AGE OF AUTISM

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Jenny McCarthy on Celebrity Scoop

Managing Editor's Note: Please click over to Celebrity Scoop to comment directly on this article. As you can imagine, the haters stopped playing wizards of solitaire long enough to add a lot of comments.  I ordered my Rescue Blue Magic Bullet on HSN this week.  Healthy smoothies for my girls and happy SOOTHIES for Mark and me coming up!  KS

Activist mama Jenny McCarthy is partnering with the world's top-selling kitchen appliance, the Magic Bullet® blender, to launch the Blue Limited Edition Magic Bullet® specifically designed for her charitable organization Generation Rescue.

An outspoken advocate for children with autism, Jenny tells Celebrity Baby Scoop that her unofficial role as the celebrity spokesperson on the topic is nothing short of a blessing.

Anytime you can do something that serves the greater good and make a difference, you should act," the mom-of-one says. "So, what I thought was a hardship in my life, I now see as a blessing because I can reach so many people."

The best-selling author says a portion of the proceeds from the Blue Limited Edition Magic Bullet® will go directly to families with autism.

"Our partnership with Magic Bullet® allows us to leverage its worldwide popularity to generate funding for Generation Rescue’s programs that provide education, support and access to medical services for families with autism," she says.

Jenny's son Evan, 11, was diagnosed with autism when he was at 2 ½-years-old. The single mom has publicly spoken about the possible link between childhood vaccinations and autism. She is also well-known for saying that children can "recover" from autism.

Has the community embraced her since Evan's recovery -- and her controversial statement?

My story of Evan’s recovery is not unique, there are thousands of parents before me whose shoulders I stand on today," Jenny says. "I’m just as active today as when Evan recovered from autism. I still travel the country lecturing on autism, am the president and board member of Generation Rescue and actively fundraise throughout the country for the foundation. My journey now is for the other parents whose voice hasn’t been heard.

What's up next for the blonde beauty? "I’m currently developing my own talk show and writing my next book titled Sinner," she says.

Be sure to check out Magic Bullet® and Generation Rescue on Facebook for more information.

Talk to Jenny McCarthy and Order A Magic Bullet on HSN on Monday 7/18!

You'll have two chances to talk to Jenny LIVE tomorrow on HSN at 9am EDT and again at 10pm EDT when you order a Magic Bullet and help support GR.

Check your cable or satellite listing for the HSN channel on your system. Here's the HSN guide.  And here are the HSN details for The Generation Rescue BLUE Magic Bullet.

Think of the smoothies you can make with this beautifully blue Magic Bullet. Supplements for the kids and maybe a little something on a Friday night for Mom and Dad? (Share your recipes in the comments.)

Introducing the Rescue Bullet, the limited-edition blue Magic Bullet, where a portion of the proceeds benefit Generation Rescue. Catch Jenny McCarthy on HSN July 18 and visit the Facebook page July 19 to get your own Rescue Bullet before they run out!

Visit Generation Rescue to learn more, find that last credit card with a few bucks on it (ha ha!) and order yours! KS

Jenny McCarthy At the Autism One Generation Rescue Conference

Jenny McCarthy is the keynote speaker with Byron Katie today at the Autism One Generation Rescue conference in Chicago. Last night Jenny met Rescue Angels at a party in the GR lounge.  Jenny has  new line of affordable, non-toxic baby products called Too Good by Jenny. Keith Schneider of manufacturer Pem-America presented GR with a check for $5,000.And  Jenny kindly allowed everyone to take a photo with her. We'll have more photos to run later. KIM

 

Jenny and Jade Joseph (left)

 

 

 

 

 

Jenny and Abby McKinney

 

 

 

 

Jenny and Kim Stagliano

Jenny McCarthy and Byron Katie on VoiceAmerica Radio for Autism Action Month

Today! Noon EDT, 9:00am Pacific.

Autism One: A Conversation of Hope airs live on Tuesdays at 9 AM Pacific / 11 AM Central / 12 Noon Eastern on the VoiceAmerica Health & Wellness Channel. To access the show, log on at www.voiceamericahealth.com. All shows will be available in Autism One's Content Library on the VoiceAmerica Health & Wellness Channel for on-demand and podcast download.

Nutrition expert and mother of a child with autism, Kristin Selby Gonzalez, interviews inspirational warrior-women on April 5th, 9 AM PT on the VoiceAmerica Health & Wellness Channel to empower parents & caregivers

Phoenix, AZ (PR-Inside) April 4, 2011 -- Autism will be in the news in the weeks to come as America recognizes “Autism Awareness Month.” Throughout the month of April, people will remember the toll which this disorder takes on the lives of children and adults throughout the world. They will also remember the work which doctors, scientists, parents and specialists around the globe are doing to combat the disorder and the millions of dollars which are being raised to provide further research, treatment and therapies.

Katie Wright: Doonesbury's Misogynistic Cheap Shot Against Jenny McCarthy

Managing Editor's Note: It's a sad irony that Gary Trudeau's wife Jane Pauley worked for NBC for many years. Would Trudeau have taken such a cheap misogynistic shot at Katie? And Jenny was in the hospital tending to Evan during a bout of seizures when the barftoon ran. A low, callous and highly "un-progressive" gesture on the part of Trudeau.

By Katie Wright

Gary Trudeau recently took a cheap shot at a single Mom who cares for her recovered, yet chronically ill, son. When this Mom is not with her son she can be found donating almost all her time and energy towards helping other ASD families in need. When is the last time Gary Trudeau fielded phone calls from broke ASD families and offered them tangible assistance? When the last time Gary Trudeau went to an autism conference and was mobbed for 5 hours by crying moms sharing stories of their sick autistic children? When was the last time Gary Trudeau spend Valentine’s Day in the hospital with his small son after he suffered a series of seizures? When was the last time Gary Trudeau heard his child spontaneously speak- today- yesterday? For me it was 2004, just prior to a series of adverse vaccine reactions that took away his voice.

Jenny McCarthy’s “crime” is advocating for objective vaccine safety research. Guess what Gary? Millions of American parents want objective vaccine safety research too. Safe vaccines are their number one health care priority. Gary, get ready to write a million more dumb cartoons. But I guess that is your specialty anyway?

When Trudeau is ridiculing Moms of sick kids with autism is he also making fun of our children’s chronic illnesses or does he doubt their existence? What are Trudeau’s credentials on the subject? Is he a parent of an ASD child-no, is he a doctor-no, is he a special Ed teacher-no, is he a medical researcher- and no to that too. Trudeau special autism expertise is the result of his long history as a… cartoonist? Gary Trudeau is a grown man who sits all day behind a table drawing stick figures with pencils and magic markers. From this lofty perch Trudeau has chosen to sit in judgment of millions of families he does not know and pain he cannot understand.

Guess what Gary? Your cartoon was inaccurate, offensive and unfunny. But that isn’t even the real issue, “Doonesbury” never was funny, the problem was that you mocked a Mom and her autistic son because you believe you “know” better why her child is autistic. When you took on Jenny McCarthy you took on all of us. We all have similar stories and we all have children who suffered horrific reactions to multiple vaccinations.  Apparently Gary Trudeau finds that amusing. Gary I challenge you meet with us. Step away from the magic marker table, Gary. Come out of hiding and tell us why you know our children better than their parents and how you became such an autism causation expert.

Katie Wright is a Contributing Editor for Age of Autism

Jenny McCarthy Speaks Out on HuffPo RE: Andrew Wakefield BMJ Report

Please read and comment on Jenny McCarthy's full post at HuffPo HERE. Don't get trampled by the trolls.

Last week, parents were told a British researcher's 1998 report linking the MMR shot to autism was fraudulent -- that this debate about vaccines and autism is now over, and parents should no longer worry about giving their children six vaccines at a single pediatric appointment or 36 by the time they are five years old.

Is that the whole story? Dr. Andrew Wakefield's study of 12 children with autism actually looked at bowel disease, not vaccines. The study's conclusion stated, "We did not prove an association between measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described [autism]."

Dr. Wakefield did something I wish all doctors would do: he listened to parents and reported what they said. His paper also said that, "Onset of behavioral symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps and rubella vaccination in 8 of the 12 children," and that, "further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome [autism with gut disease] and its possible relation to this vaccine."

Since when is repeating the words of parents and recommending further investigation a crime? As I've learned, the answer is whenever someone questions the safety of any vaccines....  Read and comment on the full post HERE.

Age of Autism Awards 2010: Dr. Paul Offit, Denialist of the Decade

By Dan Olmsted 

Why bother to call attention to Dr. Paul Offit, the vaccine patent-holder who has led the attack on the idea that vaccines have anything to do with autism or any of the myriad of other ailments afflicting this generation of American children? Well, because other people are paying attention -- including the nation's pediatricians and the mainstream journalists who need to start calling him to account. Offit has a new book out -- "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All." Here's the question doctors who recommend him to nervous parents, and parents unsure what to think, and journalists who interview him, need to ask: Why is Offit transparently opposed to ever studying the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated Americans, even as he acknowledges that vaccines have a long history of causing serious side effects?

While his last book, "Autism's False Prophets," focused squarely on the disability now afflicting 1 in 100 children, Offit branches out here to deride those who have any concerns whatsoever about the safety of the current vaccine schedule. There is plenty of sympathy for parents of children who have died of infectious diseases, but perfunctory dismissal in cases where parents blame vaccines. 

Thus Michael Belkin, whose daughter Lyla died after her hepatitis B shot, is treated as a gullible gadfly, goaded by Barbara Loe Fisher into heading "the Hepatitis B Vaccine Project at her National Vaccine information Center. Soon Belkin, a Wall Street financial adviser, was everywhere" -- everywhere being the CDC and Congress, which is exactly where he should have been as a citizen and parent who believes that Hep B is a dangerous and unnecessary childhood vaccine that killed his daughter. Sniffs Offit: "Despite Belkin's certainty that hepatitis B vaccine had caused his daughter's SIDS, study after study failed to support him."

Parents of girls who died after Gardasil vaccination get similar treatment. The idea that Gardasil is dangerous is "a contention refuted by careful study" and "established science." 

And chickenpox vaccines are critically important because chickenpox can lead to shingles, "one of medicine's most debilitating diseases. Shingles is so painful that it has at times led to suicide. And shingles doesn't only affect the skin; sometimes when the virus reawakens it causes strokes, resulting in permanent paralysis. Chickenpox is a disease worth preventing." Absent is any acknowledgement of the evidence that the vaccine itself, by reducing cases of simple childhood chickenpox, has led to a big increase in shingles by removing the protective immunological "bump" those who already harbor the virus receive when they are re-exposed.

Hannah Poling and the government's $20 million concession that vaccines resulted in her autistic regression? Not mentioned. Billions paid out by vaccine court for all sorts of injuries over the past 20 years? Well, vaccine court is a strange place ...

 

Anyone concerned about any of these things fits Offit's definition of anti-vaccine, because vaccines don't cause any of them, because Paul Offit says so, a solipsism that is really quite breathtaking: "[B]ecause anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots -- conditions that aren't caused by vaccines -- safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made."

Yet Offit himself yields an amazing amount of ground by describing unsafe vaccines -- including early polio shots and a rotavirus vaccine that was the immediate predecessor of his own. His technique is to situate all this as historical, part of the triumphant march of progress into the bright sunshine of vaccine safety. Here's a description I find especially astonishing: "When Barbara Loe Fisher burst onto the scene, several vaccines had serious side effects, every year causing allergic reactions, paralysis, or death. Public health officials and doctors didn't hide these problems. But they didn't do anything to correct them, either. And most parents had no idea they existed."

Public health officials did nothing to fix vaccine problems that led to paralysis and death? And parents didn't know about it? Is this not an indictment of the medical industry, and an unintentional endorsement advocates who have worked to remedy it?  Does it not argue that at least some of the time parental observations may well be correct, an early warning system of the first order? Well, no, because apparently those things no longer happen -- to say otherwise, in Offit's parallel universe, would be anti-vaccine conspiratorial quackery. 

Much of the book is a score-settling screed against anyone who's ever criticized him or vaccine safety surveillance, including Fisher, Jenny McCarthy and J.B. Handley. So it's no surprise that his "can't be done" argument against studying unvaccinated populations for any untoward outcomes arrives in the middle of an attack on Handley. Offit quotes J.B.'s comments on a Larry King segment in April 2009: "Larry, we have no idea what the combination risk of our vaccine schedule looks like. At the two-month visit, a child gets six vaccines in under fifteen minutes. The only way to test that properly would be to have a group of kids who get all six and a group of kids who got none and see what happens. They don't do that testing. They have no idea."

Offit's comment: "Handley was asking for a study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. One result is certain: given recent outbreaks of Hib, measles, mumps, and pertussis, no vaccinated children would suffer and possibly die from preventable infections. It would be, of course, an entirely unethical experiment. No investigator could prospectively study children who are denied a potentially lifesaving medical product. And no university's or hospital's institutional review board worth its salt would ever approve such a study." 

Offit goes on, outrageously, to compare Handley's proposal to the infamous Tuskegee experiment in which doctors withheld treatment from black males suffering from syphilis in order to study the natural course of the disease. 

P-LEEZE. No one I know of is suggesting that a study of unvaccinated children deliberately withhold vaccination. Rather, there are growing numbers of never-vaccinated children in America -- a fact Offit acknowledges with dismay -- and plenty of families willing to participate in such a study. State governments have vaccine waivers on file for public school attendance that are another obvious source of non-life-threatening data.

The real problem for Offit is not an ethical one; the real problem is that any such study would trump all the self-interested industry and CDC studies that never manage to include never-vaccinated chldren as a control group. Informal efforts to do that -- by myself, J.B.'s Generation Rescue and others -- have pointed toward less autism and asthma, and been met by the medical establishment and its sycophantic sock puppets with an absolute frenzy of denial and misdirection.

In our book, "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic," Mark  Blaxill and I discuss this aversion to doing the obvious. "A very simple test goes right to the heart of the vaccine controversy: What is the difference in total health outcomes, including autism, between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations? We would argue that we've uncovered a number of natural experiments in human populations that suggest we should be seriously concerned over the ever-increasing load of childhood vaccinations, especially in the United States. ... Oddly, when it comes to doing such studies in human populations, and studying the autism levels in the Amish, the homeschooled, or philosophical objectors, vaccine industry proponents resist mightily. Conducting human vax/unvax studies in existing unvaccinated groups would be so fraught with methodological problems that they are 'retrospectively impossible.' As for controlled studies, they would be so burdened with permission problems that they would be 'prospectively unethical.' In short, the resistance to the proposal to do vax/unvax work has not only taken the attitude that 'we already know the answers,' but 'we should not seek to know.' It's pretty hard to make scientific progress in the face of this kind of epistemological nihilism."  

I am begging, on bended knee, that pediatricians quit putting Offit on a pedestal, and that mainstream journalists do their job and ask him why he is so averse to any study that involves the health of never-vaccinated children. Don't let him call you "anti-vaccine," and don't let him change the subject to the quite thoroughly separate issue of preventing deadly disease. That's an important topic, but there is room at the table for both effective public health policies against disease AND a fearless examination of whether today's vaccine schedule contributes to chronic health problems -- whether Paul Offit denies it or not.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism

 

 

 

When It Comes To Autism, Jenny McCarthy Never Fakes It.

Thank you to Leigh Attaway Wilcox, from the MomBlogs of the Dallas Morning News for letting us share this terrific post with our readers. Please visit the DMN blogs regularly. Dan Burns has a regular blog there and Nancy Churnin, who runs the blogs, has graciously allowed me to contribute as well. KIM

Jenny McCarthy connects with warrior moms in Dallas 

3:00 PM Thu, Oct 07, 2010 | Permalink | Yahoo! Buzz

Leigh Attaway Wilcox  

Connections make life rich. Each of us seeks to surround ourselves with people who have similar priorities and goals. Sometimes it is thanks to rather dire situations that we truly connect with others who change our lives forever.

Jenny McCarthy, while on tour for her new book, Love, Lust and Faking It, took time out of her schedule Wednesday night to have a drink with a local group of moms (and a few dads, grandmothers and sisters) following a book signing at the Lincoln Park Barnes & Noble in Dallas. Why? She graciously honored a connection that many local "Warrior Moms," like me, have with her.

Let me be honest: Autism can be a very lonely place for families to journey. Especially in the beginning, after first receiving a diagnosis, many of us are so overwhelmed by responsibility ("I caused this" thoughts), shame ("I can't control my own child" thoughts) and grief ("my child may never...make friends...have a meaningful, fulfilling job...get married..." and on and on kinds of thoughts) we don't realize, (some of us for weeks, months or years) that we're far, far from alone...

Read the full post and share your comments HERE.

Jenny McCarthy on Larry King Live

Here's a snip from CNN of Jenny McCarthy on Larry King Live Friday night. Her new book Live, Lust & Faking It continues to do well at Amazon, and we're happy for her success.