FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER
Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
January 5, 2002
News Morgue Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp
·
Autism Figures Soar in America
·
Measles Outbreak Fears Spread in Parts of England
·
Arrested Teen Says He Sent Daschle Anthrax Letters, Boy
Autistic: Dad
·
Writer Emerges From Martian Past
Autism Figures Soar in America
Increase blamed on vaccination programme
Pressure grows for British register of autistic children
[The Sunday Herald, UK. Thanks to Ray Gallup.]
http://www.sundayherald.com/21347
The number of children diagnosed with autism in America is
continuing to increase at a rate of more than 20% a year, according to the
latest figures published by the US Department of Health.
The figures show that in the year 1999/2000 the number of schoolchildren
in America with autism was 65,396 compared with 53,576 the previous year.
Figures have risen steeply since the reporting of autism
became mandatory in American schools in 1991. At first the increase was
attributed to better reporting of the condition but after nine years some
experts argue that the consistent rise must demonstrate an actual rise in
autism rates.
The availability of the figures, published has prompted
calls from campaigners in Scotland for a national autism register in this
country. There is no national register
in the UK detailing the number of children affected with the condition. Parents
argue that this makes it difficult to provide adequate services and monitor
increases.
It is estimated that up to one in 175 primary school
children are autistic.
Bill Welsh, chairman of Action Against Autism, said: ‘The
USA statistics are incontrovertible proof of the autism epidemic which is sweeping
the Western world. An epidemic which the health authorities are shamefully
trying to cover up.
‘A request to the Scottish Executive, made almost two
years ago, to establish a register, by year of birth, of autistics, would have
confirmed that this tragic condition had gone from rare to common since 1990.’
Dr Ed Yazbak, a retired American paediatrician, insists
that the increase is real and argues that this can only be attributed to environmental
factors. He says vaccination may not be the only cause but is convinced that it
plays a part.
He said: ‘These statistics tell us, not only that there
has been a huge increase in autism rates in the last 20 years, but also that
this increase is not stopping.’
He also argues that the increase cannot just be the result
of better diagnosis because the same diagnostic techniques have been used since
1994.
‘The criteria for diagnosing children has not changed and
the people giving the diagnosis have not changed therefore this must be an
increase in numbers and this must be due to environmental factors. We may find
that this is being caused by something other than vaccination but it is
certainly not genetic because this happens in the second year of life.’
The US has an extensive vaccination programme, with babies
given their first vaccine against Hepatitis B in the first two days of life and
another two doses before they are 18 months old. Children also have five doses
of diphtheria and tetanus, two doses of MMR, four of the Hib, (for meningitis),
one of chickenpox, four of the polio vaccine and now four doses of a vaccine to
prevent ear infections before they go to school.
‘There are definitely too many vaccines,’ said Yazbak. ‘I
don’t think it is just vaccines but it is pretty crazy to give vaccines on the
first day of life when the child doesn’t need.’
Raymond Gallup, president of the Autism Auto-immunity
Project, a US campaign group, said: ‘I attribute this increase to
over-vaccination. There is no doubt about it and MMR is the most problematic
one. Children are definitely getting too many vaccines too early in life.’
Last week the Scottish Executive announced that children
are to receive a booster shot of whooping cough vaccine in the year before they
start school. On Monday the whooping cough vaccine will be added to the combined
diphtheria and tetanus booster given to children in their pre-school year.
But Professor David Goldberg, deputy director, the
Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health, believes the increase
is due to better recording and diagnosis of autism.
He said: ‘The increases are likely to be due to greatly
improved case ascertainment.’
Massachusetts is known to have had the best health, social
and educational provision for autism, of any state in the USA; it has
recognised autism for longer than any other state and therefore its figures are
likely to be most reliable. Interestingly, the increase in the number of
recorded cases in Massachusetts was only 10%.
* * *
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1742000/1742177.stm
Doctors fear that measles could sweep towns in north-west
England as parents turn away from the controversial MMR vaccine. North Cheshire Health Authority (NCHA) says
that coverage with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in Widnes, Runcorn
and Hale has dropped to only 77%.
This is well below the national average - and about the
same level as in Dublin last year when there was a serious measles outbreak.
Public health experts say that anything below 80% over a
prolonged period means there is the opportunity for a measles outbreaks to get
a foothold in the community as more and more children go unvaccinated.
Measles, in very rare cases, can prove fatal.
Some parents have been reluctant to have their babies
immunised due to
concerns the vaccine may be linked to autism and bowel
disorders, despite a lack of any reliable evidence of this.
Prime minister Tony Blair recently refused to bow to
political and media pressure to say whether his youngest son Leo had been given
the triple Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccination.
Nationally, the NHS aims to maintain a rate of 95% of
children covered by the MMR vaccine.
North Cheshire Health Authority fears the rate will drop
further still unless swift action is taken.
It has responded by spearheading a huge publicity
campaign.
NCHA’s consultant in communicable disease control Dr
Bernard Schlecht said: “There is a very real chance of children catching this
killer disease this winter if they are not protected with the MMR vaccine.
“Recent media stories have been confusing and caused
unnecessary alarm.
“The simple truth is that MMR is extremely safe, safe
enough to be used in every country in the world, except Japan.
“I had no hesitation in having my own child vaccinated and
I urge all parents to do the same.”
After just two doses of the MMR vaccine, 99% of children
are fully protected against all three diseases.
The national uptake of the vaccine is currently is 84.6%,
which is down from a peak of 92% in 1995.
Measles causes death in up to one in 2,500 cases.
It is also associated with meningitis and encephalitis
- inflammation
of the brain.
Warnings about the potential for measles outbreaks have
already been issued in parts of London where the MMR coverage rate has dropped
to similar levels.
Two years ago, an outbreak in Dublin claimed the lives of
two children and left hundreds more hospitalised [Other sources add that the
children were malnourished and already ill. –LS]
Mumps complications include inflammation of the pancreas
and damage to the nervous system.
In pregnant women, rubella has a 90% chance of damaging
the foetus and babies can be born blind, deaf, with heart problems or brain
damage.
* * *
[Thanks to Michael Thorpe.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2435-2002Jan5.html
Brentwood N.H. (AP) - A teenager who told police he sent
an anthrax-laced letter to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is a compulsive
liar who has been treated in a state psychiatric hospital, his father said
Saturday.
Elijah Wallace, 18, made the claim when he was arrested
for breaking into a vacant home Friday. Police found him hiding in a closet
with a gun and two knives. Investigators also found five letters addressed to
local businesses and a bag of white powder in the house with Wallace.
Preliminary tests on one of five letters found with the
teen was negative for anthrax.
Wallace told police he was preparing to send anthrax-laced
letters and had already had sent four others, including one mailed last week to
Daschle, Fremont Police Chief Neal Janvrin said.
But officials said they do not believe Wallace sent the
Daschle letter because, with heightened security measures, it would have taken
up to three weeks for a letter to reach the congressman.
The Daschle letter contained a white powdery substance and
threatening letter. U.S. army scientists and the FBI said Friday the substance
was talc and contained no trace of the deadly bacteria.
“He’s telling a story that is a sensational story to, I
think, feel important,” the teen’s father, Eric Wallace, said Saturday.
“I don’t think there’s any chance any anthrax was
involved.”
Wallace said his son was diagnosed with Asperger’s
Syndrome, a
high-functioning form of autism, when he was a child.
“We’ve been trying since the third grade to get him help but
it’s been very difficult,” the elder Wallace said.
“He gravitated to the worst of the worst.”
Wallace, 45, a software engineer, said his son was
expelled from
junior high for making a threatening comment about wanting
to kill Jews. He graduated from a high school for troubled youths and in recent
years had been in and out of jail, mostly on minor theft charges.
Wallace began assaulting his family members last winter
when he couldn’t have his way, his father said.
His parents had him committed to the state psychiatric
hospital last February and he was released in April.
Wallace entered no plea when he was arraigned on a
burglary charge.
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* * *
Writer Emerges From Martian Past
[By Valerie Grove from The Times Appeal series.]
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2002004296,00.html
The title of Clare Sainsbury’s book about Asperger’s
syndrome, Martian in the Playground, sums up exactly what she felt like at
primary school: she looked perfectly normal but she felt like an alien.
“Half the time my parents were told I was a gifted child,
and half the time that I should be in a school for kids with special needs,”
she says.
Clare was hyperlexic — an unusually early and fast reader
— and would pace around the classroom talking, reading Gerald Durrell when the
others were on Roger Red-hat. Before starting school she evolved her own
private language. She hated disruptive excitement such as children’s parties.
School brought new horrors: playtime, noisy corridors, the
lunch queue, fluorescent lights, physical closeness to others. April Fool’s
Day, with its pointless and cruel jokes, was an incomprehensible torment. All Asperger’s
children know the pervasive isolation of the child who cowers at the edge of
the playground, makes no friends, plays no games, is unable to fit in.
“Asperger’s children make perfect victims, as bullies are
quick to discover. We have no tactics for physical or verbal self-defence,”
Clare writes.
Clare never even thought of telling her parents about all
this. “I just assumed that school was supposed to be like that,” she says.
School life is designed for team players, conformists and
good mixers. Teachers can handle
physical disability, learning difficulties, behaviour problems. But what to do
with an intelligent kid who is simply weird?
Francesca Happe, an autism expert, says that whenever she lectures,
there is a moment when her audience goes quiet, and she knows that they are remembering
someone in their class at school who was always left out of everything. There
must be at least one Asperger’s child in every school, since the ratio is one
in 200.
They may baffle teachers by being unable to learn times
tables, yet having an eidetic (extraordinarily accurate and vivid) memory for
facts on whatever topic obsesses them: whales or coins or Mesopotamia or the
Book of Genesis. Their interests become surrogate companions.
David Sainsbury, now Lord Sainsbury, and his wife Susie
staunchly defended their daughter when teachers suggested that she was
emotionally disturbed, “or just bloody minded, incredibly irritating, bright
but lazy and perverse”.
When it was hinted that they were the lax parents of a
rude child, they retorted that Clare was clearly just different: she was happy
at home and they were delighted by her academic prowess.
One teacher told them that Clare acted “like an autistic
child” when she was six, yet she could speak fluently. But the only friend
Clare made in childhood was an autistic girl who was totally mute.
In her school reports — “not very communicative and
somewhat taciturn” was typical — she can see retrospective clues to her
condition. But no label seemed to fit. She is grateful not to have been wrongly
classified, since she knows other people who were misdiagnosed as
schizophrenic, or put into intensive psychotherapy.
At St Paul’s Girls’ School she felt disliked.
“Schoolchildren seem to have a very limited tolerance for social deviance of
any sort,” she says. Teenage years can
be excruciating for people with Asperger’s, who often do not see finding boy
and girlfriends and going to parties as a priority.They appear stuck up, rude,
painfully shy. In her younger sisters Clare could observe normal teenage
behaviour.
“My sister Lucy is the exact opposite of me: socially
gifted, particularly good with children. She now wants to teach special needs.
She says that growing up with me was excellent training.”
At 27 Clare is lovely, a taller Helena Bonham Carter. “Did
people often say this?” I asked by e-mail. “Nope. Never,” she replied. In her
teens Clare sought help for depression, but psychotherapy put her into a
Catch-22 situation.
“I was pretty self-aware and gave a textbook description.
I said, ‘I can’t fit in, I can’t make friends with people, there is something
wrong with me, please tell me what it is.’ But since they’d never heard of Asperger’s,
they only saw how articulate I can be in a one-to-one situation, and said,
‘There’s nothing wrong with you, you only think there is because you are so
depressed’. So I said, ‘No, I am depressed because I am isolated and don’t fit
in’. And so it went on.” Like fellow sufferers she was told:
“Everybody feels like that sometimes” ; “You can do it if
you just try” ; “I ’m sure they like you really.”
It was not until Clare went to read philosophy and
politics at New College, Oxford, and found herself encouraged to challenge
other people’s arguments, that she felt more at home. “I gained more confidence
and stopped being so horribly depressed — but I also realised that, although no
longer depressed, I stayed weird.”
Oxford is tolerant of quirky individualism, but imposes an
obligation to socialise. In Clare’s first term, her behaviour convinced fellow
students that she was having a nervous breakdown.
“I would stay in my room, and never went into the noisy,
crowded college bar. I can’t hear properly when there’s background noise. And I
would walk around the college gardens talking to myself and gesticulating. I knew
that talking aloud is socially forbidden but the only way I can manage social
occasions is by rehearsing things to say, over and over, while walking alone.”
One day she went into a bookshop and in the psychology
section she found Uta Frith’s Autism and Asperger Syndrome, in which she read
an exact description of herself.
“It was uncanny. I realised that there were other people
just like me. It was too good to be
true, I was afraid to believe it. I showed it to my mother. She said, ‘It does
sound rather familiar. This is a description of you, isn’t it?” Later Frith gave
her the Wechsler IQ test: Clare has an IQ of more than 130. “I just wished I’d
known years earlier. Just knowing could have made a difference,” she says.
She found herself joining in student drama. “Stage
managing is a perfect job if you like lurking in corners and checking through
lists several hundred times,” she says. She was assistant director on Twelfth Night.
“Having an obsession with Shakespeare and the meaning of
words, I could be a walking Arden Shakespeare footnotes, and explain Elizabethan
jokes.” Clare also got a first-class degree.
She reported her Asperger’s diagnosis to Janet Gough, a
teacher, later High Mistress,at St Paul’s, who had been particularly
understanding. She told Clare that they now had another girl just like her, who
was subsequently diagnosed.
Clare is passionate about raising awareness, and
supporting the National Autistic Society’s Prospect scheme, which finds
companies willing to employ people with Asperger’s, such as computer companies.
“Asperger’s people naturally understand the rigid, binary, literal way a
computer thinks,” says Clare.
When Martian in the Playground won an award, Clare gave
the £500 cheque to the NAS, in addition to all her royalties. She runs a
website and support group for university students with Asperger’s, and works
part-time with autistic children, who sometimes remind her of the way she was
as a child.
“It is such a subtle disability, but just being socially
out of synch results in devastating isolation. There are so many bright able
people with Asperger’s in their 30s and 40s, living alone or with their parents
with enormous collections of information on Star Trek or trains or medieval musical
instruments or maps of the world. They can’t get jobs, can’t use their
qualifications. They are regarded at best as loony but harmless, at worst loony
and dangerous.”
She says that she and others are often followed in shops
by security guards. Their awkward movements and indecisive loitering excite suspicion;
their failure to make eye contact looks shifty. “It’s ironic, since we tend to
be painstakingly law-abiding. It always makes me wince when newspapers report
that an accused murderer was a loner, a weirdo, had no friends, as if all such
people are dangerous.”
Last summer she wrote to The Times when Professor David
Canter dismissed Asperger’s as a fashionable term. Clare says this is a common misconception.
“People think, ‘You look normal, you talk fluently, you should just pull your
socks up and stop acting weird’. It works against us that we are so competent
in some areas. People see you as being wilfully difficult.”
But small amounts of support — such as arranging social opportunities
— can make an enormous difference. “Since my book came out, one boy I quoted
has committed suicide. He was only 20, very articulate, but felt so isolated
and depressed he took the only way out. That is not atypical.” Copyright 2002
Times Newspapers Ltd.
Lenny Schafer, Editor@feat.org • CALENDAR EVENTS@feat.org
Michelle Guppy
Catherine Johnson PhD
• Ron Sleith •
Kay Stammers • Edward Decelie
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