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As a five year old autistic, he HAS agendas. And his mom, dad, brother, sister, teachers, and pets are repeatedly throwing wrenches in them. Agendas include (but are not limited to) measuring crayons throughout the house, lining up Hot Wheels down the staircase, placing stickers in strategic locals (on mom’s rearview mirror, for example). Though the ‘novice’ might interpret David’s plans as misguided, the scheming is very calculated, methodical, and purposeful. And, (dare I say it) …weird.

The media gave big headlines to this week's stories on a prestigious British medical publication's retraction of an article that had claimed to show a causal link between standard childhood vaccinations (measles, mumps and rubella) and autism. Yet the coverage of the Lancet affair didn't truly convey the outrageousness of the original publication or the gravity of its consequences--consequences long festering, since the paper was published not last week but 12 years ago. Many of us in the scientific community recognized the "study" as junk when it appeared in 1998. Even before we learned of then-unknown ethical failings by its...

The medical journal The Lancet on Tuesday retracted a controversial 1998 paper that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. The study subsequently had been discredited, and last week, the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was found to have acted unethically in conducting the research. The General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Britain, said that "there was a biased selection of patients in The Lancet paper" and that his "conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible."

Obesity is a disease of excess, but a new study suggests that a few obese patients are actually lacking something--a piece of one of their chromosomes. The loss might remove a gene that helps the body manage blood sugar and appetite. Obesity runs in families, and researchers have identified several genetic variants that seem to boost the odds of becoming obese. However, these variants only explain a minority of cases. In the last decade, researchers have discovered that genetic differences among people can stem from lost or duplicated sections of chromosomes, called copy number variants (CNVs). Because of CNVs, for...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have identified 10 locations in California that have double the rates of autism found in surrounding areas, and these clusters were located in neighborhoods with high concentrations of white, highly educated parents. > "In this particular case, we found 10 clusters of autism across the state of California. When we looked further, we discovered virtually all of them were areas where there was a higher level of education among the parents who were giving birth in those years," Hertz-Picciotto said. "We already know that people with a higher education in the United States are more...

As many of you know, I'm the mom of two autistic kids. While I've been blessed that they are high-functioning, it has been and continues to be something we struggle with. It can be exhausting. The last statistics I had read about the prevelance of autism spectrum disorders placed the number at 1 in every 100 kids. That's staggering. Could you imagine the outcry from the gay community if this was AIDS we were talking about? But yet the Washington DC voices remain silent.

The McDonalds had only four months to go before the crushing economics of covering treatments for their autism spectrum son was all on them. “But thank God, come January, we’ll have no worries,” said Michelle McDonald, 39, as she joined others in Hartford Wednesday to talk about an insurance fix that mandates coverage for medical needs of these children. The law, which was championed by state Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, state Sen. Joseph Crisco, D-Woodbridge, and state House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, applies to private insurance plans and is effective as of Friday. McDonald said her non-verbal 4-year-old son...

FRIDAY, Dec. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The brains of autistic people are less active than expected when they're engaged in self-reflective thought, a finding that helps explain autism-related social difficulties, say British researchers. Using functional MRI, they measured the brain activity of 66 males, half of whom had autism, while they were asked questions about their own or the Queen's thoughts, opinions,preferences, or physical characteristics. The researchers were particularly interested in an area of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is known to be active when people think about themselves. In non-autistic volunteers, this part of the brain...

Autism and schizophrenia may be two sides of the same coin, suggests a review of genetic data associated with the conditions. The finding could help design complementary treatments for the two disorders. Though autism was originally described as a form of schizophrenia a century ago, evidence for a link has remained equivocal. One theory puts the conditions at opposite ends of a developmental spectrum. To investigate, Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues gathered data on all known genetic variants associated with each condition, then looked for patterns of co-occurrence. The researchers found...

Many parents worry about a possible link between autism and mercury exposure. But most research dismisses those fears as groundless, and a new study says autistic children actually have lower blood levels of mercury than children who are developing normally. Mercury levels were closely related to fish intake, the study found, and children with autism and related disorders tend to be picky eaters who avoid fish. After researchers adjusted for the lower fish consumption of autistic children, they found no differences between their mercury levels and those in other children. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at the...

INDIANAPOLIS -- The mother of a 7-year-old boy with autism and a severe peanut allergy has filed a lawsuit claiming a teacher tossed her son a peanut-filled Mr. Goodbar candy bar in hopes of sickening him and keeping him from going on a zoo field trip. The boy didn't eat the candy bar, but Anita Young said her son suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his teacher, and filed a lawsuit in Marion County against her son's Indianapolis school. Young also wants criminal charges filed against teacher Trinda Barocas.

Natural News Vaccines cause autism: Supporting evidence October 6 - Rates of autism have skyrocketed 1000% since 1990, yet defenders of vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry keep scratching their heads in confusion: What could be causing this? Lots of clues point to vaccines... Autism rates double in children as vaccines poison an entire generation According to a U.S. government survey just published, rates of autism in children have doubled since 2003. Today, an estimated 1 in 91 children are being diagnosed with autism ...

Contrary to what had been thought, young people with autism recognize and compare relationships among objects in scenes Children with autism have difficulty forming social relationships. But they discern relationships among objects in visual scenes surprisingly well, indicating a fundamental grasp of analogical reasoning, according to a new study. Youngsters diagnosed with autism, or autistic disorder, reason about the relations between objects and people on a par with kids free of any developmental problems, psychology graduate student Kinga Morsanyi of the University of Plymouth, England, and psychologist Keith Holyoak of the University of California, Los Angeles report in an upcoming...

Loopey might be an unorthodox best friend, but she's a good one. Share Fayetteville, N.C., city council turns down family's plea to keep their pet pig. She was sweet and playful and didn't seem to notice her buddy's quirks like others did. Now, more than a year after Loopey -- a black pet pot-bellied pig -- made fast friends with 8-year-old Anthony Pia, the autistic boy's parents are battling their city's ban on hogs. It's been three months since Lisa Pia and Bobby Tibbetts, fearing fines from the city, removed Loopey the pig from their Fayetteville, N.C., home and took...

Spending thousands of dollars on lab tests, Aleni Prokopius discovered that her newborn son was contaminated with trace amounts of heavy metals including mercury, which is used in the vaccine preservative Thimerosal. In this interview with Aleni Prokopius, you'll learn how vaccine injections can expose some children to one hundred times the methyl mercury of other children, depending on how the medical practitioner prepares and administers the vaccines. Aleni also explains how she worked to try to reverse autism and restore normal neurological function to her son through chelation and dietary changes. There's a protocol for natural health restoration that's...

Finding could offer insight into autism and other disorders Related Links: Dr. Ralph Adolphs Pasadena, Calif.—In a finding that sheds new light on the neural mechanisms involved in social behavior, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have pinpointed the brain structure responsible for our sense of personal space.The discovery, described in the August 30 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, could offer insight into autism and other disorders where social distance is an issue.The structure, the amygdala—a pair of almond-shaped regions located in the medial temporal lobes—was previously known to process strong negative emotions, such as anger and...

Here is disturbing cell phone video just released last week of what is reportedly an autistic child in Pittsburgh being slapped by a teacher back in 2008. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the parents of the child are suing but had not seen the video until it was posted on YouTube just recently. The teacher was removed from the classroom last year. On the video, you clearly see the child being slapped in the face and being screamed at. . . . (Video)

MY 7 yr old, autistic son, Matthew came home from his mother's house today with blisters on his arm and leg. I have tried to call her repeatedly to find out the source of the blisters, but no return call. So, I'm hoping some of the parents here will have seen something similar and can tell me whether it's something i need to be concerned about. There are four burns on him. Two on his inner forearm, a large grouping of blisters on his inner calf, and a small one just above the large one on the leg. I don't...

Just when the pharmaceutical industry thought the vaccine-autism controversy had been resolved, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee has recommended further study of vaccine safety. A perceived fear of the safety of the U.S. vaccination schedule has led increasing numbers of parents to opt out of full compliance. The numbers of children who are not fully vaccinated has now reached a point where “herd� immunity may be compromised, compelling the Centers for Disease Control to hold town-hall meetings and convene a Vaccine Safety Working Subgroup. Despite research ruling out mercury (Thimerosal) or the measles portion of one specific vaccine, autism continues...

IS ABORTED FETAL DNA LINKED TO AUTISM? By Theresa A. Deisher, Ph.D. Just when the pharmaceutical industry thought the vaccine-autism controversy had been resolved, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee has recommended further study of vaccine safety. A perceived fear of the safety of the U.S. vaccination schedule has led increasing numbers of parents to opt out of full compliance. The numbers of children who are not fully vaccinated has now reached a point where “herd” immunity may be compromised, compelling the Centers for Disease Control to hold town-hall meetings and convene a Vaccine Safety Working Subgroup. Despite research ruling out...

He was diagnosed with autism, had received counseling for an attraction to child pornography and lived in a group home. Still, a recruiter thought that Joshua Fry had what it took to be one of “the few, the proud, the Marines.” Pvt. Fry, who spent the last year in the brig at Camp Pendleton on charges of possessing child pornography, leaving base without authorization and concealing his psychiatric history, was discharged today from the Marines for bad conduct and sentenced to four years confinement. Although the case has been settled and a verdict handed down, disturbing questions about exactly how...

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - Byrd and Melanie Billings had a growing brood of adopted children with autism, Down syndrome and other disabilities, and took care to make their nine-bedroom house a safe place for them, wiring it with surveillance cameras in every room. It was those cameras that captured images of the masked men who shot the wealthy couple to death in a break-in executed with chilling precision.

July 6, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Increased rates of regressive autism in children in the US and UK can be historically associated with the switch by pharmaceutical companies from the use of animal cells to produce vaccines to the use of aborted human fetal cells, a campaign group is claiming. "Now when we vaccinate our children, some vaccines also deliver contaminating aborted human fetal DNA. The safety of this has never been tested," says Dr. Theresa Deisher, President of the Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (SCPI). SCPI, a group that educates the public on the use of aborted human fetal material for...

COLORADO SPRINGS — Pressure is mounting to routinely screen all children for autism early because evidence increasingly demonstrates that intervention before age 3 years results in far better outcomes, Dr. Ann Reynolds said at the annual conference of the Colorado Academy of Family Physicians. “It's so important to get those services going. Children with autism who begin treatment before age 3 have a much better chance of having functional language,” explained Dr. Reynolds, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado and director of the child development unit at the Children's Hospital, Denver. American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines recommend an autism-specific...

Karl Greenfeld’s painful, eloquent memoir lays bare the disease’s toll.Boy Alone: A Brother’s Memoir, by Karl Greenfeld (Harper, 368 pp., $25.99) In the 1988 film Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman plays an autistic adult named Raymond Babbitt, a role for which he received an Academy Award. Hoffman’s performance has another distinction: 21 years later, it remains the phoniest portrayal of autism ever put on screen. Those who suffer from that affliction, unlike Raymond, aren’t all cuteness and intuition. Their rages don’t last three picturesque minutes; they can go on for days. In infancy, those stricken most severely retreat into themselves, never...

Gina Marie can sing. Watching the clip below will serve as proof and anyone who has ever tried to perform the national anthem will attest that it takes some definite skill to do. But, lots of little girls can sing. So, what makes Gina Marie so special? Her mother explains far better than I could on her site ginachildperformer.com: When Gina was about 2 years old she was diagnosed with PDD NOS (an autistic spectrum disorder). The pervasive development disorder diagnosis was a result of evaluations sought because Gina could not speak at age 2. In fact, Gina did not...

Over the past year I have been going over articles about Asperger's syndrome. Asperger's syndrome is considered to be a highly functioning form of autism yet it is also considered to be a disability. Members of the autism community have worked for years trying to downplay the severity of the disorder. I first heard about Asperger's in 1998 while watching a documentary. Asperger's disorder was first invented by a German doctor named Hans Asperger. (the disorder was named after him.) Asperger did study on children who though they were bright were considered awkward. The world health organization began to use...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin paid a visit to Long Island, N.Y., on Sunday and spoke about the joys of raising her 1-year-old son Trig, who was born with Down syndrome. "We are just so blessed to have this child in our lives," Palin said before a crowd of about 1,000 people. "What God has shown us with Trig in our lives is 'Yes, every single person has purpose no matter their developmental abilities.' " Also at the event – a fundraiser for Independent Group Home Living, a non-profit for children and adults with developmental disabilities – were Palin's husband, Todd;...

Julia a three year old US citizen has just won substantial compensation in the US Federal Court for autism caused by MMR vaccine – says her mother. What is different about this case? They kept the “autism” word out of the case. Many parents in other US cases have been advised to do this:- CBS News has found that since 1988, the vaccine court has awarded money judgments, often in the millions of dollars, to thirteen hundred and twenty two families whose children suffered brain damage from vaccines. In many … cases, the government paid out awards following a judicial...

http://governorpalin4president.blogspot.com/2009/06/governor-palin-helps-raise-12-million.html

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is using her public profile to draw attention to the needs of those with autism and other developmental disabilities in the New York metropolitan area. The former Republican vice presidential candidate is scheduled to join a fundraising walk for the group Autism Speaks in Westchester County on Sunday morning. Then she is to be honored on Long Island later Sunday at an anniversary celebration for Independent Group Home Living Inc. Palin's youngest son, Trig, has Down syndrome.

Gov. Palin's spending another day in New York, this time a little farther downstate. She started the day at an autism awareness walk at Manhattanville College...

Former vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin is expected to attend a popular autism awareness walk Saturday at Manhattanville College. More than 12,000 people with autism spectrum disorders and their families are expected to participate in the two-mile walk around the campus.

Mystery 'pilot' cannot tell police his origin By Petra Krischok in Berlin Last Updated: 2:17am BST 12/07/2007 German police are trying to identify a man they believe to be British, who has a detailed knowledge of military planes but cannot tell them where he comes from. Karl has been named 'the pilot' The man, who calls himself Karl, has been cared for in a nursing home. He was found in a confused state in the city of Heidelberg three days ago. Echoing the case of the "piano man" in England, Karl is known as "the pilot" to staff because of...

It takes a certain mix of optimism and frustration to contemplate the possibility of space travel. To dream of navigating the cosmos is to assume that man has the resources and the know-how to propel himself into the heavens, but also some compelling reasons to exchange his home planet for the cold vast unknown. It was these seemingly contradictory impulses that shaped “Star Trek,” the supremely influential science-fiction television series whose three-season run yielded 40 years of sequels and spinoffs including a new feature film about the origins of Kirk and Spock that opened on Friday. Yes, the series is...

A student was left shocked when she checked her tourist snaps of the London skyline - and spotted what looks like a flying saucer. University Of Exeter academic Karolina-Slavka Mueller was in London for the weekend, when she took some shots with her camera phone of the sights. But when she looked back at the January 19 night time pictures of Tower Bridge and the London Eye, she was shocked to see an apparent UFO. And experts claim it is the real thing. Karolina said in an email: "What's very strange about this is the fact that we didn't actually...

Leo Lytel was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. But by age 9 he had overcome the disorder. His progress is part of a growing body of research that suggests at least 10 percent of children with autism can "recover" from it — most of them after undergoing years of intensive behavioral therapy. Skeptics question the phenomenon, but University of Connecticut psychology professor Deborah Fein is among those convinced it's real. She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no...

In three studies, including the most comprehensive study of autism genetics to date, investigators funded in part by the National Institutes of Health have identified common and rare genetic factors that affect the risk of autism spectrum disorders. The results point to the importance of genes that are involved in forming and maintaining the connections between brain cells. "These findings establish that genetic factors play a strong role in autism spectrum disorder," says Acting NIH Director Raynard Kington, M.D., Ph.D. "Detailed analysis of the genes and how they affect brain development is likely to yield better strategies for diagnosing and...

SAN DIEGO -- Spencer Trussle likes to play and ride his bike. "I'm 4 years old," he said, "and I have a sister named Olivia, and I ride my bike all day long." He lives in a piece of suburbia that seems picturesque: the Venzano development in San Marcos. His parents, Gary and Marla Trussle, moved the family here five months ago. "I thought it would be good for the children," Marla Trussle explained. But instead of being welcomed, the Trussle family has been under attack, they said, by neighbors. The accusations against them have been wild, including that 4-year-old...

The eight children, ages 5 to 11, who attend the Brooklyn Autism Center Academy need intensive individual instruction to cope with a neurological disorder that can make achieving academic progress slow and grueling. During the course of the day, one teacher is paired with each child. After successfully completing a task, students are rewarded with a spoonful of vanilla pudding, time on a piano or a few minutes in a bouncy castle. The system repeats itself, interspersing work with small breaks. “Every child with autism can learn,” said Jaime Nicklas, 32, the school’s educational director. “If they are not learning,...

A special vaccine court dismissed claims that the vaccine can cause the cognitive disorder. The pitched debate regarding the purported link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine -- a battle viewed on both sides as critical to shielding the defenseless from harm -- took the encouraging turn for which many physicians were hoping and landed in favor of protecting public health. At issue was the consideration by a special vaccine court of test cases to determine if certain hypotheses of how vaccines could cause autism were legitimate and, therefore, warranted compensation to the affected parties through the...

An astonishing revelation regarding UFOs is being reported in some initial media reports relating to the very recent Japanese false alarm regarding an alleged North Korean missile attack. The entire population of Japan is in a state of utter panic and anger and an international crisis might well all be the result of irresponsible actions of extraterrestrial tourists flying a UFO from North Korea to Japan on a sightseeing expedition. As the story initially unfolded the remarkable information emerged that the highest levels of the Japanese defence establishment conceded that their most advanced radar system has picked up, in the...

Tomorrow morning President Obama gives a speech in Prague outlining his plans for a nuclear weapons free world. Obama indicated his intentions in comments at Strasbourg, France: "Even with the Cold War now over, the spread of nuclear weapons or the theft of nuclear material could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet. And this weekend in Prague, I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons." The last U.S. President to seek a nuclear weapons free world was President Ronald Reagan who proposed it to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986....

In a previous article we gave you a taste of how grossly incompetent and inefficient government programs are and that they are far too expensive. Programs that are designed not to uplift the poor and promote self sufficiency, but actually do more to leave people dependant and keep them poor. Its not just the taxpayers that suffer, it is those who are forced to depend on them who suffer and who suffer the most. Consider the story of Sebastian Peters, born and raised in Manchester NH, from earliest moment of his childhood, Sebastian had suffered terrible cruelty under a father...

A Thai fireman turned superhero when he dressed up as comic-book character Spider-Man to coax a frightened eight-year-old from a balcony, police said Tuesday. Teachers at a special needs school in Bangkok alerted authorities on Monday when an autistic pupil, scared of attending his first day at school, sat out on the third-floor ledge and refused to come inside, a police sergeant told AFP.

Generation Rescue, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey’s Los Angeles-based non-profit autism organization, today announced that the United States Government has once again conceded that vaccines cause autism. The announcement comes on the heels of the recently unsealed court case of Bailey Banks vs. HHS. The ruling states, “The Court found that Bailey would not have suffered this delay but for the administration of the MMR vaccine…a proximate sequence of cause and effect leading inexorably from vaccination to PDD [Autism].” In a curious and hypocritical method of operation, the mysterious Vaccine Court not only protects vaccine makers from liability but supports...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- Families are continuing to put pressure on the West Virginia Legislature to require insurance companies in the state to cover autism treatment and therapy. Do you think insurance companies in West Virginia should cover autism treatment and therapy? Yes No Right now, many families have to pay for the health care costs with no help from their insurance companies. Do you think insurance companies in West Virginia should cover autism treatment and therapy? We would like to hear from you in our WSAZ Charleston poll. You can also give us your ideas by filling out the...

MINNEAPOLIS — Ayub Abdi is a cute 5-year-old with a smile that might be called shy if not for the empty look in his eyes. He does not speak. When he was 2, he could say “Dad,” “Mom,” “give me” and “need water,” but he has lost all that. He does scream and spit, and he moans a loud “Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” when he is unhappy. At night he pounds the walls for hours, which led to his family’s eviction from their last apartment. As he is strapped into his seat in the bus that takes him to special education class,...

THE idea that a preservative once used in vaccines is to blame for rising autism rates has just been authoritatively debunked - again. Indeed, some of the key early "evidence" now stands exposed as fake. Sadly, none of this will kill this myth - because it was never based on good science.

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. Confidential medical documents and interviews withwitnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.