Owner and operator Lisa Witte, 29 and diagnosed at age 2 with autism, has cut a place for herself in the world at Lisa’s Quality Rags, based in Wyoming, Mich. Witte can’t read, write or talk beyond saying, “Hi, I’m Lisa,” and sometimes parroting what others say (sounds like Alex), but she’s turned a decade and a half of training by Goodwill Industries into a profitable business. She began by taking clothes out of boxes and putting them on hangers, but her aide soon saw she could do a lot more, becoming by last summer a veteran rag cutter, producing half …read more

From MSNBC: “NBC News’ Matt Lauer will take an unprecedented look at the emotional debate surrounding vaccines and the suggested link to autism today, August 30, 7 p.m. Eastern with “Dose of Controversy.” In the one-hour Dateline, Lauer speaks with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 medical study was the first in the world to suggest a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism.”
 
Here are some questions and points to bear in mind during Matt Lauer’s “Dateline” show concerning autism, vaccines, and the possible connection:
General Electric owns NBC.  Does General Electric own or have a financial interest in any company that …read more

Let’s say there IS a massive conspiracy and coverup. Big Pharma knowingly produces vaccines manufactured with a substance (thimerisol) that causes neurologic or immunologic damage (no one’s completely sure of the mechanism) to some children, who then become autistic.
Doctors are complicit in this malpractice: they prescribe and administer vaccines. And nurses ask you to hold the baby while they administer a shot they know could result in a devastating developmental condition.
There are people who believe this. But I’m not one of them.
You’re not going to meet many people who actively dislike and distrust doctors as much as I do.  Jeff …read more

So says Ellen Raphael, UK director of Sense About Science, regarding the “bad science tips” made by various celebrities and public figures (from Tom Cruise on psychiatry to, yes, President-Elect Barack Obama on vaccines and autism).
Here’s hoping that they’ll all take a New Year’s resolution to do a little fact-checking, or at least web-surfing, before offering those tips in 2009.

That’s how autism is referred to in a  story in yesterday’s Philadelphia Examiner about “assembling your medical team” including osteopathic physicians. There’s mention of finding “relief from autism” via homeopathic methods, and autism is discussed as if it were a disease like cancer—which autism is indeed not.
And no, after 11-plus years raising my autistic son, no way do I feel that it’s been some “horror” I wish to run away from, or that I ever need “relief from autism.” Sure I do (as one new story today puts it) “worry about everything,” but, really, it’s all better with Charlie.

Translating Autism, a blog about autism research by Nestor L. Lopez-Duran, Ph.D., has posted a summary of a recently published study about heavy metal toxicity and detoxification capacity in autism. The study is published in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences, and is based on the notion that autistic children have a diminished ability to remove toxins—such as mercury—-from their bodies. In an effort to prove this theory, the researchers looked at urinary porphyrins as a measure of mercury exposure; specifically, they examined “urinary porphyrin metabolites (a proposed measure of heavy metal toxicity) and plasma sulfates (a proposed measure of …read more

As reported today by ABC15-Scripps Howard News Service : More than 135,000 kindergarten students nationwide are attending school without being vaccinated for potentially deadly diseases like measles, mumps and rubella.

In a review of the recently published book, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, Rahul Parikh, a physician who writes the sWell blog for Salon, starts by noting that the hate mail and, indeed, death threats, the book’s author, Dr. Paul Offit, has received are reminiscent of “pro-choice physicians on the front lines of the abortion debate.” Dr. Parikh—-who has also written about …read more

Raw chocolate, that is, as someone on Craigslist suggests as an autism treatment; someone else, the mother of two adopted autistic children, writes about a specific product on an autism board. Why raw chocolate? This site lists a few “health benefits”; apparently raw chocolate is an antioxidant and has an ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) superior to that of prunes, blueberries, strawberries and spinach. I know “the other Orac” (over at Respectful Insolence) has had his hands full fending off anti-vaccine woo-mongers and putting the Post-Modernists in their place, but Orac on ORAC: That could be worth a …read more

Sometimes I think this blog is in danger of becoming a vaccine blog, as vaccines are so frequently a topic here. There’s what some refer to as their right to vaccinate or not. There’ve been recent outbreaks of measles and mumps, with many cases among unvaccinated persons. There’s the fear that vaccines or something in vaccines might be connected to autism.
Indeed, it’s “fear of autism” that is the reason for the continued talk about vaccines and autism. Anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine-safety advocates say that they want to “change the schedule” and to “make vaccines safer” to ensure that future generations of children do …read more

Now that it is the first of June, my son is down to his last two weeks of being at the school he’s been at for the past two years. He starts Extended School Year in the middle of June; it’ll be at the middle school and with the teacher who’ll be Charlie’s teacher in the fall. Moving up and on.
Here’s what got talked about here last week:

Neurodiversity in New York Magazine
New York Magazine has a long article by writer Andrew Solomon about, indeed, neurodiversity, the view that autism is not an illness, but a difference and a different …read more