Dachel Media Update: Songs in the Key of Strife
By Anne Dachel
Jan 22. 2016, Examiner: Parents question vaccines as epilepsy rates rise to 1 in 20 children under five
Jan 22, 2016, The San Francisco Chronicle: ‘In a Different Key,’ by John Donvan and Caren Zucker, By Emily Willingham
Jan 21, 2016, Huffington Post: Melinda Gates Wishes Donald Trump Would Stop Peddling Garbage Science On Vaccines
Jan 21, 2016, The Sacramento Bee: Number of California students classified as autistic jumps for 14th consecutive year
Read more here:
Jan 21, 2016, The Australian: Making sense of the common ‘disorder’ autism
Jan 21, 2016, Slate.com: The Vindicated Parents-- A history of autism hints at why the vaccination scare has taken hold so firmly
Jan 21, 2016, USA Today: The coming avalanche of autistic adults: Column
The rate of epilepsy among children and the elderly has been skyrocketing, with 1 in 20 children under five now suffering from the seizure condition in the United States. More and more parents say that vaccines triggered their children's seizure disorders. The government maintains that while vaccines can trigger febrile (fever related) seizures, the many cases of epilepsy that begin immediately following infant vaccination are merely coincidental or were bound to occur eventually.
Don't worry parents. The AAP has a plan. Dec 30, 2015, AAP calls for school action plans for kids with epilepsy
At this rate, to become a teacher in America, you'll have to have a certification in emergency first aid.
What is really important about promoting In a Different Key is to assure everyone that we can handle the onslaught of autistic adults.
On GMA, with "the always-eager-to-diminish-autism George Stephanopoulos," as Dan Olmsted described him, Donvan said,
"We don’t really know if there is not an epidemic, but we also think that it shouldn’t matter when we decide whether or not to respond to the needs of people in the autism community. It shouldn’t matter whether there’s an epidemic or not. What we should do is really try to focus on the fact that they need respect, they need support, they need us to be inclusive of them."
On the PBS New Hour, Donvan and Zucker talked about how "we've learned to love the autistic child," we just haven't learned to love the adults yet. ... We don't have to ask where they're coming from.
Caren Zucker brought up how we used to put autistic people into institution and how children with autism weren't allowed to go to school. Donvan explained that we've now started to come out of the dark ages of autism neglect as far as children are concerned, we just haven't done the same for adults.
Zucker: "Parents were told to put their children in institutions. ...Keeping them at home, nobody did that. And if they did, they hid them. And if they put them in institutions, they didn't tell anyone. It was what doctors told you to do."
Donvan: "And to forget about your kids. They would say, 'Put your kids there, go home, take care of your kids who are 'normal,' and try to forget those kids. Some parents, many parents did that, through about the 1950s or 60s."
What is really incredible here is that THEY'RE BLAMING THE PARENTS. Instead of refrigerator moms CAUSING AUTISM, it's now cold, unfeeling parents who put their autistic children in institutions and forgot about them AND COVERED UP AUTISM.
Finally, they're coming out of the closet. We're not hiding autism anymore. It's time to provide for the adults. The problem is the demand for adult services is for ADULTS IN THEIR 20s, not adults in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Why is that? Where is the one in 45 residents in nursing homes with autism? Why aren't we looking for them? The institutions were closed down forty and fifty years ago. Doesn't that bother anyone? WHERE HAVE THEY BEEN ALL THIS TIME?
Huffington Post (VIDEO)
Philanthropist Melinda Gates blasted Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump this week for his assertions that childhood vaccinations can lead to autism, calling them “ridiculous” and “misinformed.”
During the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Gates sat down with HuffPost Rise and discussed why Trump’s statements on vaccines are wrong.
The Sacramento Bee http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article55928865.html
More than 90,000 California public school students are autistic, a number that has risen more than six-fold since 2001, according to the latest data from the California Department of Education.
The figure represent a jump of about 6,000, or 7 percent, from 2013-14 to 2014-15. More than one of every 75 kindergartners in California public schools is classified as autistic.
The number of autistic students statewide has risen by between 5,000 and 7,000 every year for a decade. In 2001, there were about 14,000 autistic students in the state
According to the California Dept. of Ed., there are now 90,000 children with autism in California schools. Seven years ago I wrote one of the most important stories I've ever written:
2009, Pay no Attention to that Tsunami. It was on the California numbers. The California State Senate announced the Senate Select Committee on Autism on a video.
One speaker gave us the mind-boggling numbers, saying that there were "14,000 students with autism a decade ago.” Then he added the increase, “46,000 students today, and growing."
In 2009 the California State Senate announced that there were 46,000 autistic students in California schools. Today in 2016, seven years later, those numbers have doubled.
The next year I wrote more on what's happening in the states.
Anne Dachel on the Rising Autism Numbers
The autistic brain is a beautiful mess. There are more synapses in this lump of grey matter than in an ordinary brain. It’s these connections between the brain’s neurons — which regulate signals — that orchestrate the overwhelming sensitivity to outside stimuli. ...
The $22 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme is the largest and latest system to unpick this mystery, and for now it has few answers.
For the longest time autism didn’t have a name. People who felt under siege by the world were curious at best and mentally ill at worst. Children were institutionalised, parents were blamed for their progeny and remarkable minds already producing some of the best art, science and politics of a generation continued without classification.
The story of autism as a condition is a conspiracist’s fantasy. Co-discovered in the early 1940s by Nazi scientist Hans Asperger — a man whose morality has been questioned ever since — its definition was subject to expansion and revision over the decades until, in the 1990s, a fraudulent doctor with a stake in a rival product took advantage of its cloudy origin story and implicated vaccines in its cause
It’s unfair to view the first 39 chapters of In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker as culminating in Chapter 40, the one titled “The Vaccine Scare,” but it’s also irresistible. No doubt the authors, veteran TV journalists who report on autism for ABC, view the raging battle over whether childhood immunization causes autism as a unfortunate sidetrack in the saga of this complex and mysterious condition. In a Different Key is nothing if not judicious and fair-minded in its approach to a field harried by controversies and enmities from the very start. Nevertheless, the vaccine scare captures all of the drama of autism’s story in a single, vivid package: the tension between beliefs in environmental and genetic origins, the flourishing of parent activism, the wayward influence of the media, and above all the untrustworthiness of established experts. ...
Slate.com reported Donvan and Zucker's view of the vaccine controversy. "[A]nti-vaxxers are dangerous, misguided and infuriating." In a Different Key not only tells us how we finally woke up to the existence of autism everywhere, it also explains how wrong those who link it to vaccines are.
Autistic children never really grow up. How are we going to take care of them? ...
As the number of autistic children grows, so does the number of autistic adults. Their needs remain much the same as they age, yet the support they once received fades. Though families like mine are feeling it most acutely, this is an issue for everyone to consider. The tsunami of adults with autism is coming.
This story is becoming common in the news. The children with autism are becoming adults with nowhere to go. Why is this happening? The "adult autism crisis" is YOUNG ADULTS, not people in their 40s, 60s, and 80s.
Why is that? What does that tell us about autism? Sadly, no one ever asks.
Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism.
And the Chronicle article is written by Emily Willingham no less. Don't we know her from somewhere else?
Posted by: Birgit Calhoun | January 27, 2016 at 06:53 PM
People I've talked to say, with almost no hesitation, that they simply don't believe the epilepsy numbers. Where do the numbers come from?
Posted by: Betty Bona | January 26, 2016 at 09:22 AM
Hmmm vaccines and epilepsy, perhaps Cochrane collaboration has something to say on this. Wouldn't epilepsy actually be one of the outcomes that supposedly vaccines prevent? If so they aren't doing a good job. Oh, and I can think of a medical intervention they have been pushing on children and seniors that might explain more seizures. It rhymes with glue snot.
Oh and Melinda, you've done enough harm to children, thank God Trump isn't afraid or beholden to the likes of you.
Posted by: Reader | January 25, 2016 at 10:43 PM