The St. Louis Post Dispatch

We’re seeing the disaster unfold, yet we’re not seeing it. 

“When St. Louis County voters head to the polls on Election Day, they’ll be asked to approve a 19-cent tax increase for the Special School District, which provides special education services and technical education to more than 25,000 students in 22 school districts in the county.”

“The demand for autism-related services has risen substantially in recent years. The district delivered services to fewer than 500 students with autism in 2000 but now provides services for about 2,500 children with autism, he said.”

New York Magazine:  

This is an outrage. One more attempt to trivialize and cover-up the disaster.  I left one comment.

“If so, you're in good company. From Asperger’s to “Asperger’s,” how the spectrum became quite so all-inclusive.”

“‘Is every man in America somewhere on it?’ Nora Ephron wondered about the autism spectrum in an e-mail to a friend a few months before her death….

“The diagnosis is everywhere: Facebook’s former head of engineering has stated that Mark Zuckerberg has “a touch of the Asperger’s.” Time suggested that the intensely awkward Bill Gates is autistic; a biographer of Warren Buffett wrote that the Oracle of Omaha, with his prodigious memory and ‘fascination with numbers,’ has ‘a vaguely autistic aura.’…

“Real life celebrities who have or probably have Asperger’s” include Jim Carrey, Adolf Hitler… “

WBTV: 

Listen to the mom who plans to donate her own brain to Autism Speaks Tissue Depart. when she dies as her autistic son stands beside her.  In truth, parents should be outraged…THIS IS “THE 10^TH ANNUAL WALK, as the reporter announced. TENS YEARS OF WALKING? FOR WHAT? No one knows anymore than they did in 2002. The only difference is that the numbers have gone from one in 250 to one in every 88 nationally. When will there be any answers?

"’Cause it's highly important and when I pass away they're going to take my brain, Autism Speaks Tissue Department and run tests on it to see why we're so behind schedule,’ said Kate Shepherd, an autistic mother who has an autistic child.”

(So does Autism Speaks have those freezers fixed yet?)

NJ.com:

Doug Flutie talked about his life raising a son with autism.  His remark about his son’s regression is typical of our failure to demand answers from the people who are supposed to be the experts.

 If kids who had been born with normal sight suddenly went blind at age two, I don’t think parents would so easily shrug their shoulders and accept that these things  happen for no known reason. 

"If you picked up a textbook back then, it would read that autism was caused by bad parenting….There weren't a lot of people we could turn to."

"Doug Jr. had matured normally until after his second birthday.”

New York Daily News:

“Stephanie Wilkerson is charged with aggravated child abuse for kicking an eight-year-old girl with special needs off the bus and fracturing the girl’s foot.”

The Daily American:

This letter from a mom was very good.

“It's a little known fact that the month of October is Vaccine Injury Awareness month! Many of you may not have heard about it in the main stream media or our local papers but it is a very real occurrence for many families.

“Many people have heard about Autism and how the rates of Autism have risen since the early 1980's, from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 88 children afflicted with toxic overload illness from an increase vaccine schedule! Less have heard about other illnesses that occur from vaccine injury, like auto immune disorders, mitrochondrial disorders to Rheumatoid arthritis and the list of illness goes on! Did you know that people actually have died from vaccines, have become paralyzed; have gotten the disease that was to be prevented from the actual vaccine?”…

 

“Can you imagine having a perfectly healthy child one day, getting them vaccinated and they stop talking, or walking and even worse dying.

“I don't have to imagine. My daughter Sara at the age of 13 years old on Oct. 17, 2006 was vaccinated with Gardasil to prevent cervical cancer. She was a vibrant, healthy, and active teenager. Directly after the Gardasil vaccine (just one dose) she was in extreme pain at the site of the injection, dizzy spells, weakness, eventually the pain swept her entire body.” CON’T…

TIME Magazine:

Alice Park at TIME has long loved telling us that there is no epidemic and that autism is genetic. Here’s another example of her surreal look at autism.

“Autism likely has deep genetic roots, but the latest research provides hope that some learning techniques can lessen symptoms of the developmental disorder.

“In children with the mildest cases of autism, these techniques resulted in changes in their brains that made them “indistinguishable” from those of unaffected children of the same age — essentially normalizing them, according to Geraldine Dawson in the department of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

“‘We essentially reversed the pattern so kids with autism are now showing greater normal brain activity when they saw a woman’s face and less activity when looking at objects,’ says Dawson.”