FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER Sacramento, California

"Healing Autism: No Finer a Cause on the Planet" ________________________________________________________________

More Burton Family Prayers: Alex Almost Dies

Danielle Burton-Sarkine's daughter, Alex,

was admitted to the hospital at her home town

in Indiana this morning for testing following

a serious grand mal seizure this morning.

Danielle is the daughter of Rep. Dan Burton.

Danielle earlier today indicated that Alex

was alert and doing better but seized for nearly

15 minutes this morning and was going into

cardiac arrest this morning when the EMTs arrived

at their house. Early tests have not indicated

what might have caused the seizure and there was

nothing to indicate any illness as a trigger.

Alex will undergo an EEG this evening.

The Burton family is requesting your prayers for

Alex and for continued prayers for Barbara Burton, who

is battling cancer.

PUBLIC HEALTH / FORENSIC

* Mercury's Legal Morass

* Autism: Out Of The Shadows - A Glimmer Of Hope

TREATMENT

* Brainstorming New Learning: One Child At A Time

* New ABA Resources: Video from NYFAC, "Textbook" from Leaf/McEachin

* A Work In Progress

* Reader's Posts

Mercury's Legal Morass

A surge of lawsuits allege that vaccinations triggered autism

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In the months after Joseph Alexander Counter was born in 1996, he appeared to be progressing normally.

He had met all his development milestones and by the age of 20 months had a growing vocabulary, says plaintiffs' attorney Andrew Waters of Dallas' Waters & Kraus.

"He was able to say Mama and Dada and fire truck, sort of," Waters says. "But then he lost all of his language and the only way he could communicate was by screaming."

The boy was diagnosed with autism and then tested and found to have high levels of mercury exposure. Seemingly, there was no explanation for this. As an infant, "Jac" -- the boy's nickname, based on his initials -- hadn't been unusually exposed to any heavy metals. But as the boy's parents, Joseph and Theresa Counter, began researching Web sites and contacting support groups for parents of autism, a theory developed.

From his first weeks of life onward, Jac had received all his scheduled vaccinations, and the vaccines he received contained a preservative called thimerosal. Thimerosal, by weight, was 49.6 percent mercury. In May 2001, the Counters, of Plano, Texas, sued a slew of vaccine and thimerosal makers, charging that exposure to the mercury in the vaccines caused Jac's autism.

It was the first case ever filed charging vaccine mercury poisoning, the opening of what has become an onslaught of litigation against the vaccine industry.

Dozens of lawsuits, including putative class actions, have been filed across the country, claiming autism or other neurological defects were caused by exposure to mercury in vaccines.

Dozens more lawsuits are scheduled to be filed in the next few weeks. At least three coalitions of plaintiffs' lawyers have been established to pool resources and share information to litigate these claims. Plaintiffs' attorneys in several states are now advertising on television and in print seeking prospective clients with autistic children.

War Chest

"We've put together a war chest and are trying to get the cases developed," says plaintiffs' attorney Michael Gallagher of Houston's Gallagher, Lewis, Downey & Kim. The interest from prospective plaintiffs is stunning, he says. "We've had phone calls from several thousand people."

Waters is part of a separate coalition of about 30 law firms nationally.

"We're considering about eight to nine hundred, and we've filed 45 or so," he says. The firms in this coalition are also contributing to a litigation fund.

The attorneys are working together, Waters says, "so we don't have to reinvent the wheel." He declined to say how much money the firms have contributed thus far, but adds, "it will take millions to litigate these cases."

The defendants include the vaccine makers, such as American Home Products Corp., Aventis Pasteur Inc., Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline, and the makers of thimerosal, including Uriach Corp., Emerck Inc. and Sigma Aldrich Corp. The plaintiffs are also suing Eli Lilly & Co., which invented the product and promoted its use as a preservative, Waters says.

The claims include products liability, conspiracy and fraud.

The suits over thimerosal are seen by some plaintiffs' lawyers as one of the most enticing causes of action in recent memory.

"The jury appeal is unparalleled," says Waters. "In these cases, you have a small child whose whole life is ahead of him." The child begins life normally, then "degenerates. It's a devastating process."

As a result, the potential damages could be astronomical. "You've got 10, 20, 30 millions in a life-care plan," he says. "That's before talking about the emotional distress or the pain and suffering."

Defense Side

The defendants say that the litigation lacks any basis in reality. "There is an absence of any reliable scientific evidence" linking incidence of autism "to vaccines containing thimerosal," says Nancy Pekarek, vice president of corporate media relations/U.S. for GlaxoSmithKline, which makes several vaccines with the preservative. Following an investigation into possible dangers, she says, "the Institutes of Medicine said there was no harm."

Thimerosal, a water-soluble organic mercury compound, has been used to prevent contamination and bacteria in vaccines since about 1940. Thimerosal was and is considered the most effective agent for preventing bacteria growth in vaccines, Pekarek said.

But the plaintiffs contend that thimerosal is directly connected to a significant rise in the diagnoses of autism.

"Autism once was really, really rare," Gallagher says. "The incident rate was once one in 10,000 births. Now it's 40 per 10,000." In some areas, including California and New Jersey, "the rate is one in 150 births."

The use of thimerosal increased in the 1990s, says Kathleen Dailey of Portland, Ore.'s Williams Dailey O'Leary Craine & Love, as the vaccination schedule changed. Children still received the traditional diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine, but the newer HIB flu vaccine and the hepatitis B vaccine were added then.

Many of these vaccine doses, depending on the manufacturer, contained thimerosal, thus upping the potential exposure, Waters asserts. This was exacerbated, Dailey says, by the reliance on multidose vials, which required preservatives to ward off contamination. As the amount of mercury-tainted vaccines delivered to infants increased, the number of autism cases increased as well, she says.

A possible connection between thimerosal and autism was not suspected, however, until the late 1990s, says Lyn Redwood, president of Safe Minds, a support group for parents with autistic children. What set this off, she adds, was a rider on the 1997 Food and Drug Administration reauthorization bill that required the FDA to compile a list of drugs and foods that contained intentionally introduced mercury compounds.

In June 1999, the FDA issued a report indicating that "infants who received thimerosal-containing vaccines at several visits may be exposed to more mercury than recommended by federal guidelines for total mercury exposure."

This news spread among parents with autistic children, says Redwood, who has an 8-year-old son who had been diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, a form of autism. Before this, she notes, "I never would have made a correlation between my son's disability and vaccines."

At 2 months of age, Redwood says, her son Will received 62.5 mcg of mercury from three infant vaccines. The Environmental Protection Agency's standard allowable dose, based on the boy's weight, was 0.5 mcg, she says.

"These large injected bolus exposures continued at 4, 6, 12 and 18 months to a total mercury exposure of 237.5 mcg." During his first year of life, said Redwood, her son progressed normally. He began regressing shortly after his first birthday.

Despite the FDA's report that infants were being exposed to larger-than-recommended doses of mercury, there was no ordered recall. But the FDA did ask the vaccine makers to reduce the mercury content and the companies complied, said Pekarek.

In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report based on its study of thousands of children who had been given thimerosal-containing vaccines.

The study indicated that the data was inconclusive in connecting thimerosal exposure and autism.

But as the news of the presence of mercury in vaccines spread among parents with autistic children, these parents began doing additional research, Redwood says.

What particularly clicked with these parents was that the symptoms and manifestations of mercury poisoning almost perfectly dovetailed with the signs of autism, adds Gallagher. "I've handled some mercury poisoning cases and there is an amazing similarity in how this progresses," he says.

After hearing about the possible thimerosal-autism connection, Redwood had her son's hair tested and discovered that he had a mercury level of 4.8 ppm, well above the EPA's 1 ppm action level for mercury toxicity.

Her group, Safe Minds, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CDC in February 2001 seeking all information about its research. Last fall, the group received what it considered the smoking gun, says Safe Minds attorney Elizabeth Birt, who's a parent of an autistic child and an associate at Chicago's Ross & Hardies. The CDC's research had initially found that children who were exposed to 62.5 mcgs of mercury in vaccines in the first three months of life were 2.48 times more likely to develop autism. Anything over two is considered significant, Birt says.

"This report never saw the light of day," adds Waters. Instead, the researcher, Thomas Verstraeten, added more children to the epidemiological study.

The new numbers brought the correlation down to 1.69 times; this figure was cited in the final report. But, he adds, all the children added were under the age of 2 -- or below the age when autism is diagnosed. The researcher, Waters asserts, was subsequently hired by GlaxoSmithKline as a consultant.

As the parents began gathering information, they also began looking for lawyers. And the lawyers contacted began sharing information. Michael Williams of Williams Dailey co-founded and heads the Mercury Vaccine Alliance, an organization of about a dozen plaintiffs' firms that have been involved in filing individual lawsuits and class actions in several states, including Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts.

The attorneys in this coalition will be attempting to get class-certified, Williams says. Last July, Williams Dailey filed a class action in state court in Portland, Ore., on behalf of autistic children, contending the plaintiffs had been damaged by exposure to thimerosal.

The class action is seeking medical monitoring, as well as recovery for injuries. There is a separate medical monitoring class action for plaintiffs "who have been exposed, but are not symptomatic," Dailey says. King v. Aventis Pasteur Inc., No. 0106-05780 (Multnomah Co., Ore., Cir. Ct.).

Waters and the other lawyers are eschewing the class action approach, he says, determining that individual lawsuits are the proper method of pursuing personal injury claims.

The exact number of cases filed so far is a moving target. Waters has filed more than 50 and is considering several hundred others. Lyn Redwood's attorney, Michael Weathersby of Atlanta's Evert & Weathersby, has filed her lawsuit in Georgia and will be filing another dozen more in the next 30 to 60 days. Redwood v. American Home Products Corp., No. 2001V0612M (Fayette Co., Ga., Super. Ct.).

Not all autistic children are likely plaintiffs, however, Waters says. If a child shows symptoms from birth of autism, then Waters will not take the case. Instead, he says, he is looking for a child who is normal at birth, and, generally, for the first year beyond.

"You have to make sure it's a regressive case," he says. To prove regression, he adds, complete medical records are essential; videotapes of the child before and after the regression are also critical. "There is a typical fact pattern," adds Weathersby. "Most have achieved early language fluency and then it's like a switch flips. The child becomes regressively autistic." Boys are more likely to undergo this transformation than girls, Weathersby says. "It's about 4 or 5 to one. Mercury sensitivity is more prevalent in males."

A 'Time Bomb'

"The symptoms don't happen immediately after vaccination," adds Waters. "There is a significant latency period," he says. The doses of mercury are cumulative and act like a time bomb in the child. The number of potential plaintiffs could be enormous. Waters estimates that as many as one-third to one-half of autistic children were injured through exposure to mercury in vaccines. Dailey adds that mercury in vaccines could also be connected to other neurological disorders in children. This includes attention deficit disorder, Dailey says.

The vaccines sold in the United States no longer contain thimerosal, but the ingredient continues to be used in vaccines sold or donated in other nations, Redwood says. In addition, since there was no recall, vials of thimerosal-laced vaccines already purchased are still used in the U.S., she says.

The Counter lawsuit will likely be the first of these thimerosal actions to go to trial. It's scheduled for February 2003. The plaintiffs have already received more than 20,000 documents from the defendants and have scheduled several depositions of defense personnel for mid-April. Counter v. American Home Products, No. 15285 BH01 (Brazoria Co., Texas, Dist. Ct.).

Whatever the results of these trials, the litigation itself may have some harmful effects on future generations of children, Pekarek says. In Britain, she says, following a recent controversy over the measles vaccine, fewer children had the vaccinations and "there was a measles outbreak in the U.K. Whenever people become afraid of vaccines, the incidence of disease rises."

* * *

Autism: Out Of The Shadows - A Glimmer Of Hope

Researchers Work To Unlock The Mystery Of Autism And Determine Why It's On The Upswing

It is one of the cruelest tricks fate can play on parents.

A baby appears normal at birth, develops on schedule, smiles when he hears his parents' voices, speaks his first words.

Then, without warning, something happens, something terrible and irreversible.

He may develop a sudden fever, experience frightening seizures, start hitting and biting for no apparent reason. His speech flies away. He retreats into his own world.

Eventually the diagnosis is made: autism.

It is a kind of sentence. There is no cure. Until recently, the only palliatives were acceptance and unconditional love.

But now there is a glimmer of hope. As the number of families touched by autism multiplies, scientists are getting funding to conduct research that finally may unravel the mystery of autism and uncover the reasons for i ts recent dramatic upsurge.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimates that about 285,000 people in the United States have autism or related disabilities. Other reliable estimates range as high as 550,000.

It's hard to come up with a precise estimate. Though autism was first described in the 1940s, until the 1970s many autistic children were labeled retarded or emotionally disturbed. For years, society blamed autism on "refrigerator mothers" who withheld love. No one believes that myth anymore.

Still, autism remains an enigma. There is no blood test for autism, no single characteristic behavior, no single known cause.

Some researchers believe the condition is caused by abnormal development of the parts of the brain that control emotion and process sensory information. A predisposition to autism is inherited, though no single gene is to blame. Its onset may be triggered by environmental factors.

University of Washington research psychologist Geraldine Dawson heads one of the nation's leading autism research programs at the UW Center on Human Development and Disability in Seattle. Dawson is directing studies that track brain activity in autistic children in an effort to understand why they can't relate normally to other people. One study is charting brain development in 75 young children over a three-year period.

Elsewhere, new research using computer imaging has discovered abnormalities in the brains of autistic people that may explain why their brains can't sort out or control the flood of information their senses deliver.

The UW is collaborating with other universities on a study of whether the timing of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could be linked to the heartbreaking regression many parents have witnessed in autistic children who developed normally until their second year.

Dawson is reserving judgment on what is driving the increase in autism.

"Clearly a part of the explanation is better diagnosis," she said, but other factors may be in play. "The increases are occurring with younger children, higher functioning children. You can't speculate until the epidemiological research is done."

Research gets a boost

Congress, concerned about the sharp rise in autism, approved a record $50 million for new research last year. The UW has applied to become one of five new autism research centers in the nation. The designation would double its federal research budget for autism to $2 million annually and push it to conduct more applied research that might lead to effective treatments for young children.

Autism in older children and adults is beginning to attract attention as well. One UW study is attempting to find out what it is in the brains of people with autism that makes them unable to read others' facial expressions, body language and voice cues.

Felice Orlich, a UW pediatric neuropsychologist, worked with Microsoft to develop a chat room called KidTalk for high-functioning autistic young people. The software simulates social settings like dinner parties and invites participants to describe how they would act in given situations. A psychologist gives them real-time feedback on their performance.

Researchers at the University of California at Davis are studying music ---- specifically the music of Mozart ---- and its effect on the ability of people with autism to grasp concepts involving space, time, and mathematics.

A laboratory for learning

A key part of the UW program is its Experimental Education Unit, a school that serves 250 toddlers and preschoolers. Sixty percent of the children at any one time are developmentally disabled; 35 have autism.

Teachers here are racing to help shape the behavior and intellectual development of children with autism while their brains are still malleable enough to change. Studies at UW and elsewhere suggest that intensive intervention with children as young as 2 can raise their IQ levels significantly, improve their speech and decrease their need for support services.

Teachers work with children individually at play stations. At this age, it's hard to tell the "normal" children from those with special needs. That's the idea, says Principal Jennifer Annabel. "We keep our expectations high. We never say that a student can't do anything."

A constant stream of parents, educators and researchers passes through the school, which also serves as a laboratory for students working on degrees in special education and speech therapy.

Children who don't speak, or who shy away from social contact, get extra encouragement. For instance, at snack time they are given the most popular snacks to distribute.

Teaching of academic skills is left to the elementary schools. "We don't do reading or math in kindergarten," Annabel said. "We believe this time should be spent on preparedness and social behaviors."

The EEU program is expensive, but Dawson says it's highly cost-effective. Early intervention that works could save society up to $3 million over the lifetime of each child with autism, she said. "And the impact on the quality of life for individuals with autism and their families is immeasurable."

* * *

Brainstorming New Learning: One Child At A Time

Detroit-area services offer innovative ways to help with motion, muscle control and autism

Tony Saylor has no trouble describing what he finds tough about school.

"Concentrating," Tony said. "I'm not very good at concentrating. I start thinking of something I like, and I may walk around and I realize I'm supposed to be working."

A fifth-grader at the Dearborn Heights Montessori Center, Tony, 11, has struggled for years with his schoolwork.

His challenges come from Asperger Syndrome, a type of autism that can cause obsessive behavior, clumsiness and problems with communication and learning.

Tony was diagnosed with Asperger in 1996 after a teacher at the Dearborn Heights private school noticed he was having trouble mingling with the other children and was talking to himself.

Now, after six years of counseling during and after school, Tony is making progress, Tony's teacher told the Saylors earlier this month at his parent-teacher conference. He handles projects and time-consuming tasks with less frustration. He's become sociable at school. "His teacher told us kids clamor to sit with him at lunch," said his mother, Angela Saylor of Allen Park. "It's like he's Mr. Popular."

Tony's recent success tells a much broader story. Today, help is more widely available for children with learning obstacles. At every stage -- screening and evaluation, diagnosis, treatment -- there is better awareness of the skills children need to succeed and more programs to help children get on track.

The push brings into the elementary grades a national goal of identifying problems in children during their first three years of life.

Brain research also shows that most children are likely to retain information if they acquire it early, when lasting connections between brain cells are created.

"Our better understanding of the brain tells us what we need to fix," said Catherine Lord, PhD, a development psychologist and autism specialist at the University of Michigan Medical Center.

"We used to conceptualize nature and nurture as two entirely separate phenomena," she said. "Now we understand there's a real back-and-forth, and that's part of the reason why we emphasize early intervention more." As important as early detection is, many problems -- like Tony's -- escape detection until children reach school, said Dr. Ernest Krug III, one of Michigan's few developmental behavioral pediatricians -- a speciality that combines pediatrics with the study of human development. He heads Beaumont Hospital's Center for Human Development in Berkley, one of the largest pediatric evaluation and therapy programs in Michigan.

"The stress of the school environment brings it out," Krug explained. "The majority of kids we see with learning issues were normal in their early years."

Signs can be subtle

Tony's parents, both lawyers, noticed a few differences about their son when he was a toddler. He loved Thomas the Train toys, particularly lining up the engines precisely in the bedroom of his Allen Park home.

He was clumsy and uncoordinated and didn't like to feed himself. He was late to be toilet-trained, at age 4 1/2. He hates scratchy winter clothes. He found most meat disgusting.

None of the signs, though, seemed exceptionally unusual.

But by 4, when he enrolled in preschool, his teacher at the Montessori center noticed that he did not make good eye contact with her or children in the room. He liked to walk around and talk to himself.

U-M psychiatrists and child specialists who evaluated him told the Saylors that Tony had "Pervasive Developmental Disorder, non-specific type" -- a diagnosis often described in the past as atypical autism. In the past year U-M psychiatrists modified Tony's diagnosis to Asperger, to reflect the more precise problems they've observed.

All types of autism, a spectrum of disorders from mild to severe, are on the rise in the United States, for reasons not yet understood.

More specialists appreciate distinct differences between Asperger and PDD, Patricia Romanowski Bashe and Barbara Kirby write in their new book, "The Oasis Guide to Asperger Syndrome" (Crown; $27.50). Though they may develop problems later, children with Asperger usually reach developmental milestones in the first few years of life, the authors write.

The initial U-M tests launched the Saylors on a path to find help. They discovered that Tony was eligible for help from the Wayne-Westland Community Schools' special education program, as are many children with special educational needs, regardless of whether they are enrolled in a private school.

Five years ago, Nancy Kelly, an occupational therapist with the Wayne-Westland schools, began working with Tony once a week, 30 minutes at a time.

"He used to be very self-absorbed and into his own imagination," Kelly said. Confronted with too many simultaneous events in a classroom, "he'd shut down" and pay attention to no one but himself, she explained.

She began with simple exercises to build his big and small muscles, then she moved to working with him on conversational skills. She's used music to build rhythm and timing; joint compression activities to build muscle tone; and balls and other objects to build attention and motor skills.

Kelly also encouraged the Saylors to seek additional help. That led them to weekly therapy sessions, which Tony has received since 1998 at the Abilities Center.

The center, in a West Bloomfield office complex, is one of several large, established programs in metro Detroit that help children with movement, attention, hyperactivity and other problems.

The Abilities Center has classes with names like Jitterbugs, Able Listeners and Spinning Wheels. Staffers aim to raise a child's confidence with movement and help the child master specific tasks like bike riding.

Tony loved the place the minute he walked in the door, his mother recalled. Occupational therapist Gayle Munro remembered that when she met Tony he stood with his hands crossed across his chest, and his elbows bowed out. "He's what we call a low-tone kid," she said, referring to underdeveloped body muscles.

Most of Tony's sessions occur in an activity room filled with balls, a large swing, a Lycra trapeze, steps and a ladder.

Tony navigates his way around the room, from swing to slide, trapeze to steps, for example, without touching the ground. "He's just like Tarzan, only he doesn't go from vine to vine," Munro said. The activities help build motor planning, attention and muscle strength.

Last spring, Tony also began swimming classes each week with Janelle Woodruff, a physical therapist with the Abilities Center.

He's progressed from a fear of water and a weak dog paddle to swimming a length of a pool both freestyle and backstroke. In one recent lesson, when Tony's swimming goggles fogged up, he stopped to fix them, saying to no one in particular, "Houston, we have a problem."

Swimming pays off outside the pool, Woodruff said. "This uses both sides of the body at different times, which builds shoulder stability," she said. "That's important for fine-motor tasks like handwriting, and for endurance."

Angela Saylor said she's noted benefits at home from Tony's stronger muscle skills. His handwriting has improved; he doesn't tire as easily.

By fall, "the whole package fell together," Munro said. Tony's teachers and parents agree.

"We've see a huge amount of progress," Angela Saylor said.

"His teacher told us she's just amazed how well he's doing."

Tony is a bit harder on himself. "My mom says I'm doing good," he said, over his favorite strawberry pancakes at a West Bloomfield Big Boy restaurant.

Lately, his passion is cartooning. He's created a robot he calls Mel Function, who "falls apart a lot," Tony said.

School "isn't so bad, I guess," he added.

"It always seems like it's going to be harder, and then it's not so hard."

Angela Saylor said she remains hopeful "as long as we're addressing things and moving forward."

* * *

New ABA Resources: Video from NYFAC, "Textbook" from Leaf/McEachin

NYFAC announces the release of Volume#2 in its' Video Education Series:

[Note: this video, and its DTT predecessor, is not comprehensive stand-alone do-it-yourself training films. From neither of these tapes alone will anyone learn "Improving Play Skills" or "Discrete Trial Teaching." These are complementary training aides that only make sense when used within an overall, supervised behavioral program. But as training aides, they are must-haves for parents or tutors doing ABA programs.

"Improving Play Skills" simply lays out the components of a generic behavioral program for both play skills and some social skills that are faded into play. For the student it provides yet another set of clear models for executing the components of play and chaining them together, visual tasks analysis for the trainers for teaching play skills, if you will. Like the DTT tape below, this is also an excellent refresher course for the advanced, as well. –LS].

This video is 54 minutes packed with information on

The six different stages of play, Scripting, Schedules, Video Modeling, Basic, Intermediate and Advanced Target Skill, Task Analysis, Reinforcers, Language Masters and much more....

$59.99 plus $6 shipping

Also Available

"Discrete Trial Teaching"

DTT is the video everyone has been waiting for. Whether you're a parent or a professional DTT has something for you. This video is 60 minutes packed with information on the following: Assessing Reinforces, Token Economy Systems, Learning Readiness Skills, Gross Motor Imitation, Eye Contact, Teaching a new skill, Avoidance, Prompting (Physical, positional and verbal), Modeling, Errorless Learning, No-No Prompting, Shaping, Receptive and Expressive language, Generalization, Maintenance, and much more...through lectures, samples and re-caps we have made this easy to understand to use for parent education, staff development, and classroom lecture.

Over 1000 of these videos are already in us Worldwide!

Ordering and Further information can be found at

* *

A Work In Progress

by Ron Leaf and John McEachin

This ABA book might look like it should be sitting on the shelf along side such ABA bibles as "The Me Book" by Ivar Lovaas and "Behavioral Intervention for the Young Child With Autism" workbook by Catherine Maurice. Leaf and McEachin are early on co-conspirators and colleagues of Ivar Lovaas.

While the material is comprehensive and well-laid out, it might seem a little tough figuring out exactly how or where it would fit in designing or running any given program -- unless you look at it as a textbook, rather

than a clinical workbook for parents. If you're a student contemplating

having a career, or a degree, or a license in "Lovaas" –based hehaviorism, this textbook's for you, you'll probably find out sooner or later. When it comes to discrete trial training ABA, Leaf and McEachin are the expert's experts. -LS

DRL Books, L. L. C.

12 West 18 Stree

New Your, New York 10011

ISBN: 0-9665266-0-0

* * *

Reader's Posts

5 yr o. aut. son will be ready for kindergarten this fall. We have been trying to find the best place to settle down, which would best meet his needs. Right now he needs lots of one to one and inclusion is not that important. But we do hope to mainstream him soon. We are now looking to find specific excellent schools so that we can move right into the school district and be assured that at least we are doing the best we can for our son. Please reply at pchojar@hotmail.com

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Moving to Northern CA (around San Fransciso) this summer. My son is considered mildly autistic (11 years old/middle school). He needs a small class size with lots of hands-on learning, structured repetititon, visual aids, he has no aggressive behaviors. Please help me find a public school/area that has these types of services. Thank you! Gailski8@aol.com

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My wife and I are parents of an Autistic child and we are in the process of starting up our own School for Autistic Children in Orange County, California. We would appreciate it if any parents who would be interested in such a school would respond to this posting so we can properly assess the need and plan accordingly. Please respond to: ccsvci@aol.com

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Can anyone tell me where to find a recommended schedule for delayed and separated immuniatations? I have a 7 yr old with PDD and am researching this topic for baby #2. Leslie Gallagher leslie_gallagher@hotmail.com

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My son laughs histarically when he gets milk products. This is often accompanied by crying about 15 minutes later. I have assumed his stomach hurt after the milk did its thing. Also, I have seen gluten makes him bang his head and be more aggressive. I can always tell if he got glutten or casein by mistake. They have much different reactions. Lisa Helt Never2soon4peace@cs.com

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Australian Family in Los Angeles seeking therapists trained in Discrete trials/ABA to travel with us to Sydney and QLD for a minimum of 4 mths. One month would be spent in LA getting to know our adorable 6 year old austistic daughter, and overlapping with current therapists. 3 months in Australia would be June to September 2002. Cori on 310 451 8036, or e-mail Jocelyn on hogan2@gte.net

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I was wondering if anyone has tried the Discrete Trial Trainer software that was mentioned in a Feat newsletter earlier this month. I wanted to know what other parents thought of it and how your child responds to it. LDDKA@aol.com

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This form gives a $ 500. tax credit for long term care givers of the disabled. Ask your Tax Consultant to check it out; you will need pediatrician's CA License Number. Ed Silva

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I recently inquired about getting the MMR booster shot for my soon to be 5 year old son. I just wanted to say thanks to the editor for posting my inquiry and thanks to everyone for the excellent feedback. It turns out that many have had the same question and I am able to share your input with them. If anyone would like copies of the responses just email me. As for me I'm gonna go for the titer for my son. aimeeco_2000@yahoo.com

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APRIL 21, 2002 - 12 Noon to 5pm

THIRD NATIONAL AUTISM AWARENESS RALLY:

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