The summer swimming season in New Jersey is pretty much confined to a few months; while the water is warm now, there’s no lifeguards in the fall. To be amid a lot, a lot of water, nothing like an aquarium; Charlie’s enjoyed a couple of visit to the New Jersey State Aquarium and notices more and more with each visit. Fish Wish is program run by the Georgia Aquarium. Yesterday’s 11alive notes the calming influence of the aquarium on autistic children who’ve visited through the program (though a reference to autistic kids as “being in a world all to themselves” …read more

Paul A. Offit, chief of the infectious diseases division of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, writes this about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the case of Hannah Poling in an op-ed in today’s New York Times:
Now, petitioners need merely propose a biologically plausible mechanism by which a vaccine might cause harm — even if their explanation contradicts published studies [my emphasis].

In determining what causes autism, you would think that scientific evidence would have the final say. Just in the past year, there has been more and more evidence refuting a link between thimerosal and rising autism rates, and more and more studies pointing to a complex web of genetic factors in autism. And yet, again and again, the public’s attention has been drawn to legal decisions in cases involving an autistic child and claims of injury by a vaccine, as in the cases of Michelle Cedillo (whose case was brought before the “vaccine court” in June of 2007) and Hannah …read more

Looks like everyone has to get in their say about the case of Hannah Poling and the government’s recent concession that her underlying mitochondrial disorder was aggravated by receiving nine vaccines and led to “symptoms like autism,” as today’s New York Times puts it in an editorial entitled A Puzzling Autism Case. The NY Times calls for the “court for vaccine compensation [to] unseal documents involved in this unusual case so that experts, families and their doctors can better understand exactly how Hannah Poling, now 9 years old, came to be harmed after receiving a battery of shots when she …read more