Happy 2009!
We’re leaving tonight on the red-eye to go back from the Bay Area to New Jersey so, in the interest of being able to spend more time in the California sunshine with my guys and my parents, and since it is, indeed, 2009, a few more highlights from 2008.
August means one thing in my household—-two weeks at the beach, at the Jersey Shore. Not surprisingly, it was still impossible to avoid talk about vaccines. A new clinical trial of the GFCF diet was announced. While people have strong disagreements about the “right” of parents to vaccinate or not, …read more

If Charlie’d had a younger sibling, would we have decided to participate in studies like this one at the University of Washington, as noted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Autism researchers at the University of Washington are seeking parents who will allow them to do brain scans of their infants.
………….
The UW scientists are looking for 84 six-month-old infants from California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Nevada and Alaska who have an older sibling who has been diagnosed with autism. They also need 34 infants with typically developing older brothers or sisters.
Each child will be scanned three times over two years.
Certainly I would have …read more

I would say I wrote a lot, and probably too much, about Jenny McCarthy in 2008 (and writing less about her, and about the whole vaccine-autism idea, is making its way higher and higher up onto my list of New Year’s resolutions).
Nonetheless, vaccines dominated discussions about autism in March in the wake of announcements about the case of Hannah Poling, whose “pre-existing mitochondrial disorder…. was ‘aggravated’ by her shots” and led to symptoms of autism, as conceded by the U.S. Federal Court of Claims. A lot of debate followed about the Vaccine Court, to the point of general vaccine fixation.
Some …read more

The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) has issued a list of Top 10 Unfounded Health Scares of 2008 and take a wild guess about one item, specifically #8……. it involves autism and a word that starts with a ……………………..v.
Stumped?
Hint: Something involving “greening.”
Hint: Something involving a certain former MTV starlet.
Yeah, it’s something that gets brought up too much in discussions about autism, namely, the hypothesis, unsupported by the scientific evidence, that vaccines can be linked to autism.
Here’s the ACSH’s bottom line:
Not only are childhood vaccines safe, they are necessary to protect both individual children and the larger population from …read more

We do not, as I’ve noted from time to time, have a TV set—a fact which, when I happened to mention it to my students a while back, completely shocked them. “What do you do?” they sputtered. The class was my Elementary Latin class and it was one of those “teachable moments” when I could have launched into a discussion about “how did the Romans spend their free time” and “what about those giadiator fights.” It was the week before exams and we had so much to review and so I let the moment past, and got back to …read more

1049 cases of measles have been reported in England and Wales so far this year, the highest number in 13 years and exceeding the number on 2007, when there were 990 case. Today’s Guardian reports that health officials are seriously concerned about a possible epidemic of measles of between 30,000 – 100,000 cases. Measles has been spreading more easily because of the “relatively low uptake” of the MMR vaccine in the past decade:
The fall in uptake of MMR was triggered by now-discredited research claiming there was a link between the jab and autism.
Health officials in the UK are planning a …read more

Among the books about autism at the public library in our town are this, this, and this—I’ve put in requests for a few other things.
To be very honest, we rarely visit our library. While there’s no lack for books of every sort at our house, Charlie’s not a reader. I was interested to read about a program called Project Inclusion, which is described in the November 26th Wausau Daily Herald (Wisconsin):
Project Inclusion’s overall goal is for the participating libraries to “take a proactive stance to address the literacy needs of children with disabilities and to make libraries meaningful and welcoming …read more

Is the “warrior mother” not—as proclaimed in the Warrior Mothers book put together by Jenny McCarthy—the opposite of the “refrigerator mother” of the previous generation, but rather her “distorted mirror image”? So argues Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, author of another new book, Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion, argues in yesterday’s Spiked. As Fitzpatrick writes in his essay, The ghost of the ‘refrigerator mother’,
The ‘warrior mom’ is yet another reflection of the culture of mother-blaming and a manifestation of the burden of guilt carried by parents as a result of the influence of pseudoscientific speculations about the causes of autism……
…….
A number of …read more

Well, here’s a headline that hasn’t been heard so much of late, it seems:
Immunization rate among children rising (from MSNBC via WTHR TV)
According to a recent CDC survey, 77 percent of children have been fully vaccinated in the schedule of recommended vaccines, while less than 1 percent of children had received no vaccines by age 19 to 35 months. Vaccination rates among children are “at or near record levels, with at least 90 percent coverage for all but one of the individual vaccines in the recommended series for young children.” In Indiana, 94 percent of public schools and 68 percent …read more

There’s plenty to debate about regarding autism and the speech about special needs children that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is to give today in Pittsburgh —-her first about public policy—-should set off more. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she’s to deliver the speech this morning at the morning at the Airport Marriott in Pittsburgh before an invited crowd of 350.

Update 13:00 EST: Here’s the text of Palin’s speech.Palin talks about “these beautiful children” and these are her three policy proposals: more choices for parents, fully funding IDEA, and efforts to reform and refocus. I just heard about some budget …read more