using words like “toxic exposures” or “pollutants” despite very pointed questions from advocates. 

David Kirby: Dr. Insel on Rising ASD Numbers: “No Question” About Environmental Factors

(Good morning. We've new posts below David's for today, Sunday the 20th. Please send David's post far and wide to your lists, FB, Twitter.  Click the headline to grab the URL, then copy it. Thanks.)

By David Kirby

On Friday, the CDC released its long-anticipated (HERE) autism figures, showing that the average rate of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) among 8-year-olds increased by nearly 60% between 2002 and 2006, with almost one percent of US kids affected.
 
Also on Friday, the nation's top autism research coordinator said that better diagnosis and reporting could not "explain away this huge increase," and that "there is no question that there has got to be an environmental component here."
 
He added that some ASDs may be preventable, that some children could recover from the disorder, and that a virus might conceivably play a role in some autism cases.
 
According to the latest CDC figures, the ASD rate at 11 sites among 8-year-olds in 2002 (kids born in 1994) was 60-per-10,000, and 94 per-10,000 in 2006 - among kids born just four years later, in 1998. Some of this increase was explained by better access to school records and other factors, the CDC said, though it added that a "true increase" could not be ruled out.
 
Some of the new figures were quite staggering. For example, the reported rate among all 8-year-olds in Arizona skyrocketed by 95 percent in just four years. Also in Arizona, among boys, the ASD rate reached 189-per-10,000. It also reached 193-per-10,000 in Missouri - or nearly two percent (1 in 50) of the total.
 
Another surprise was the difference between some of the racial and ethnic categories. In 2006, the rate among non-Hispanic white children was 102-per-10,000, but among black children it was 76-per-10,000, a 34-percent difference, and among Hispanic children it was 61-per-10,000, a difference of 67 percent.
 
Inexplicably, the rate among Hispanics in Alabama actually plummeted during the period in question, by 68%, from an already low 19-per-10,000 in 2002 to an almost rare 6-per-10,000 in 2006. Meanwhile, with the exception of Arizona, the CDC said, "prevalence among Hispanic children did not change significantly within any of the other 10 sites.”
 
So what do these increases mean? I put that question to Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Chair of the federal government's Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), tasked with recommending funding priorities for autism research and services. Was the increase simply an artifact of better diagnosis and reporting? Or could there be an actual increase in the numbers and, if so, wouldn't that necessarily implicate environmental factors in ASD?
 
I was surprised by Dr. Insel's frankness.
 
"As far as I can tell, the burden of proof is upon anybody who feels that there is NOT a real increase here in the number of kids affected," Dr. Insel told me in a telephone interview on Friday. He said factors such as better ascertainment "don't really explain away this huge increase" and that "you really have to take this (increase) very seriously - from everything they are looking at, this is not something that can be explained away by methodology, by diagnosis."

Support Autism Research & Shop for the Holidays at the SafeMinds Auction!

Wow, check out the 97 items in the auction for SafeMinds.  We autism families might not be able to afford everything on the list, but we can share the link with family and friends who ask, "How can I help?"

Items include lunch with David Kirby, lunch with Katie Wright, an autographed baseball by NY Yankee Mariano Rivera, gift cards to your favorite retailer and many more!

Click HERE to go to the auction site now! Bidding ends on December 10.

The Heroes of Autism Video

This is a beautiful way to end the holiday weekend. Thank you to AL for creating the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8onanMtxc

Part 2: David Kirby on HuffPo "Is Obama Ready to Take on Factory Farming?"

Click HERE to read David Kirby's second post on factory farming.

Part Two: White House Realities

(Note: This is the second part of an essay adapted from David Kirby's upcoming book Animal Factory. To read PART ONE, please click here).

In 2008, Barack Obama was swept to victory on a national wave of desire for change -- change that included a coherent program for curbing many of the excesses associated with modern American animal agriculture.

Obama's Plan to Support Rural Communities appeared on the White House website in January, 2009, and read like a manifesto from grassroots groups trying to defend their vision of what a traditional, sustainable agrarian way of life should be.

David Kirby is author of Evidence of Harm, a founding contributor to Huffington Post and a contributor to Age of Autism.  His next book, Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment will be released within the year and is available now for pre-order at Amazon.