SCHAFER AUTISM REPORT "Healing Autism:

No Finer a Cause on the Planet"

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Monday, October 14, 2002 Promote Your Event - Free! - Send

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EDUCATION

* Minding Their Own Business: A Special-Ed Class Builds Skills and Sales

* Sense Of Place - Constant Search For Keys To Communication

AWARENESS

* Thru The Autis. Eyes of Mark Mesko, 18 as He Strives To Break Through

* Sibling Rivalry - Why the Nature/Nurture Debate Won't Go Away

PUBLIC HEALTH

* Import Block Holds Up Jabs For Mumps

MEDIA

* Spice Girl Ex Fined £200 For Autis. Toddler Tush Push: A Bum Rap?

* Public Radio Show On Autism via Real Audio

EDUCATION

Minding Their Own Business: A Special-Ed Class Builds Skills and Sales

From the outside, it's hard to imagine magic could take place in the portable classroom of special-education instructor Cheryl Nixon and instructional assistants Becky Cline and Melodie Baker.

Separated from the main building at Seattle's Whitman Middle School, the location is a bit of an outpost. To get to the small portable, which is in need of a paint job, you pass through outdoor basketball courts, where weeds protrude from cracks in the blacktop and nets are absent from many rims. A rusty chain-link fence stands between the class and some plush, green athletic fields.

Walk through the door, however, and the colors are almost blinding. Bright red, blue and green rugs line the floor, yellow curtains hang from the windows, and flowers sit atop the students' desks. The room is called the Dyspraxic Room and is for students who have difficulty processing information and need extra help with communication skills.

For 50 minutes a day, at the end of the day, the three teachers oversee 11 special-education students in a course known as "The Biz." The students have formed their own company, Ink Inc., that collects empty ink-jet and laser printer cartridges and sells them to Ecco Recycles of Kent. If they make enough money, the students — sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders — want to take a class trip to Universal Studios Hollywood.

"This is a dream that might change their whole lives," said Nixon, 52, who has taught off and on for eight years in different states. "A lot of these children could go with their families, but they're not going to go with the school system because they're not in clubs or after-school activities."

Aside from the prospect of reaching their goal, there is an even greater benefit, say teachers and parents: the number of skills the kids are learning.

A teacher-learning expo gave Nixon the idea of students running their own recycling business. She later learned Ingraham High School had a similar program and patterned Whitman's after that one.

Nixon saw numerous learning opportunities in running a company — marketing, advertising, math and public speaking, for instance.

The first year, the students worked to get the business off the ground. They came up with a name, elected officers and designed a company logo, stationery and business cards.

The students then had to decide how they would get clients. Focusing their efforts on the 1,200 students at Whitman, they put up fliers at school and wrote an article in a parent newsletter, attached with bags in which to recycle cartridges.

By February, the business was off the ground. The students had landed accounts with the IRS, Swedish Medical Center and Windermere Real Estate. By the end of the year, receiving $2 to $12 per cartridge, they made $800. Superintendent Joseph Olchefske visited the class to congratulate them.

This year, business continued to boom. Recently, company president Brandon Manney, an eighth-grader, addressed the Ballard Chamber of Commerce. Impressed, the chamber asked the students to be honorary members.

Last week, the class celebrated with cake and root beer as it passed another landmark: $1,000 in sales.

Manney said the class is the highlight of the day for the students.

"This is the big enchilada, the big news," he said. "Mrs. Nixon makes it fun. The business part is when we knuckle down and do our work."

Along the way, the students have kept minutes from meetings, and learned business strategy and how to keep inventory, balance a checkbook and market their company.

"It's not only academics, they're instilling how to live, politeness, cooperation and how to solve problems without hurting each other or each other's feelings," said Linda Couser, whose son, Tommy, is in the class. "They really have a very caring group."

Nixon likes the confidence her students have gained communicating with others, and how close she has become with them.

"There's so many great parts to this job, but the best is the caring the kids have for us," she said.

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

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Sense Of Place - Constant Search For Keys To Communication

A small box sits on teacher Kelly Larkins' classroom shelf. It's worn, and has no top.

Inside are a dozen objects. All seem like things that might be headed for the trash: part of a plastic spoon; a frayed strip of green fabric; a piece of paper tube; a rubber band.

But these objects aren't trash. They've acquired a value far beyond intrinsic. They're keys to the closed doors of one child's isolated world.

Teachers search constantly for communication keys. They tap a vast 21st Century array of tools, and seek the best methods and latest techniques to convey concepts and ideas to students.

It's different for Larkins. She created her own simple tools.

Larkins works at Boston Avenue School where her students include 10-year-old Danny, a blind, nonverbal child with a toddler's mind.

Danny can be violent. When he's startled, or doesn't understand what's happening, he lashes out, scratches, pushes, pinches. No one knows what he's thinking, and the dark-haired Danny can't tell them.

The box of objects can change such unhappy scenarios.

When it's time to eat, Larkins puts the spoon in Danny's hand and runs his fingers over it. When he grasps the idea, he calmly heads to the cafeteria.

Before horticulture class, Larkins puts the fabric in Danny's hand. The rubber band means music, and dancing. The tube means bathroom.

Communication is tightly focused for teachers at Boston Avenue, a Volusia County public school for special needs students. Some children are autistic.

Some have Down Syndrome. Some are deaf, or blind, or both. Many cannot speak.

Seizures and medical emergencies are school day routines.

None of which matters when it comes to the question of education in Volusia County.

"These children are entitled to an education, like any other child in this county," said Juanita McNeil, principal here since 1984. "Our mission is to educate them to the extent they are capable."

It's an expensive mission, but there's little debate because it's the right thing to do.

Staff to student ratio at this quaint, 1926 school is about 1:1. In mid-September, there were 85 teachers and staff serving 83 students. School figures show the annual average education cost for a mainstream student is about $4,100. It can cost six times that much to educate severely disabled students.

Education doesn't necessarily mean reading, writing and arithmetic. It may mean making a bed, buttoning a shirt, stacking plates, or brushing teeth.

Emphasis is on basic life skills, said McNeil. "We have kids who cannot feed themselves, and we teach them how. We've got kids in diapers. We change diapers . . ."

Mixing teaching with therapy, diapers, seizures and violent behavior isn't a skill taught in universities, McNeil said. "Most college professors haven't seen this type of child."

Some students learn skills that lead to simple jobs, but most cannot aspire to such great accomplishments.

"Many of our kids can't even communicate. They can't tell us what they feel, what they think or need," McNeil said. "So we try to teach basic sign

language: I am hungry. I want to drink. I'm sick.

"We're not talking complete sentences. We're talking basic communication. We teach them to point. Or just look this way or that so we know what they want."

Successful communication at this school is measured in many ways, mostly small.

"You could leave here every day for six months, or even a year, and not see progress with a child," said McNeil. "Or you may see a smile. You may see food go to their mouth. You may one day hear a word."

A word. A single, joyful word. At Boston Avenue, a single word can sometimes be a communications breakthrough.

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AWARENESS

Thru The Autistic Eyes of Mark Mesko, 18 as He Strives To Break Through His role on team is beyond words

You hold the water bottles.

You are 6 feet tall and 275 pounds. Some people see you and wonder why you are not wearing shoulder pads and a helmet like the other players.

You'd love to tell them. You want them to know what it means to be you. You want to explain, to answer, to just say SOMETHING! You hear the words in your head. You know what you want to say. But the best you can do is make sounds: moans, screeches, laughs, grunts.

And no one understands.

They say you are autistic, something like Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man. Only you can't talk at all, while Hoffman spoke in a distracted monotone. They say there are a lot of people like you, about 15 of every 10,000 births, and it's four times more likely to happen to males.

They can say all they want, but they just don't know.

They don't know how your brain works.

They don't know that when Hudson High football coach Tom Narducci said you could come to practice, you thought it was to play, that you crashed into the tackling dummy like a charging bull.

But they led you to the water and the bottles, saying you're a team manager. You're one of several "special needs" students who help the team, but none of the others is battling the obstacles you face.

Your name is Mark Mesko.

Your father and mother are John and Phyllis Mesko. They love Narducci for doing what no coach was willing to try before -- letting you be a part of the team.

You're 18 years old. Your favorite color is red. You love football teams that wear red, especially Ohio State and Nebraska. You like firetrucks. You sometimes carry a red book bag with your pictures of firetrucks. You have a firetruck as a screen saver on your computer. You have a framed picture of you in a firetruck. Your older sister, Heather, drives around with a camera, and when she sees a neat firetruck, she takes a picture for you.

You'd like to be a firefighter, or a football player.

But it probably won't happen.

If only you could talk. If only you could be like the other kids. As your oldest sister, Jennifer, said, "If only I could know if he's happy." You are happy. And you're frustrated. And you're lonely. And you feel loved. And sometimes you don't know how you feel.

That's how it is for many teen-agers.

You get mad at your parents, you glare at them, you stalk off, you slam the door and hide in your room. You're likely to put on a videotape of Scooby Doo or the Care Bears. But Heather has seen you with a Victoria's Secret catalog. You seem to have one foot in a child's world, another leg in the life of any teen-age boy.

Heather understands this. She bought you a poster of Pamela Sue Anderson. She says, "I wish Mark could go on a date, just do the things everyone does in high school." Sometimes, Heather takes you to the Stow Cafe, where you get hamburgers together. You love hamburgers. You love your 23-year-old sister. Sometimes, she holds your hand. Sometimes, people think you're her boyfriend. She doesn't care. She loves you.

You're her brother, you're special, and you know that.

One day, your mom found her eyes tearing up, her throat going dry as she sat next to you by the computer. She told you how much she loved you. She so wanted to hear that voice from your soul, to know what thoughts are in your heart.

Phyllis Mesko whispered, "Mark Mesko, why can't you talk?" You typed: TOO HARD.

They say that for the first two years of your life, you were like most infants. Your mother insists that you said "Mama... daddy... cookie" and about 30 other words.

Then something happened. Those words are gone. Except you do hear them in your head. Sometimes, you can even type them on the computer. Sometimes, you can't.

You don't know why that happens; it just does.

Just like you don't know why the words fail to come out. They just don't.

They say it's a neurological problem; the brain didn't develop in the usual way. They took you to doctors in Cleveland, Baltimore and North Carolina. By the time you were 7, they finally put a label on you.

Autistic.

How much of this you comprehend, it's hard to know. You're just aware that you're different, that you really don't have friends like most of the kids at Hudson High. Sometimes, you feel walled in. The walls are glass. You see them. They see you. But communication is lost.

You give water to football players such as Toney Morton and Tyson Meikle. They say thank you. Once in a while, they pat you on the back. You whack their shoulder pads, as you've seen the other coaches and players do.

+ Article Continues at:

[RELATED LETTERS]

>From New Jersey:

"As the father of an 8-year-old boy with autism, I wanted to write to say how much your article meant to us. Your description of Mark and his various `eccentricities' was so eerily reminiscent of our own experience.... And also, a very big `bravo-zulu' to Coach Narducci."

>From a University of Akron alumnus:

"The article on Mark Mesko was nothing short of a masterpiece. As a health-care professional with experience dealing with autistic children and other children with handicaps, I am truly grateful for the way you portrayed Mr. Mesko."

>From Wheeling, W.Va.:

"I was so touched by Terry Pluto's first-person perspective of what it is like for Mark Mesko to live in the silent world of autism, I cried through the entire article. This is what journalism is all about -- bringing the reader into a world he or she may not have otherwise known."

* * *

Sibling Rivalry - Why the Nature/Nurture Debate Won't Go Away

when the British educator Richard Mulcaster wrote in 1582 that "Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward," he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since. People's beliefs about the roles of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics. Do adolescents engage in violence and substance abuse because of the way their parents treated them as toddlers? Are people inherently selfish and aggressive, which would justify a market economy and a strong police, or could they become peaceable and cooperative, allowing the state to wither and a spontaneous socialism to blossom? Is there a universal aesthetic that allows great art to transcend time and place, or are people's tastes determined by their era and culture? With so much at stake, it is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke such strong feelings.

Much of the heat comes from framing the issues as all-or-none dichotomies, and some of it can be transformed into light with a little nuance. Humans, of course, are not exclusively selfish or generous (or nasty or noble); they are driven by competing motives elicited in different circumstances. Although no aspect of the mind is unaffected by learning, the brain has to come equipped with complex neural circuitry to make that learning possible. And if genes affect behavior, it is not by pulling the strings of the muscles directly, but via their intricate effects on a growing brain.

By now most thinking people have come to distrust any radical who would seem to say that the mind is a blank slate that is filled entirely by its environment, or that genes control our behavior like a player piano. Many scientists, particularly those who don't study humans, have gone further and expressed the hope that the nature-nurture debate will simply go away. Surely, they say, all behavior emerges from an inextricable interaction between heredity and environment during development. Trying to distinguish them can only stifle productive research and lead to sterile polemics.

But moderation, like all things, can be taken to extremes. The belief that it's simplistic to distinguish nature and nurture is itself simplistic. The contributions of this opposition to our understanding of mind and society are far from obvious, and many supposedly reasonable compromises turn out, under closer scrutiny, to be anything but. Let's consider some of the "reasonable" beliefs of the radical moderates.

"Reasonable" Belief No. 1: No one believes in the extreme "nurture" position that the mind is a blank slate.

Certainly few people today endorse the blank slate in so many words, and I suspect that even fewer believe it in their heart of hearts. But many people still tacitly assume that nurture is everything when they write opinion pieces, conduct research, and translate the research into policy. Most parenting advice, for example, is inspired by studies that find a correlation between parents and children. Loving parents have confident children, authoritative parents (neither too permissive nor too punitive) have well-behaved children, parents who talk to their children have children with better language skills, and so on. Everyone concludes that to rear the best children, parents must be loving, authoritative, and talkative, and if children don't turn out well, it must be the parents' fault.

But there is a basic problem with this reasoning, and it comes from the tacit assumption that children are blank slates. Parents, remember, provide their children with genes, not just a home environment. The correlations between parents and children may be telling us only that the same genes that make adults loving, authoritative, and talkative make their children self-confident, well behaved, and articulate. Until the studies are redone with adopted children (who get only their environment, not their genes, from their parents), the data are compatible with the possibility that genes make all the difference, the possibility that parenting makes all the difference, or anything in between. Yet in almost every instance, the most extreme position - that parents are everything - is the only one researchers entertain.

Another example: To a biologist the first question to ask in understanding conflict between organisms of the same species is "How are they related?" In all social species, relatives are more likely to help each other, and nonrelatives are more likely to hurt each other. (That is because relatives share genes, so any gene that biases an organism to help a close relative will also, some of the time, be helping a copy of itself, and will thereby increase its own chances of prevailing over evolutionary time.) But when the psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson checked the literature on child abuse to see whether stepparents were more likely to abuse their children than biological parents, they discovered not only that no one had ever tested the possibility, but that most statistics on child abuse did not even record the information - stepparents and biological parents were lumped together, as if the difference couldn't possibly matter. When Daly and Wilson did track down the relevant statistics, their hunch was confirmed: Having a stepparent is the largest risk factor for child abuse ever examined.

The finding was by no means banal: Many parenting experts insist that the hostile stepparent is a myth originating in Cinderella stories, and that parenting is a "role" that anyone can take on. For agencies that monitor and seek to prevent child abuse the finding of a greater risk with stepparents could be critical information. But because of the refusal to entertain the idea that human emotions are products of evolution, no one had ever thought to check.

"Reasonable" Belief No. 2: For every question about nature and nurture, the correct answer is "Some of each."

Not so. Take the question, "Why do people in England speak English, and people in Japan Japanese?" The "reasonable compromise" would be that the Japanese have genes that make it easier for them to learn Japanese (and vice versa for the English), but both groups must be exposed to the language to acquire it fully. This compromise, of course, is not reasonable at all; it's false. Immigrant children acquire the language of their adopted home perfectly, showing that people are not predisposed to learn the language of their ancestors (though they may be predisposed to learn language in general). The explanation for why people in different countries speak different languages is 100 percent environmental.

And sometimes the answer goes the other way. Autism, for example, used to be blamed on "refrigerator mothers" who did not emotionally engage with their children. Schizophrenia was thought to be caused by mothers who put their children in "double binds" (such as the Jewish mother who gave her son two shirts for his birthday, and when he turned up wearing one of them, said, "The other one you didn't like?"). Today we know that autism and schizophrenia are highly heritable, and though they are not completely determined by genes, the other likely contributors (toxins, pathogens, chance events in brain development) have nothing to do with parenting. Mothers don't deserve "some" of the blame if their children have these disorders, as a nature-nurture compromise would imply; they deserve none of it.

"Reasonable" Belief No. 3: Disentangling nature and nurture is a hopeless task, so we shouldn't even try.

On the contrary, perhaps the most unexpected and provocative discovery in 20th-century psychology came from an effort to distinguish nature and nurture in human development. For a long time, psychologists have studied individual differences in intellect and personality. They have assessed cognitive abilities using IQ tests, statistics on performance in school and on the job, and measurements of brain activity. They have assessed people's personalities using questionnaires, ratings by other people who know them well, and tallies of actual behavior such as divorces and brushes with the law. The measures suggest that our personalities differ in five major ways. We are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected.

Where do these differences come from? Recall those flawed studies that test for the effects of parenting but forget to control for genetic relatedness. Behavioral geneticists have done studies that remedy those flaws and have discovered that intelligence, personality, overall happiness, and many other traits are partly (though never completely) heritable. That is, some of the variation in the traits among people in a given culture can be attributed to differences in their genes. The conclusion comes from three different kinds of research, each teasing apart genes and environment in a different way. First, identical twins reared apart (who share their genes but not their family environment) are far more similar to each other than randomly selected pairs of people. Second, identical twins reared together (who share their environment and all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins reared together (who share their environment but only half their genes). Third, biological siblings reared together (who share their environment and half their genes) are more similar than adoptive siblings (who share their environment but none of their genes).

In each comparison, the more genes a pair of people share (holding environment more or less constant), the more similar they are. These studies have been replicated in large samples from many countries, and have ruled out the alternative explanations that have been proposed. Of course, concrete traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture are not heritable at all, such as the language you speak, the religion you worship in, and the political party you belong to. But the underlying talents and temperaments are heritable: how proficient with language you are, how receptive to religion, how hidebound or open to change.

So genes play a role in making us different from our neighbors, and our environments play an equally important role. At this point most people leap to the following conclusion: We are shaped both by our genes and by our family upbringing: how our parents treated us and what kind of home we grew up in.

Not so fast. "The environment" and "our parents and home" are not the same thing. Behavioral genetics allows us to distinguish two very different ways in which our environments might affect us. The shared environment is what impinges on us and our siblings alike: our parents, our home life, and our neighborhood (as compared with other parents and neighborhoods). The unique environment is everything else: anything that happens to us over the course of our lives that does not necessarily happen to our siblings.

Remarkably, study after study has failed to turn up appreciable effects of the shared environment - often to the shock and dismay of the researchers themselves, who started out convinced that the nongenetic variation in personality had to come from the family. First, they've found, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins who grew up in the same home are no more similar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes. Whatever experiences siblings share by growing up in the same home in a given culture makes little or no difference in the kind of people they turn out to be.

The implications, drawn out most clearly by Judith Rich Harris in her 1998 book "The Nurture Assumption," are mind-boggling. According to a popular saying, "as the twig is bent, so grows the branch." Patients in traditional forms of psychotherapy while away their 50 minutes reliving childhood conflicts and learning to blame their unhappiness on how their parents treated them. Many biographies scavenge through the subject's childhood for the roots of the grown-up's tragedies and triumphs. "Parenting experts" make women feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a reading of "Goodnight Moon. " All these deeply held beliefs will have to be rethought. It's not that parents don't matter at all. Extreme cases of abuse and neglect can leave permanent scars. Skills like reading and playing a musical instrument can be imparted by parents. And parents affect their children's happiness in the home, their memories of how they were treated, and the quality of the lifelong relationship between parent and child. But parents don't seem to mold their children's intellects, personalities, or overall happiness for the rest of their lives.

The implications for science are profound as well. Here is a puzzle: Identical twins growing up together have the same genes, family environments, and peer groups, but the correlations in their traits are only around 50 percent. Ergo, neither genes nor families nor peer groups, nor the interactions among these factors, can explain what makes them different. Researchers have hunted for other possible causes, such as sibling rivalry or differential treatment by parents, but none has panned out. As with Bob Dylan's Mister Jones, something is happening here but we don't know what it is.

My own hunch is that the differences come largely from chance events in development. One twin lies one way in the womb and stakes out her share of the placenta, the other has to squeeze around her. A cosmic ray mutates a stretch of DNA, a neurotransmitter zigs instead of zags, the growth cone of an axon goes left instead of right, and one person's brain might gel into a slightly different configuration from another's, regardless of their genes.

If chance in development is to explain the less-than-perfect similarity of identical twins, it says something interesting about development in general. One can imagine a developmental process in which millions of small chance events cancel one another out, leaving no difference in the end product. One can imagine a different process in which a chance event could derail development entirely, or send it on a chaotic path resulting in a freak or a monster. Neither of these results occurs with a pair of identical twins. They are distinct enough that our instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being. The development of organisms must use complex feedback loops rather than prespecified blueprints. Random events can divert the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope of functioning designs for the species.

These profound questions are not about nature vs. nurture. They are about nurture vs. nurture: about what, exactly, are the nongenetic causes of personality and intelligence. But the questions would never have come to light if researchers had not first taken measures to factor out the influence of nature, by showing that correlations between parents and children cannot glibly be attributed to parenting but might be attributable to shared genes. That was the first step that led them to measure the possible effects of parenting empirically, rather than simply assuming that those effects had to be all-powerful.

The human brain has been called the most complex object in the known universe. No doubt many hypotheses that pit nature against nurture as a dichotomy, or that fail to distinguish the ways in which they might interact, will turn out to be simplistic or wrong. But that complexity does not mean we should fuzz up the issues by saying that it's all just too complicated to think about, or that some hypotheses should be treated a priori as necessarily true, necessarily false, or too dangerous to mention. As with other complex phenomena like inflation, cancer, and global warming, when it comes to the development of a human being we have no choice but to try to disentangle the causes.

Steven Pinker is Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology at MIT and author of "The Language Instinct," and "How the Mind Works." This essay is adapted in part from his latest book, "The Blank Slate."

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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PUBLIC HEALTH

Import Block Holds Up Jabs For Mumps

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Parents are being denied the right to choose single vaccines for their children instead of the controversial MMR jab because of Government import restrictions, a consultant said last night.

Paediatrician Dr Damitha Ratnasinghe was speaking yesterday at the end of Direct Remedies' latest two-day single immunisation clinic at Menzies Hotel, Silverlink, Newcastle, which immunised 120 children over the weekend with single jabs. He said at least 75 children in the North-East were missing out because of restrictions on the import of mumps vaccines.

He spoke as another single jab company, Direct Health 2000, which has immunised more than 30,000 children with the single jabs, said it would start legal action against the Department of Health for restricting availability.

Dr Ratnasinghe says the Government is unfairly restricting the option of single rubella, measles and mumps vaccines as an alternative to the MMR combined vaccine by allowing only 25 doses to be brought into the UK each day for any one importer.

He challenged the Government to lift the restrictions and further called on them to encourage UK drugs companies to produce the single vaccine and eradicate the need for importing.

Direct Health claims restraint of trade as thousands of children are unable to complete their course of vaccinations.

A Health Department spokeswoman said: "The maximum quantity of any unlicensed medicinal product that may be imported per notification is 25 doses. These are not regulations specifically for the single vaccines."

Dr Ratnasinghe said: "There are certainly around 75 children in the North-East who should have had their mumps vaccine by now but because of the restrictions, we simply cannot bring in enough.

"The Government should encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in starting production of single vaccines in the UK. This would help drive down the cost and solve the problem of importing and shortages."

Around 1,000 youngsters across the region have started on a programme of single measles, mumps and rubella jabs, with private clinics following concerns that the triple MMR jab had been linked to autism and bowel disorders.

Leigh and Kevin Scully who set up Direct Remedies said earlier this month they were prepared to wait for mumps vaccines to become available for their 15-month-old son, Taylor.

Yesterday, Leigh, 30, of Tenbury Crescent, North Shields, said: "We have had to turn people away today whose children were due to have the mumps vaccine because we simply have not got any."

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MEDIA

Spice Girl Ex Fined £200 For Autistic Toddler Tush Push: A Bum Rap?

The former husband of Spice Girl Mel B has been fined £200 after being convicted of assaulting a three-year-old autistic boy.

Jimmy Gulzar, 35, was found guilty at Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court in London of striking the boy after the three-year-old pushed another child.

He was ordered to pay an additional £200 costs.

Speaking after the hearing, Gulzar's solicitor John Burton said his client would appeal against the verdict.

He said: "He feels aggrieved by what has occurred today.

"We will be appealing the conviction and for that reason he is not going to answer questions about the case."

Mr Burton said Gulzar had been forced to put his career on hold and a number of contracts - including work as a children's television presenter - had not come off because of the case.

The Dutch-born dancer from Willesden, north London, had denied common assault.

Both children had been playing at London Zoo on 1 September last year.

Gulzar had claimed he hit the boy to protect another child, but District Judge Anthony Evans agreed with the prosecution's argument that Gulzar had lost his temper and smacked the child on his bottom.

The judge said: "I am satisfied that this is not a case of self-defence and that it was a question of assault. I find that proved."

The judge, however, said allegations suggesting the dancer had "roared" were an exaggeration.

He also said a deep red mark on the boy had no relation to the incident involving Gulzar.

He stressed that the level of criminality of the offence was "towards the bottom end" of seriousness as far as assaults were concerned.

He said the case had snowballed because witnesses had sold their stories to newspapers.

"One would expect this case to have been dealt with fairly expeditiously," he said.

"But regrettably it has escalated because of, to use a popular phrase, chequebook journalism."

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Public Radio Show On Autism via Real Audio

Over 1,million people in the U.S. today have autism or some form of pervasive developmental disorder. In fact, autism is one of the most common developmental disabilities.

Yet autism is still largely misunderstood by the health care community and public alike. Dr. Dan Gottlieb will discuss new the treatment of autism with Dr. Stanley Greenspan, author of "The Child with Special Needs." We'll explore the latest research in the autism spectrum with Dr. Susan Levy, Director of the regional autism center at CHOP. Psychologist Dr. Robert Naseef will discuss how families are affected by autism.

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Lenny Schafer, schafer@sprynet.com Kay Stammers Edward Decelie

CALENDAR EVENTS@doitnow.com Michelle Guppy Ron Sleith

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