SCHAFER AUTISM REPORT "Healing Autism:

No Finer a Cause on the Planet"

Autism Resource: News Archive – Autism Database

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TREATMENT

* New Sacramento Center Pushes Hyperbaric Treatment for Autism, Other Neurological Maladies

RESEARCH

* The Causes Of Autism Spectrum Disorders

PUBLIC HEALTH

* CDC's 2nd National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals

* Pediarix 5-in-1 Vaccine Receives Approval From FDA

* Groups Challenge Mandatory Immunizations On Constitutional Grounds

EDUCATION

* Educators Intent on Transforming Egypt

CARE

* Study Finds Kids' Risk Higher In Single-Parent Home

COMMENTARY

* Illicit Drug Use as a Cause of Autism

LETTER

* How the War in Iraq Will Affect My Family's Life

READERS' POSTS

TREATMENT

New Sacramento Center Pushes Hyperbaric Treatment for Autism, Other Maladies

[By Kathy Robertson for the Sacramento Business Journal, week of January 27, 2003. Not available online. Thanks to Bruce Kaminski.]

Seven-year-old Rebecca Nemeth has cerebral palsy, her muscles coordination impaired by 35 minutes without oxygen at birth. Her father, Ed, says doses of 100 percent oxygen at high pressure have improved her movements and ability to live and act normally.

To spread the word – and make an experimental treatment called "hyperbaric oxygen therapy" more accessible to people with neurological disorders, such as cerebral palsy and autism – Ed Nemeth co-founded a company here last year to establish a network of clinics across the nation, including one due to open in Sacramento in mid-April.

Nemeth got an $890,000 Small Business Administration loan from Western Sierra Bank to buy, fix up and equip a 42,000-square-foot building at l93~ Stockton Blvd. for the new center. “He's put his heart and soul— and his pocketbook into this," said Eileen Gormnan-Grebitus, a business development manager at Western Sierra who handled Nemeth's loan.

The Harch Hyperbaric Medicine and Neuro-rehabilitation Center, located under Highway 50 near the UC Davis Medical Center and Shriner's hospital for Children, will be available to anyone willing to pay the fee, probably about $17S per treatment. It takes about an hour.

Nemeth hopes he can convince local doctors that the treatment works for patients with severe brain damage and autism, and win support for medical coverage of costs for the treatment.

There are still questions about high-pressure oxygen therapy for neurological disorders, but interest is growing.

"Hyperbaric treatments have not been researched well enough so far," said Dr. Robert Hendren, executive director of the MIND Institute at UC Davis, which treats patients with palsy and autism. While the institute will be happy to tell parents that the new center is available, help design a research project and share details, “we’re not endorsing their program," he said.

The only other center in the region is located at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael. It's used primarily to treat chronic wounds, said Dr. Richard Stack, medical director for hyperbaric oxygen treatment and wound care at the hospital. Demand is up for use of hyperbaric treatment to promote healing after radiation therapy for cancer, he said.

The average charge for treatment at Mercy San Juan is about $700 for a 90-minute treatment although that’s not always what the hospital collects on the care. There may be other charges, too, for dressings, lab work amid other things, said hospital spokesman Bryan Gardner.

High-dose oxygen: Patients undergoing hyperbaric oxygen therapy breathe 100 percent oxygen in a couch-sized chamber where atmospheric pressure is increased and controlled. Because Earth’s atmosphere is only about 21 percent oxygen, the treatment raises the oxygen level in the patient’s bloodstream many times above normal, which helps control infections and promote healing.

The treatment is not new. It’s been around for 40 or 50 years — about 600 U.S. centers exist — and is most commonly used for wound care, diving-related illnesses and to treat smoke inhalation. Some medical experts think it cam help patients with severe brain injury, too.

Cerebral palsy is caused by a lack of oxygen before, during or after birth. Brain cells that don’t get oxygen die or become dormant. Swelling from the brain injury has a ‘cascade effect’ that dilutes the oxygen and glucose around the cells that surround the area. They shut down, too.

Hyperbaric treatment bathes the area in oxygen — and can cause some of these cells to ‘wake up” again. Nemeth said.

He thinks this happened to Rebecca.

A breakthrough glass of orange juice: Nemeth - president of Spectrum Events in Sacramento, with an MBA and a background in neurobiology — started looking for answers alter Rebecca was born in September 1995. Physical therapy helped, but she had a basic problem with head control from lack of tone at the base of her spine.

Nemeth discovered research that pointed to improvements from hyperbaric oxygen treatment, found an expert on the treatment in Florida, and started Rebecca on the therapy. Rebecca couldn’t swallow liquid without choking, so Nemeth added, a substance to her drinks to thicken them. One day, within the first six sessions of the new treatment, Nemeth discovered he was out of the stuff. It was a hot day — and Rebecca was thirsty. She downed a glass of orange juice.

"This made me an absolute fanatic,” Nemeth said. "My goal is to get the treatment available — and paid for — for patients with cerebral palsy, autism and brain injuries."

Although hyperbaric treatment has been approved by Medicare for wound care and some other illnesses, it is still considered experimental for brain injury; existing law does not require health plans to cover it for this purpose.

A bill backed by Nemeth and others last year would have required Medi-Cal, California’s government healthcare program for the poor, to cover the therapy for acute or chronic brain conditions.

Along with a slew of other bills, AB 2763 by Republican Assemblyman Anthony Pescetti from Sacramento was sidelined for additional study by a cost commission established to consider health plan mandates.

Spreading the word: But Nemeth is on a mission.

Nemeth, an events guy, underwrote an international symposium on the therapy in Boca Raton, Fla., in mid-2001. While recruiting speakers, he met Dr. Paul Harch, a physician in New Orleans who pioneered the use of hyperbaric treatment for children with cerebral palsy in North America.

They paired up to form a for-profit company that focuses on treatment, and the nonprofit March Institute for Hyperbaric Medicine and Neuro-rehabilitation.

The goal of the latter is to seek funding of more than $2 million for research, education and training on the use of hyperbaric treatment and some care subsidies.

There’s a hyperbaric center in Macrero, La., across the river from uptown New Orleans and home to Harch’s original medical practice and Nemeth purchased an existing center in Santa Monica in September.

The Sacramento center will be the inaugural center of the new network, to be followed by centers in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Hugo, Okla., by year-end.

The idea is to get local doctors with a special interest in neuro-rehabilitation to set up their medical practices in the building and provide medical support. Nemeth says he has tapped Dr. Geoffrey Woo-Ming in Sacramento. Efforts to reach the doctor were unsuccessful.

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RESEARCH

The Causes Of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Multiple factors have been identified, but a unifying cascade of events is still elusive

Autism is a developmental disability with onset in infancy. Its clinical presentation is characterised by impairments in reciprocal social interaction and in communication with others, and by a preference for repetitive, stereotyped behaviours. Our understanding of the clinical picture of autism has changed dramatically over the past decade thanks to a much greater appreciation of the possible range of behaviours seen at different ages and degrees of functioning.

Another key change has been the appreciation that several closely related "disorders" exist that share these same essential features but differ on specific symptoms, age of onset, or natural history. These disorders, which include Asperger syndrome, atypical autism, and disintegrative disorder are often conceptualised as lying on a spectrum with autism (hence the popularity of the term "autism spectrum disorders"). Current estimates of the prevalence of autism are 16 per 10 000, but this estimated prevalence increases to 63 per 10 000 when all forms of autism spectrum disorders are included1 much higher than previously reported.

Along with these changes in taxonomy has been a greater understanding of the causes of autism, although, admittedly, the picture of the cascade of structural and biochemical events that culminate in the disorder is still not clear. Surely, however, we are much further ahead today than we were some years ago when blame was squarely placed on the shoulders of mothers who, it was claimed, were cold and indifferent to their infants. The distress caused by these claims is a painful reminder of the need for evidence based information on causation for all parents who have children with developmental or psychiatric disorders.

Developmental delay, epilepsy, dysmorphic features, obstetric complications, an unequal sex ratio, and extremes of head size represent non-specific signs that autism is a neuropsychiatric disorder. Perhaps the most important advance in changing our understanding of the cause of autism was the discovery that genetic factors have a key role. In 1977, Folstein and Rutter published the first twin study in autism and showed that the concordance rate in identical twins was very much higher than in non-identical twins.3 This finding has now been replicated several times and is well established.4 But the genetics of the disorder must be complex, as the mode of transmission does not follow any recognisable pattern. Modelling studies have shown that multiple genes in interaction probably account for the genetic complexity underlying the disorder. These data do not exclude an environmental risk factor as well; as long as it is understood that "environmental" in this context can include any event after fertilisation.

The only environmental factors for which we have preliminary evidence of such causation are thalidomide induced embryopathyw3 and anti-convulsants taken during pregnancy.w4 In spite of recent publicity, there is good epidemiological evidence that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is not an environmental risk factor for autism.6 The strong genetic effects observed in family and twin studies have encouraged investigators to conduct linkage and association studies that attempt to identify actual susceptibility genes. Although several promising findings are based on candidate gene studies (particularly in the region 15q11-13w5 w6), these have yet to be replicated consistently. Several genome-wide linkage studies have found that regions on chromosomes 2, 7, and 13 may contain one or more susceptibility genes but actual susceptibility genes have not yet been identified.7 w7 Further progress may depend on collecting very large sample sizes. Another helpful approach is to identify more immediate biological effects of these putative susceptibility genes.

Postmortem examinations and studies using magnetic resonance imaging have found larger volumes of white matter in general and subtle structural changes in cell density and alignment, particularly in the limbic system.w8 8 Functional imaging studies have also reported atypical activation of the amygdala and surrounding structures in response to social stimuli.w9 9 A minority of children with autism have a comorbid disorder of the central nervous system that presumably "causes" the disorder. In total, these comorbid conditions probably account for only 10-15% of cases,10 but they should be kept in mind as their diagnosis will have clinical implications. In terms of comorbid medical disorders, good evidence now exists that disturbances of the gastrointestinal system are not more common in children with autism than in the general population of children.

No causative factors have been found to differentiate children with autism from children with other disorders on the spectrum such as Asperger syndrome. Good evidence exists that these related conditions arise from a common familial, presumably, genetic mechanism. It is gratifying to see that research into the causes of autism has helped to temper the guilt so often experienced by parents when the disorder was considered to be psychogenic in origin.

However, the difficulty of conducting sound studies of causation has now led some healthcare practitioners to encourage parents to act on very poor quality data and vigorously pursue hypothetical causes. It is generally anticipated, however, that with newer technologies and study designs, the risk factors initiating the causal chain that culminates in this profoundly disabling disorder will soon be identified. The great hope is that from this understanding, more definitive treatments can be developed to improve long term outcomes for all children with autism spectrum disorders.

Peter Szatmari, professor. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8N 3Z5

(szatmar@mcmaster.ca) Competing interests: None declared Footnote are

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PUBLIC HEALTH

CDC's Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals The Report will go "live" at 10:30 a.m. EST on January 31.

The CDC will release its Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, on Friday, January 31, 2003.

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Pediarix 5-in-1 Vaccine Receives Approval From FDA

This three-dose series of shots can reduce the number of immunizations by six.

The first five-in-one vaccine to be approved offers advantages for infants, pediatricians, and public health, pediatric infectious disease experts agree.

Pediarix—DTaP, hepatitis B vaccine (recombinant), and inactivated poliovirus vaccine—is recommended for administration via intramuscular injection as a three-dose primary series to infants at approximately 2, 4, and 6 months of age. This could mean elimination of six injections in the same time frame to get the equivalent disease protection, according to a statement by manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.

“The biggest advantage of this new vaccine is fewer injections for kids,” commented Dr. Michael E. Pichichero, who conducted a GlaxoSmithKline–sponsored study of the vaccine that will be available to pediatricians in January.

Fewer shots will come as a relief to some parents as well, said Dr. Carol J. Baker, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Red Book committee who has no affiliation with GlaxoSmithKline and has not performed studies on Pediarix.

“There are parents who object to the number of shots that are given to their child,” she said. For this group of families, a reduction in the number of shots will be welcome.

Although use of a five-in-one vaccine may mean lower reimbursement because fewer shots are given, “pediatricians don't make money on vaccines. They are interested in being reimbursed fairly,” said Dr. Baker of Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, said in an interview.

Dr. Pichichero, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases in Rochester, N.Y., noted that fewer vaccines to administer would help pediatricians and nurses keep better vaccination records. From a public health perspective, fewer vaccines in the schedule of childhood vaccinations make room for new vaccines that are on the horizon.

+ Article continues:

Copyright © 2003 by International Medical News Group.

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Health Groups Challenge Mandatory Immunizations On Constitutional Grounds Due process lacking for potentially lethal injections, they point out

[From an organizational press announcement. Thanks to Jo of SC and April of the Autism Autoimmunity Project. -LS]

As the nation contemplates the prospect of an extensive program of inoculation against the hypothetical threat of smallpox being disseminated by terrorists, two health groups are launching a challenge to the very constitutionality of subjecting infants and children to mandatory vaccinations for a variety of diseases.

The joint effort by the Washington, D. C.-based non-profit consumer groups Foundation for Health Choice and Citizens for Health is based on the fact that such “preventive measures” can be expected to kill a certain number of children and substantially harm others.

The two health organizations have already begun to utilize this approach in a “friend of the court” brief filed in a case now in federal court, citing both a recent opinion by a U.S. district court judge that federal capital punishment law is unconstitutional based on findings that some people facing execution were actually innocent and the argument used by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in reversing that ruling.

In overturning the lower court decision, the appeals court affirmed the need for due process in the taking of a life by government but, contrary to the district court’s opinion, held that a criminal trial provides all necessary due process to support the death penalty. It is the citizens groups’ contention that children deserve at least as much due process as a convicted killer before being subjected to a possible lethal injection. This is the first time such an argument against mandatory immunization has been raised in the courts.

“The lives that are lost by this program are lost without even a pretense of due process,” noted James S. Turner, a lawyer, consumer advocate and spokesman for the groups, who pointed out that those for whom vaccination may prove to be a lethal injection aren’t even granted the legal recourse open to defendants facing the death penalty.

The groups have offered to similarly intervene in any court case in which parents find themselves in the position of having to assert their right not to have their children administered immunizations ordered by state or local authorities.

Such inoculations are a routine requirement for attending school, but without any procedures currently in place for parental participation in determining the need for shots or the adverse effects they might have on certain children.

In a joint statement, the two organizations contend that “the body of law justifying mandatory vaccine programs contains limitations on the state power to force vaccination.”

Prior rulings, they contend, have required that such programs be based on “a demonstrable emergency” (e.g., a threatened or actual epidemic), include a medical opt-out for vaccine-endangered individuals, and recognize conscientious objecting.

The groups call for “interested families” to be involved in a procedure for determining who is likely to be harmed by each vaccine, and “a way of prioritizing which of the nearly 20 vaccines currently administered to each child and at what age … will most protect the community at the least health cost.”

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EDUCATION

Educators Intent on Transforming Egypt

Cairo, Egypt (AP) - A Cairo-based agency that serves the disabled is agitating to transform Egypt - one classroom at a time.

SETI began working toward that goal four years ago, when it first persuaded public schools in Egypt to enroll youngsters with Down's syndrome, autism and other disabilities.

The numbers, so far, are small. This year, 64 disabled children are enrolled in six Egyptian public schools, no more than one or two to a class in a country where primary school classes of 50 or more aren't unusual and where the education needs of an estimated 900,000 disabled children aren't being met.

The goal is enormous: not just educating the neglected, but destroying stereotypes in a country where the disabled often are shunned as cursed or crazy, even contagious.

"Children are easier to accept than adults. To learn to accept people with differences, we have to start with children. In the long run, society will be a different society," said Samia Sami Aziz, head of training at SETI.

The group's name - Support Education Training for Integration - forms the name of the ancient pharaoh Seti, whose reign is remembered as a time of renaissance in Egyptian culture.

Mohammed Abdrabou's family feels SETI offered a renewal just in time for the 10-year-old, who suffered from mild autism. He had been fine in kindergarten in a private school, but his behavioral and development problems made advancement to first grade appear impossible, his adult sister Reda Abdrabou said.

He started first grade as one of the first disabled children to be enrolled in a public school under the SETI program.

"He would have been kept at home if it wasn't for this project," said Reda Abdrabou, who helps her aging parents care for Mohammed.

Reda Abdrabou says that because he is interacting with children of all abilities at school, her once withdrawn little brother has developed self-confidence and social ease - and often surprises teachers with how well he keeps up academically. She once feared leaving him alone with her own young children, but now lets him walk them to school or take them to the corner store to buy treats.

"Now I feel like he's a regular child," Reda Abdrabou said.

Like many a 10-year-old, Mohammed says he wants to grow up to be a detective and "catch thieves."

"We're thinking about going on with his education as much as possible," his sister said. "We have faith in God and we believe everything will be OK with him."

SETI started the project alone but now has financial and curriculum support from Save the Children. British-based Save the Children introduced the idea in places as disparate as Laos in Asia and Lesotho in Africa before coming to the Mideast - and finding SETI was already pioneering it in this region. With 67 million people, Egypt is the most populous Arab nation and wields great cultural and political influence in the Middle East.

Egypt's streets have no curb cuts for wheelchairs, its street lights don't chirp to alert the blind when it's safe to cross the street. The lack of accommodation for the disabled in public space reflects ideas about them in the public's imagination - instead of being expected to fully participate in society, they often are hidden at home.

"When they are seen, they're seen as beggars, not financially or psychologically independent," said Saadiya Nielson, an advocate for the rights of the disabled who has observed SETI's project in Egypt.

The Morocco-born Nielson, who is crippled by polio, makes her base in Britain. So she speaks with the authority of experience when she adds it was only a generation or so ago that Westerners gave up ideas about the disabled still prevalent in the Middle East, and that prejudices linger in the United States and Europe.

Mariam Saleh, who teaches math and Arabic to 7- and 8-year-olds, was hesitant when SETI's program came to her Cairo public primary school two years ago. A few years earlier, she had taught at a private school where the one disabled student was the school's clown. "They thought he was of no use," Saleh recalled. Saleh decided to volunteer only after visiting SETI, where trainers assured her no child was worthless and that they would give her the tools - including regular consultations with a disability specialist - to be an effective teacher for everyone in her class.

The first year, Saleh said, she stopped a mentally retarded boy in her class from making faces to amuse the other kids.

"I wanted to teach him he shouldn't be funny, he shouldn't be laughed at," she said.

The disabled encounter not only ridicule, but fear, said SETI's Aziz, who also teaches child psychiatry at Cairo's Ain Shams University.

Many Egyptians think the disabled "are lunatics, they think they are going to catch the disease," she said. "They know nothing of what a handicap is about. They have to find out. They can't just be told."

SETI didn't have social engineering in mind when it began operating in 1986. It largely focused on training teachers to work with the mentally disabled and providing child-rearing tips and other support for parents.

In 1997, at an educators conference in Paris, SETI director Naguib Khouzam first encountered the theory known as inclusion, which advocated bringing disabled children out of special schools in the West and into mainstream schools. That planted the seed for SETI's program.

In the West, educators argue over whether special or mainstream schools were best for disabled children. In Egypt, thousands of disabled children aren't in school at all.

Figures are difficult to pin down. SETI estimates Egypt has 1.5 million people of all ages with a mental disability of some kind and only 1 percent to 2 percent have access to any educational, recreational or rehabilitative program.

Save the Children estimates schools for the blind and deaf and other special schools in Egypt accommodate about 26,000 children, but at least 900,000 others are in need.

Saleh, the math and Arabic teacher, says advice as simple as collecting and cleaning ice cream bar sticks for children to use as counting tools has made her a better teacher not just for new disabled children, but for all her pupils. The youngsters aren't the only ones who've gained confidence.

She and other teachers who helped pioneer the program "have learned patience and we are ready" to accept more disabled students, Saleh said. "We have had the experience and any difficulties we met seem easier now."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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CARE

Study Finds Kids' Risk Higher In Single-Parent Home

Children who grow up in single-parent homes may be more vulnerable to mental and drug-related problems than those who live with both parents, a Swedish study released Thursday suggests.

The large study, of nearly 1 million children and teens, found that those who lived with only one parent had higher risks of psychiatric illness, substance abuse and suicide attempts.

However, researchers point out that despite the higher risk they found among these kids, severe problems were still relatively rare.

Of the more than 65,000 children from single-parent homes they studied over nine years, the vast majority did not develop mental illness or have drug and alcohol problems. For example, fewer than 800 were considered to have an alcohol-related disorder by the end of the follow-up, while fewer than 600 had developed a drug problem.

The findings are published in the January 25th issue of The Lancet. Gunilla Ringback Weitoft of the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare in Stockholm led the study.

Weitoft and her colleagues believe that the economic hard-times that often hit single-earner families may account for much of the effect they found on children's well-being.

They also attribute a "very small" role to the higher rate of addiction and mental illness they found among single parents themselves.

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COMMENTARY

Illicit Drug Use as a Cause of Autism

By Lenny Schafer

Editor

"My heart breaks for autistic children. But I still ask the question 'How many parents used illicit drugs prior or during conception?'" writes in one reader, "Nobody has answered this question yet."

This subject has come up before; both in email to this publication and on one or two autism discussion lists. I am not aware of any formal studies, so I asked Dr. Bernard Rimland of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego for his comments. He said that if this were a significant factor, it would have been picked up and reported by now by any of the astute

clinicians who have autism concentrated practices. Besides, vaccines

appear to have a greater corollary relationship to autism and its rapid growth in prevalence. Also vaccines given in combination with one another have not been well tested. In many cases, vaccine reactions aren’t tested for beyond six weeks.

This seems a plausible explanation for giving more attention there. But I gave it more thought and came up with this as well: Except for the legal, and more-likely the moral implications, there is little difference between the potential toxic effects of say, marijuana and many of those untested, but very potent plant-based legal supplements on the market. Of course, just because a substance doesn’t alter ones mood to induce licentious behavior, doesn’t necessarily make it safe. Also when looking around for causal candidates, one can suspect commercial tobacco found in cigarettes, which are laced with known toxins used as additives, including formaldehyde.

In sufficient quantities, alcoholic beverages are known causes of birth defects and cancer. There is an epidemic of abortions, says one theory, a direct surgical assault on the human reproduction system while in a high state of hormonal flux, which some argue has a temporal relationship to the autism epidemic. This would apply to mothers who carry later pregnancies to term. There is plenty to conjecture, but little science to maintain a grasp.

Looking at the matter from another direction, the purported autism hotspots of Brick Township, N.J. or Granite Bay, CA are not exactly known for their pot parties. But then again, 'brick' and 'granite' are the stuff of stone. . .hmmmm. Seriously, places like Holland and Spain, which have more liberalized drug use laws, don't stand out as an autism hot-spot.

It would seem to me that the other suspects, plus some unmentioned, are equally qualified candidates for causal investigation. An elevated focus on illicit drug use carries with it a moral agenda: you inhaled, ingested or sniffed your sins; you pay for the results of it. It lays the groundwork for once again blaming parents for their children’s autism, making it that much easier for the medical profession, the government and even our neighbors to turn their backs on autism as they did during the blame “refrigerator mom” decades. However, I believe it is possible to undertake a methodical, non-hidden agenda laden, look into all of these possibilities until we eventually nail the trigger or triggers. This will take the raising of money for the biomedical and clinical research, now mostly being siphoned away by those myopically focused on genetic research, in tacit defense of vaccines.

[The opinions expressed in these commentaries belong to author and not necessarily the Schafer Autism Report and its volunteers. We welcome a diversity of opinions. If you have one to share on this or other matters related to autism, email if for submission to edit@doitnow.com]

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LETTER

Dana Wisdom's Letter to ABC.com

How the War in Iraq Will Affect My Family's Life

While the Bush administration diverts attention to this war, he is ignoring an epidemic of autism.

In fact, when Congressman Dan Burton called on him to hold autism hearings and parents of children all over the country faxed and e-mailed pleas to find out why autism is increasing at such a dramatic rate, the President sent letters to some saying that he was "too busy".

His "No Child Left Behind" initiative should be re-named "No Child Left Behind Unless they have Autism". Special Education funding is not keeping up with the Nations children that have neurological disorders.

Last year while the Nation was so shaken with September 11, we then had the terrible Anthrax mailings. But something as serious was happening all over America. Children that seemed to be developing normally began to lose skills they already had. It was as if someone had come in the night and replaced your child with an empty shell. It reminded me of the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Then, nobody believes you when you question your child’s development. My own child's Pediatrician was very dismissive and basically treated me like a Mom that was on the verge of hysteria and over-reacting to normal "boy" development. It did not make any difference that I already had an older son that was doing o.k. To get a diagnoses you must battle to even be given the chance.

The rate in California is now 10 children per day, everyday diagnosed with level 1 autism, the most severe. That does not include those with milder forms of autism. If this rate continues and these children do not receive the services they need, the result will be billions of dollars needed to institutionalize them.

+ Letter continues at:

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READERS' POSTS

Trying to get adapted P.E. for my severely autistic first grader. District claims this is just for wheelchair kids. Does anyone have ed codes or precedents or something that can help get APE for this child? aprilshowerz@sbcglobal.net

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Anyone have information on services for an autistic child in the Tampa, Florida area? Considering a move to Brandon from Colorado. Linda Hill lindah@gjct.net

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My autistic boy he is 5 year old and he is on Therapies. We need orientation on several points about Autism, we also want to know if we can do something legal about his MMR and DTP vacination. Since he was one year old he started regressing and I suspect one of those vacinations, also we want to know if there is any good medication for bad behavior and ADD. He is not focusing in class. Jose Perez rherbruger@cs.com

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Need info on reatining daugther and also advocates in West Virginia. We live in Hampshire County, WV. Please reply to laura52@frontiernet.net

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After reading the very interesting article about The Third Largest Autism Research Center Opening in Indiana my husband said we would like to go and see the center. Then the question arose, "Where are the two larger centers located and what are their names?" Christine Hank ersella@msn.com

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Utah will give you 100% of your state income tax back if you have a child w/autism-in fact, didn't know about form but the Spec Ed Dept sent it home in Alex's backpack. Don't know form number, though. Please advise parents in UT that it is there.

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