SCHAFER AUTISM REPORT "Healing Autism:

No Finer a Cause on the Planet"

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

AWARENESS

* A Boy, a Mother and a Rare Map of Autism's World: NY Times

ADVOCACY

* Senate to Vote on Security Bill

* Senators to Contact This AM.

* Facts & Fiction About Thimerosal in Vaccines from Congressman Dan Burton

* CAN Nods in Favor of Amendment to Trim Merc/Vaccine of 'Homeland' Bill

RESEARCH

* Molecular Genetics Of Speech And Language Disorders

COMMENTARY

* Bradstreet's Science Contributes to the General Confusion

LETTER

* Unfilled Mercury Research

EDUCATION

* Ontario Boosts Spending For Autistic Kids

AWARENESS

A Boy, a Mother and a Rare Map of Autism's World: NY Times

Los Angeles - Tito Mukhopadhyay sits in a darkened laboratory, pointing at flashes of light on a computer screen. On his right is a neuroscientist, one of several who are testing Tito's ability to see, hear and feel touch. At his left, Tito's mother, Soma, watches quietly.

Tito, who is 14, often stops the testing with bursts of activity. His body rocks rhythmically. He stands and spins. He makes loud smacking noises. His arms fly in the air as if yanked by a puppeteer. His fingers flutter.

Everyone waits.

Tito reaches for a yellow pad and writes to explain his behavior: "I am calming myself. My senses are so disconnected, I lose my body. So I flap. If I don't do this, I feel scattered and anxious."

Tito has severe autism, a disorder that occurs when the brain mysteriously fails to develop normally in infancy and early childhood.

Born and raised in India, Tito speaks English with a huge vocabulary. His articulation is poor, and he is often hard to understand. But he writes eloquently and independently, on pads or his laptop, about what it feels like to be locked inside an autistic body and mind.

"Tito is a window into autism such as the world has never seen," said Portia Iversen, a co-founder of Cure Autism Now, a Los Angeles research foundation that brought Tito and Soma to the United States in July 2001 and continues to support them.

Autism experts are studying him, amazed to discover, for what they say is the first time, a severely autistic person who can explain his disorder. "Tito is for real," said Dr. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School, who has run extensive tests on Tito. "He unhesitatingly responds to factual questions about books that he has read or about experiences that he has had in detail and in high fidelity."

"I've seen Tito sit in front of an audience of scientists and take questions from the floor," said Dr. Matthew Belmonte, a neuroscientist and an autism expert at Cambridge University. "He taps out intelligent, witty answers on a laptop with a voice synthesizer. No one is touching him. He communicates on his own."

Nor is Tito a savant, an autistic person with a single extraordinary talent like the mathematically gifted character in the movie "Rain Man."

"Tito thinks and feels and has opinions like all the rest of us," said Dr. Samuel Smithyman, a psychologist in Los Angeles who is Tito's personal analyst. "He defies the assumptions we have about autism."

Tito was assessed with well-validated diagnostic tests and meets all the criteria for autism, said Dr. Sarah Spence, a pediatric neurologist at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Like many autistic children, Tito appeared to develop normally. He learned to sit and walk like other babies. But by the time he was 18 months old, he was showing signs that he was not like other toddlers, especially in the way he distanced himself from social settings and did not talk.

After his severe autism was diagnosed at age 3, Soma decided to educate him anyway, using methods she would make up as she went along.

"I saw that Tito had very good memory with roads, position of objects in the room, and also he would make complex patterns with match sticks," said Soma, as she prefers to be called. "I just wanted to divert his interests toward communication and learning."

For 10 years, she and Tito lived in small apartments in Mysore and Bangalore, where she taught him, day and night. Although Tito wanted to hide in a corner and watch a ceiling fan, Soma took him for daily walks amid the colors, smells and sounds of local markets.

Tito's father, who lived and worked in a distant city, visited occasionally.

Soma first taught Tito to recognize letters and sounds on an alphabet board, choosing English over more difficult Indian dialects. Then she tied a pencil in his hand and showed him how to make each letter, often refusing to let him eat until he could do so.

Around then, a method called facilitated communication, in which a parent or teacher holds the wrist of an autistic person as he or she taps messages on computer keys, had been widely discredited. Critics said teachers were prompting autistic people to respond through a kind of Ouija board effect.

"I was desperate to show people that Tito's poems came from him and not me," Soma said. "I put myself in other people's shoes and knew we needed genuine proof that he could write independently."

The mother also read Tito stories and books - Aesop's fables, Thomas Hardy novels and the complete works of Dickens and Shakespeare - and demanded that he write his own stories in return. Tito continues to write poetry and essays every day. His first book, "Beyond the Silence," was published two years ago in Britain by the National Autistic Society.

"I need to write," he said recently, scrawling the words on a yellow pad. "It has become part of me. I am waiting to get famous."

Since traveling to the United States, Tito has visited six laboratories for neurological testing. Because he cannot hold still long enough for brain imaging, he cannot offer researchers pictures of his mind in action. Instead, he gives them clues about his mental states in poems and essays that can then be explored in specially created tests.

"When I was 4 or 5 years old," he wrote while living in India, "I hardly realized that I had a body except when I was hungry or when I realized that I was standing under the shower and my body got wet. I needed constant movement, which made me get the feeling of my body. The movement can be of a rotating type or just flapping of my hands. Every movement is a proof that I exist. I exist because I can move."

Tito seems to lack a sense of his own body, the kind of internal map, Dr. Merzenich said, that normal children develop in their first few years. The maps involve brain regions that specialize in the sense of touch and movement and are widely connected to other areas, and they are highly dynamic throughout life, changing in response to everyday experience.

By imaging the brains of higher functioning autistic people who can stay still in scanners, researchers in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Courchesne at the University of California at San Diego found that autistic people had mixed-up brain maps.

Although a normal person, for example, has a well-defined brain area that specializes in face recognition, some autistic people have face-recognition areas in parts of the brain like the frontal lobes, where no one had dreamed they could be laid down. The same is true of maps that help plan movements. This means body maps are formed in autistic children, but they may be scrambled differently in each person.

In imaging experiments starting at the University of California at San Francisco, Dr. David McGonigle, a radiologist, is exploring the hypothesis that some autistic children may have scrambled body maps. Many cannot identify parts of their bodies in a mirror. Even if they know "nose," for example, when asked to point at the nose they may put a finger to an ear. They also tend to be clumsy. With eyes closed while standing, they wobble and stagger.

Ms. Iversen, whose 10-year-old son, Dov, is severely autistic, notes that maps for face recognition form early. "I smile, you smile, and maps are formed," she said. But if you do not have a faithful mental map of your own face and body, she said, you cannot read the expression on someone else's face.

The inability to interact socially is a core problem in autism. People who lack normal body maps may not be able to build consistent mental models of the world, Dr. Belmonte said. They may not be able to integrate sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes. This is what Tito is talking about when he writes that he cannot perceive the world with more than one sense at a time.

"I can concentrate either at what I am seeing or what I am hearing or what I am smelling," he wrote, not long after he began meeting neurologists. "It felt nothing unnatural to me until I realized that others could simultaneously see and hear and smell."

In Dr. Merzenich's lab, Tito has had extensive testing to explore his unusual perception. Sitting in a darkened room, he listens to beeps followed by flashes of light on a computer screen.

Most people can sense the sound and the light, even when they are separated by only a fraction of a second. But unless the light follows the sound by a full three seconds - an eternity for most brains - Tito never sees it. "I need time to prepare my ears," he told Dr. Merzenich. "I need time to prepare my eyes. Otherwise the world is chaos."

Tito says that people with autism, at least those who are like him, choose one sensory channel. He chose hearing. Most of the time, Tito attends to the sounds of language and to oral information, which may help explain his gift for poetry. Vision, Tito said, is painful. He scans the world with his peripheral vision and rarely looks directly at anything.

Other autistic people like Dr. Temple Grandin, a professor at Colorado State who earned a doctorate in animal science, specializes in vision. "When I talk about anything new, I have to look at the picture in my mind, and then language narrates it like a slide show." Dr. Grandin said when she met Tito in Dr. Merzenich's lab, where they were tested side by side in September.

For Tito, willing his body to do things is a particular problem, Soma said. "If he's sitting on the couch and I ask him to go to the kitchen, he cannot do it," she added. "But if he hears me open a bag of cookies, he moves like a gazelle on pure impulse."

That is another sign that Tito's brain is disconnected, Dr. Merzenich said. Children gradually develop higher circuits to control their impulses as the frontal lobes mature and connect to circuits that developed earlier. Each stage rests on earlier circuitry; if that is abnormal, later-to-develop regions may never be organized correctly.

Still, Tito's behavior and writings dispel a popular notion that autistic children do not feel empathy, Ms. Iversen said. Tito has feelings and notices emotions, she said, but he can be stoic about his disorder. When a mother at a large autism meeting asked Tito for his advice to parents, Tito replied simply, "Believe in your children."

Most experts say they believe that abnormalities in several genes contribute to developing autism, along with environmental factors that have yet to be fully identified. Many parents say the first symptoms, like the lack of eye contact, as in Tito's case, do not appear for about 18 months.

This accident of timing has led some to associate vaccines given at that age with the onset of autism. But it is equally plausible, many experts say, that the symptoms appear at that time because that is when the brain naturally reaches new levels of complexity. If primary sensory regions like the auditory cortex have prenatal defects, entire pathways of subsequent brain organization would not form properly.

Researchers have measured swarms of electrical discharges in the primary hearing regions of autistic children while they sleep. Such epilepsy-like activity may affect the way the brain organizes its circuitry in childhood.

Others note that the brains of autistic children are larger than average and that the brain's basic building blocks, called cortical columns, contain many more cells than normal and make excess connections to other cells.

Such hyperconnectivity may cause autistic children to become overwhelmed by details because their minds are never free to integrate the whole picture. Moreover, their brains are wired in such a way that they are prone to associate things that do not normally go together.

Tito says that at 4, he was looking at a cloud when he heard someone talking about bananas. It took him years to realize that bananas and clouds were different.

As researchers continue to study Tito, Soma works with a small number of children in Los Angeles to see whether her teaching methods can help others.

Unlike many educators who try to slow things for autistic children, Soma demands rapid responses, which she says prevent the child's brain from being distracted.

It is too soon to tell whether she will succeed. But parents like Ms. Iversen have been impressed. When her son first used the spelling board, Dov broke his muteness, asking for a navy blue blazer and algebra lessons. When she asked him what he had been doing all those years when he couldn't communicate, he pointed out letters to spell "listening."

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* * *

ADVOCACY

Senate to Vote on Security Bill

The struggle to create a Homeland Security Department has come down to a fight over provisions that Democrats want to strip from the bill, arguing they are nothing more than gifts to Republican corporate interests.

Democrats pressed hard for a victory in the waning days of their Senate majority and got a boost when Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said he would support their effort.

President Bush weighed in Monday, calling undecided Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., to seek his support, and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge was making similar calls.

A vote was expected Tuesday.

The Republican-controlled House passed its version of the bill by a wide margin in July and approved a compromise version last week narrowing differences with the Democratic-led Senate over workers' rights in the new department.

But Democrats still wanted to get rid of seven provisions, including one that they say is aimed at protecting pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits over vaccines they create and their side effects. The protections would be retroactive to lawsuits already in court.

Democrats said that among the lawsuits to be thrown out are those involving claims that mercury-based preservatives used in vaccines cause autism in children.

Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, in opposing the amendment, said that ever since the Civil War, liability protections have been given to companies manufacturing products for a war effort, and ``we are treating smallpox vaccines as an instrument of the war on terrorism.''

The bill also includes liability protections for makers of airport screening equipment and airport security firms and weakens an amendment offered by the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., that would have barred companies that set up offshore tax havens from getting federal homeland security contracts.

With Democrats holding a 50-49 majority plus an independent in the Senate, the vote was expected to be close.

McCain, long an opponent of using legislation to satisfy special interests, said he would support the Democratic amendment. Another Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said he was ``very distressed'' by the inclusion of certain provisions, but would ``swallow hard'' and vote against changes to the bill because setting up the department was so important.

Approval of the Democratic amendment would mean that the bill would have to go back to the House, which has finished its work for the year, pending Senate actions. ``This will doom the Homeland Security bill,'' the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a letter sent to lawmakers.

Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who will be the House majority leader in January, said he was willing to call the House back into session to defend the president's position.

Timing of the Senate final vote on the Homeland Security bill depended mainly on the intentions of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who in recent weeks has spoken for hours on the Senate floor on his opposition to the legislation.

The terrorism insurance bill has been one of the president's top priorities for more than a year. He says many new construction projects have been slowed because builders must pay exorbitant terrorism insurance premiums or find that such insurance is unavailable.

Under the bill, approved by the House last week, for the next three years taxpayers would cover up to 90 percent of insured losses from major attacks, with the insurance industry covering up to the first $15 billion in annual claims.

* * *

Senators to Contact This AM.

Second number is the fax number.

[From Vicky Debold.]

Please ask the Senator to vote “YES” on the Lieberman/Dashle/Byrd amendment that eliminates the Thimerosal Shield Rider (Sections 1714-1717 of the Homeland Security Act). The vote is scheduled for this morning. The Thimerosal Shield Rider has nothing to do with Homeland Security.

Instead, it protects manufacturers of thimerosal (a mercury-based

preservative) that was in infant vaccines from having to be accountable for the damage their product caused to thousands of infants and shifts the costs for caring for these children to the taxpayer. A “YES” vote to the Lieberman/Dashle/Byrd amendment is a vote to end a special-interest bailout to companies that refuse to be accountable for their products that damaged innocent children and their families.

Campbell (202) 224-5852 224-1933

Chafee (202) 224-2921 none listed

McCain (202) 224-2235 228-2862

Spector (202) 224-4254 224-1229

Collins (202) 224-2523 224-2693

Ben Nelson (202) 224-6551 228-0012

Barclay (202) 224-9430 none listed

Landrieu (202) 224-5824 none listed

Miller (202) 224-3643 228-2090

* * *

Facts and Fiction About Thimerosal in Vaccines from Congressman Dan Burton

[This was sent to the US Congress lastnight from Dan Burton, Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform via his aide Beth Clay, Beth.Clay@mail.house.gov.]

Dear Colleague:

During the past 24 hours, a number of incorrect statements have been

made about the vaccine provisions in the Homeland Security Act. The facts

are simple. These provisions severely restrict the legal rights of parents who believe their children have suffered neurological damage due to vaccines. The scientific debate remains unresolved. These provisions do not belong in the Homeland Security Act. I hope the following points will help separate fact from fiction.

FICTION: Scientists have concluded that there is no causal connection between mercury-containing thimerosal and neurological disorders such as autism.

FACT: In 2001, the respected Institute of Medicine concluded that a connection between thimerosal and autism, while unproven, is "biologically plausible." The IOM called for further research, stating, "the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between exposure to thimerosal from vaccines and neurological developmental disorders of autism, ADHD, and speech and language delays."

FACT: Researchers in the state of California concluded this year that there is no statistical explanation for the nearly 300% increase in cases of autism in that state. "It is astounding to see a threefold increase in autism with no explanation," said Dr. Robert Byrd, an epidemiologist who led the study. "There's a number of things that need to be answered. We need to rethink the possible causes of autism."

FACT: An internal HHS document produced to the House Government Reform Committee during its investigation into vaccine safety described what it referred to as a "weak signal" in its data linking thimerosal to neurological disorders:

"Preliminary screening of ICD-9 codes for possible neurologic and renal conditions following exposures to vaccines containing thimerosal before 3 months of age showed a statistical association for the overall category of neurological developmental disorders and for two conditions within the category, speech delay and attention deficit disorder."

FACT: If there were no concerns that scientific research would demonstrate a connection between thimerosal and autism, Sections 1714-1717 would not have been tacked onto the Homeland Security Act in the eleventh hour with no debate.

FICTION: Sections 1714-1717 do not eliminate the rights of vaccine-injured individuals to sue manufacturers of vaccines and their components. Proponents of these provisions have stated that once individuals have gone through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program they can still choose to file a civil law suit.

FACT: For many families who believe their children were injured by

mercury-based thimerosal, these provisions do eliminate their right to file suits. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has a narrow 3-year statute of limitations. Because many families were unaware of the program, they were unable to file a petition on time. Sections 1714-1717 take away their only remaining legal recourse.

FICTION: Thimerosal has now been removed from all childhood vaccines and is therefore no longer a concern.

FACT: While thimerosal has recently been removed from most pediatric vaccines used in the United States, it is still used in the flu vaccine given every year to millions of Americans, including children as young as six months old.

FACT: The argument that thimerosal has been removed from most pediatric vaccines is beside the point. Because the FDA was painfully slow to seek the removal of thimerosal during the 1990's, millions of children across the country were exposed to this mercury-based preservative at a time when concerns about its health effects were emerging. The legal rights of these children should not be curtailed.

Please vote to strip Sections 1714-1717 from the Homeland Security Act. Fifteen years ago, only 1 in 10,000 children was autistic. Today that number has skyrocketed to 1 in 250. Let's not be stampeded into cutting off the legal rights of these children without hearings and a full public debate.

* * *

CAN Nods in Favor of Amendment to Trim Merc/Vaccine of 'Homeland' Bill

In an eleventh hour response to the eleventh hour effort to strip legal redress from those with autism who believed they were damaged by vaccination, Cure Autism Now announced it supports the Lieberman-Daschle amendment. The amendment would remove the Thimerosal-vaccine damage issue from the Homeland Security Bill, amongst other things. An unnamed CAN spokesperson quickly added "we do not expect the amendment to pass". The autism research fundraising organization has not urged it's members to in-turn take any action to contact their US Senators on the matter in support of the amendment. Instead they imagine other future opportunities for political advocacy of an educational nature for getting the legislation reversed. Three months ago, CAN also predicted that the questionable, if not predatory legislation had no chance of becoming law, in the first place.

Like CAN, none of the other better-known national autism organizations have engaged their members to take political action in this matter. These organizations are all non-profit, however, and declare themselves to be non-political. Working against their more active involvement are the other highly partisan and high profile issues connected to the legislation, as if vaccine controversies aren't hot enough on their own.

* * *

RESEARCH

Molecular Genetics Of Speech And Language Disorders.

ds=12436038&dopt=Abstract< - - Address ends here.

Newbury DF, Monaco AP.

In 2001, scientists characterized the first gene to be implicated in the cause of a speech and language disorder (FOXP2). Although FOXP2 was discovered using a unique family in which a severe speech and language disorder segregates in a monogenic fashion, at the time this discovery was heralded as "a milestone in understanding this uniquely human characteristic." Approximately 1 year later, we discuss the impact of this gene discovery on the study of language and review the relevance of this gene to both specific language impairment and language aspects of the autistic phenotype. We also discuss recent molecular genetic advances made in the study of generalized specific language impairment.

PMID: 12436038 [PubMed - in process]

* * *

COMMENTARY

By Frank J Marone

Bradstreet's Science Contributes to the General Confusion

[Last Friday, November 15, the SAR ran a commentary by Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, a leading autism medical clinician, "Autism Expert: Time Quote 'MMR Doesn't Cause Autism' Misrepresents Him, Issues". In it, Bradstreet uses an analogy and some examples to explain some of the scientific principles at play in the current vaccine-autism debate. Dr. Frank Marone, who comments here occasionally on the muddling use of such principles by some autism research advocates, has some to make here about the writings of Dr. Bradstreet.]

Dr. Jeff Bradstreet discusses the importance of discriminating what he characterizes as an 'association' from a 'causal association'. He raises many very important points, mainly that the simple co-occurrence of two things does not tell us whether one causes the other. This distinction has been discussed on this list in the past.

Unfortunately, Dr. Bradstreet seems to further contribute to the general confusion by incorrectly using examples. Sand in one's shoes and sunburn can be said to be associated only temporally. Both occur at the same time. This is a special class of 'association' called co-incidence and does not carry the same implications as the typical definition of 'association' (i.e., closely related). Sand in one's shoes is also coincidentally associated with numerous other occurrences (e.g., playing in a sandbox with children, pitching horseshoes, mixing cement) that do not include sunburn. Sunburn is also coincidentally associated with numerous other occurrences (e.g., sitting under a sun lamp, attending a picnic on grass, boating) that do not include sand.

Dr. Bradstreet's comments do reinforce a scientific principle relevant to much research about autism and ostensible associations with various environmental events. If you isolate two things and look in enough places, it is likely you can establish an 'association'.

Are there children assigned the label 'autism' who have had immunizations and show persistence of "vaccine strain MV in ... bowel, blood and spinal fluid"? Yes.

Are there children assigned the label 'autism' who have had immunizations but do not show persistence of "vaccine strain MV in ... bowel, blood and spinal fluid"? Yes.

Are there children not assigned the label 'autism' who show persistence of "vaccine strain MV in ... bowel, blood and spinal fluid"? Yes.

The latter two of these are both 'negative examples' that must cause one to question whether there is a 'real' (useful) association.

It is certainly intriguing that certain things co-occur, and it often makes sense to follow up discovery of co-occurrence with clarifying research. Scientifically, we know that at least three possibilities must be considered and researched.

1. Co-occurrence results from a causal association. This could mean that

measles (vaccination) causes autism, or equally possibly mean that autism causes persistence of measles in fluid samples. The second possibility here is most often overlooked. Dr. Bradstreet, for example, notes that he is certain he witnessed a change in his son following vaccination administrations. He leaps from this observation to the implication that therefore the vaccinations caused these changes. It is only a short step from here to 'vaccines cause autism'. The alternate and scientifically important equal alternative is that pre-existing autism (whatever that may

be) was responsible for any reactions to vaccines that Dr. Bradstreet witnessed in his son.

2. Co-occurrence results from a third variable. That is, persistence of

measles virus and symptoms considered a part of 'autism' both result independently from a third factor such as genetic predisposition, gut abnormalities, etc. Matthew developing seizures could be explained by such a mechanism.

3. Co-occurrence is entirely independent (coincidental). That is,

persistence of measles virus results from one process and symptoms considered a part of 'autism' result from an entirely different and independent process. Matthew developing seizures "shortly after his second MMR vaccine" could be explained by such a mechanism.

What has come to be called the 'scientific method' (random assignment of subjects to be studied, manipulation of variables in ways likely to insure the absence of even unconscious bias (e.g., expectancy, placebo), and statistical analysis establishing a 'confidence level' for the results) has served well the ends of discovering the causes of a multitude of conditions and their cures or amelioration for many decades. It seems ill advised to abandon these principles. This demands more careful consideration of scientific possibilities than that demonstrated by Dr. Bradstreet in his comments here. He does say that he is convinced that MMR is not a 'major' cause of autism, but in the context of the entire communication this is a fairly weak qualifier. Children and adults assigned the label of 'autism' deserve the best.

- Frank J Marone, PhD, BCBA

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* * *

LETTER

Unfilled Mercury Research

Regarding an article yesterday in the SAR that reported "More evidence may come in 2006, when two major studies comparing the health of more than 1,000 children given either amalgam fillings or a mercury-free kind are to end, said NIH dental chief Lawrence Tabak."

We need retrospective research that compares incidence of autism among children born to moms with a great number of fillings in their mouths during pregnancy (say ten or more), and with those born to moms with few or no fillings.

The NIH study is a joke. Six-year olds don't suddenly "get" autism after having a few fillings put in their teeth. Furthermore, the combination of mercury exposure from mom's amalgams and thimerosal exposure could give some infants super-exposure. I'm frustrated that none of the autism organizations are looking into this. With an EPA report out for years now that mercury fillings "leach," and with all the evidence of what mercury can do to the nervous system, it's amazing that the NIH isn't looking at this more obvious (in vitro) connection.

Thanks for continuing to find the stories that matter (frustrating though they may be).

Nicole Crosby

· Comparison of ethylmercury developmental neurotoxic properties with an

established model of methylmercury developmental neurotoxicity -- Jay Charleston, Ph.D., Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders

· Double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over study of DMSA and lipoic acid

for the treatment of children with regressive autism -- Jane M. El-Dahr, M.D., Tulane University School of Medicine

· A comparative study evaluating the dose-responsiveness effects of

methylmercury and thimerosal on select nervous, immune and enzyme parameters -- Deborah Keil, Ph.D., Medical University of South Carolina

· Evaluation of chelation effect on children with autism -- Patricia Rosen,

M.D., MPH, Texas Center for Autism Research and Treatment

· Role of cytokines in developmental neurotoxicity -- Ellen Silbergeld,

Ph.D., University of Maryland School of Medicine

· Effect of mercury on apoptosis of neuronal cells -- Leman Yel, M.D.,

University of California, Irvine

* * *

EDUCATION

Ontario Boosts Spending For Autistic Kids

New funds for intensive therapy, out-of-class programs total $60M

le_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035774576758&call_pageid=968332188492&col=9687058990

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MISSISSAUGA, Ont. (CP) — The province is putting an additional $58.6 million into services for children with autism, Family Services Minister Brenda Elliott announced today.

The largest chunk of the money, $39.6 million, will go towards the provision of "intensive behavioural intervention" for young autism patients. Intensive behavioural intervention is an attempt to modify the behaviour of the child through a tailor-made approach, and without the use of drugs.

"Research tells us that intensive behavioural intervention works best when provided to children at a young age," Elliott said.

"Ontario is a leader in autism services for children and we continue to demonstrate this by more than doubling our investment in this service for young children so that they can get the help they need."

She said another $19 million will go towards new programs for older children with autism to help them make a transition to school.

The new services for older autistic children include co-ordinators to help families cope with the change to alternative programs.

Elementary school-age children with autism will have new out-of-class programs focused on improving social interaction, behaviour and communication.

_______________________________________________________

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