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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 ...

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...

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...

Researchers have found a way to slow overactive brain cells that may be triggering neurological disorders Scientists say they have pinpointed a gene in the brain that can calm nerve cells that become too jumpy, potentially paving the way for new therapies to treat autism and other neurological disorders. "It's exciting because it opens the field up," says Michael Greenberg, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School. "Nobody has [found] a gene that controls the process in quite that way before."....

Shock Jock Michael Savage is in hot water again this time for a stating his belief that 99% of Autism cases are fake. He has taken a beating from parents of autistic children and those who lobby for them. However, let us play devil's advocate for a moment... Are Savage's comments mean spirited or could there be some truth to it? Are children who are diagnosed with autism and Asperger's syndrome (Considered a high functioning form of Autism) being over diagnosed? Are the diagnostic criteria for Autism and Asperger's really too broad and too flawed that otherwise ordinary playful children...

"New Ways to Diagnose Autism Earlier" read a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. There is no question that you can diagnose anything as early as you want. The real question is whether the diagnosis will turn out to be correct. My own awareness of how easy it is to make false diagnoses of autism grew out of experiences with a group of parents of late-talking children that I formed back in 1993. A number of those children were diagnosed as autistic. But the passing years have shown most of the diagnoses to have been false, as most of...

New evidence shows that the brains of adults with autism are "wired" differently from people without the disorder, and this abnormal pattern of connectivity may be responsible for the social impairments that are characteristic of autism. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a team of researchers affiliated with the University of Washington's Autism Center also found that the most severely socially impaired subjects in the study exhibited the most abnormal pattern of connectivity among a network of brain regions involved in face processing. "This study shows that these brain regions are failing to work together efficiently," said Natalia Kleinhans, a research...

PORT ST. LUCIE — Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the class voted him out of the class. Barton said her son is in the process of being diagnosed with Aspberger's, a type of high-functioning autism. Alex began the testing process in February for an official diagnosis under...

PORT ST. LUCIE - Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex -- who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism -- out of the class. Melissa Barton filed a complaint with Morningside's school resource officer, who investigated the matter, Port St....

PORT ST. LUCIE — Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class. Melissa Barton filed a complaint with Morningside's school resource officer, who investigated the matter, Port St....

Many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autism, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, argued the characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were the same as those associated with creative genius. (l-r) George Orwell, Albert Einstein and Thomas Jefferson Prof Fitzgerald cited Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, H G Wells and Ludwig Wittgenstein as examples of famous and brilliant individuals who showed signs of ASDs including Asperger syndrome.Beethoven, Mozart, Hans Christian Andersen and Immanuel Kant have also received post mortem...

A family that moved to Sudbury to put their kids in a “safe” school lost their straight-A son to a knife-slashing teen misfit yesterday in a crime that turned a haven for learning into a scene of numbing horror, officials said. Prosecutors say the death of James F. Alenson, 15, allegedly at the hands of John Odgren, 16, in a bathroom at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School yesterday before the first bell, was a premeditated act by a troubled teen who will be tried as an adult. “They had just moved there in September - they moved there to be in...

THE grandad of university mass killer Cho Seung-Hui said last night: "Son of a bitch. He deserved to die. "It's better not to have such a child in the family." And he dismissed Cho - diagnosed with autism as an eight-year-old - as "a trouble-causer who has destroyed his mother's life". Kim Hyang-Sik, 81, spoke at his home in South Korea after seeing the video Cho made of himself holding a gun to his head. Student Cho, 23, shot dead 32 at Virginia Tech University before killing himself.

Asperger’s syndrome has been used as a defense with some success in cases of violence, experts say, suggesting it may arise when the fatal stabbing of a student at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School eventually goes to court. During an arraignment Friday in the death of 15-year-old James F. Alenson, the attorney for 16-year-old John Odgren said his client has Asperger’s, a mild form of autism that has helped win acquittals for defendants in 22 U.S. criminal cases since 2002, according to the Autism Society of America. The neurological disorder is characterized by average or above-average intelligence but difficulty developing social...

Nikki Bacharach, daughter of songwriter Burt Bacharach and actress Angie Dickinson, committed suicide, Bacharach and Dickinson said in a statement Friday. Nikki Bacharach, 40, suffered from Asperger's Disorder, a form of autism. She killed herself Thursday night at her condo in Thousand Oaks, said Linda Dozoretz, a spokeswoman for the family. "She quietly and peacefully committed suicide to escape the ravages to her brain brought on by Asperger's," the statement said. Nikki Bacharach died of suffocation using a plastic bag and helium, said Mike Feiler of the Ventura County coroner's office. Born prematurely in 1966, Lea Nikki Bacharach studied geology...

We all know the basic alternatives that form the familiar "spectrum" of American politics and culture. If a young person is turned off by religion or attracted by the achievements of science, and he wants to embrace a secular outlook, he is told--by both sides of the debate--that his place is with the collectivists and social subjectivists of the left. On the other hand, if he admires the free market and wants America to have a bold, independent national defense, then he is told--again, by both sides--that his natural home is with the religious right. But what if all of...

  MSNBC.com Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born? Advances in prenatal genetic testing pose tough questionsCOMMENTARY By Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. MSNBC contributor Updated: 12:33 p.m. ET May 31, 2005 Who needs Bill Gates? No, I don’t mean who needs a gazillionaire corporate titan, a man whose company, Microsoft, took in billions of dollars last year by controlling nearly all the software used to run nearly every computer on the planet.No, I mean, literally, who needs him? If you could go back in time and stop the birth of the world’s most famous nerd, would you?You probably answered my...

Probe: Teach couldn't pass N.Y. exam so paid man $2 to take it BY LISA MUÑOZ, JONATHAN LEMIRE and JOE WILLIAMSDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Rubin Leitner, who is developmentally disabled, sits outside his Brooklyn home, saying Bronx teacher Wayne Brightly (below) paid him to take state exam. A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday. The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly - not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better...

In January of 1991, economist Lawrence Summers took a leave from his Harvard professorship and moved to Washington to work for the World Bank. His job was to create economic plans for countries in need of aid. It was a weighty task, but Summers relished the challenge. Using the kind of provocative imagery for which he would become notorious, he once explained that countries without a strong central government and vigorous private sector were like "a cripple . . . with no legs, pushing himself around on a crude board with wheels, surviving only with begging and trying to look...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A graduate student convicted in the $2 million firebombing of scores of sport utility vehicles lost a bid Monday for a new trial. A federal judge rejected the motion by 24-year-old William Jensen Cottrell, the U.S. attorney's office said. Cottrell had claimed the court improperly barred his attorneys from presenting evidence that he suffered from a type of autism that made it difficult for him to understand the intentions of his alleged accomplices. U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner sided with prosecutors, who argued that Cottrell's complaint was "irrelevant to the issues at trial." Cottrell, a...