A C T I O N   A L E R T

August Recess: Putting a Face on Autism

Parents and friends, with Congressional recess starting on August 4, we have a great opportunity to visit with our representatives when they are back in their home districts.  With three landmark pieces of legislation now on the table, a visit with your legislator will not only help these bills gain passage, but will also allow you to help put a face on autism for policy makers.

The opinions of constituents are of paramount importance to our elected officials and face-to-face meetings leave a lasting impression that will influence their support for the legislation most important to our kids.  Don’t forget to bring along a camera to get photos of you and your child meeting with your representative that can then be submitted to local media.  We are creating a website where we will post your photos along with your comments on how your meetings went.  We are constructing the page now and will have it ready in the next few days.  We’ll be following up shortly with a link where you can submit your pictures and the results of your visit with your legislator.

Let’s let Congress hear our voices and see the faces of our children.  These three bills are the most promising pieces of legislation for our community to ever come out of Washington. Legislators need to meet our kids and see for themselves the incredible challenges our families face each and every day.  They need to understand why the bills introduced last week along with one from last year are crucial for the future of our injured children.

H.R. 5887: Vaccine Safety and Public Confidence Assurance Act of 2006

This bill was introduced last week by Congressman Dave Weldon (R-FL) and is co-sponsored by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).  It will revolutionize the way vaccine safety research is conducted, creating a separate agency to oversee vaccine safety.  Currently, vaccine safety research is conducted by the CDC, the same agency responsible for promoting high vaccination rates.  As we all know, this is a conflict of interest that has been detrimental to our children and can no longer be tolerated. 

H.R. 5940: Comprehensive Comparative Study of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Populations Act of 2006

Introduced last week by Representatives Maloney and Tom Osborne (R-NE), this bill would ensure that the studies that should have been undertaken years ago by the CDC are finally conducted.  Comparing health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children will lead to a greater understanding of the potential connection between vaccines and juvenile diabetes, asthma, allergies, neurological disorders and a host of other diagnoses that have risen over the past two decades.

H.R. 881: Mercury-Free Vaccines Act of 2005

This bill was introduced last year by Congressman Weldon and is co-sponsored by Carolyn Maloney.  Thimerosal is still present in many vaccines, including most versions of the flu vaccine routinely administered to pregnant women and young children.  We must convince our legislators that injecting humans with a neurotoxin is not good public health care policy.  Many other countries have banned mercury from vaccines and the U.S. is lagging behind in addressing this obvious risk to human health.

The Time to Act is NOW!

We need to start calling local Congressional offices this week to schedule appointments during the month of August.  Tell your representatives that you support these bills and ask that they become co-sponsors.  For the sake of our children’s future and for the health of generations to come, we must work together to see that they are enacted.

Together, anything’s possible.
 

Think Autism. Think Cure

Hello Agnes

     Welcome to my forum. While I do appreciate your sharing of this information I would like to say that this article comes very close to being an ad rather than a a factual update on autism. We must be very careful when making or repeating statements about illnesses such as autism. While there is no question that some natural substances are beneficial for a lot of different ailments, we cannot base a treatment plan on testimonials. I have been researching autism for a long time now and I have never heard of autism being refered to as merely a swelling of the brain. There is testimonial support for everything that has ever been marketed on the internet. Even the most worthless syber junk ever invented.

     Autism is a very complex disorder that affects it's victims in many different ways. It's causes and treatments are still not very well established and to date there doesn't seem to be a true cure. I would suggest that brain swelling is most likely a condition caused by an upset in a bodily system affected by autism. In other words, brain swelling could be a possible stmptom of autism but it is most certainly not what causes autism. Based on my research, I believe that one of the most likely causes of autism is thimerasol. A mercury based preservative that is injected into our children in immunizations and vaccines. Mercury is one of the most neuro toxic substances known to man and it is being injected into our children at a level 500 times greater than what is permitted by the EPA to be present in our air and water.

     So Agnes, while I do appreciate your contribution to our forum here, I must ask you to be very careful to not cross the line between sharing valuable information and just running an ad. Thank you for stopping by Agnes and I look forward to hearing from you again.

Hello Everybody

   I was just sent a pretty interesting article about a small scale study done on autism. I thought I would share it with you all. If you would, please forward this link to your friends. We have a long way to go in our battle to save our children from the clutches of this terrible illness and we need all the help we can get. Anything you could do to help would certainly be appreciated.

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The Combating Autism Act passed by the U.S. Senate earlier this month includes millions of dollars for research into possible environmental causes of autism.

It`s about time.

Specifically, the bill authorizes $45 million to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to spend over five years in clinical research on possible environmental factors.

While that may sound like a good chunk of change, it`s minuscule compared with spending on (so far) fruitless searches for an 'autism gene.'

In previous installments of this column, I`ve sketched the natural history of the disorder beginning with child psychiatrist Leo Kanner`s landmark 1943 paper, 'Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.'

And I`ve suggested that from the very beginning, an environmental trigger -- something harmful coming from the outside in -- was alarmingly evident. As Macbeth put it, there`s reason to worry that 'Something wicked this way comes.'

Kanner identified 11 children with what he called the 'markedly and uniquely' different disorder of autism. The first child in his case series was born in 1931, the last in 1938. While Kanner focused on the parents` high educational attainment, we proposed a different way of connecting the dots:

-- Case 1, Donald T., grew up in Forest, Miss., which is smack in the middle of national forest land that was being replanted by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the early 1930s.

-- Case 2, Frederick W., was the son of a plant pathologist.

-- Case 3, Richard M., was the son of a forestry professor at a southern university.

What might unite those cases? Mark Blaxill of the advocacy group SafeMinds suggested agricultural chemicals, in particular ethyl-mercury-based fungicides that came on the market about 1930. They were patented by Morris Kharasch, the 'father of organic chemistry,' who also invented thimerosal, the ethyl-mercury-based vaccine preservative some blame for the huge rise in autism diagnoses.

Whether you subscribe to the thimerosal theory or not, any environmental link is a worrisome prospect. And evidence for such a link has expanded over the years.

Recently I had a fascinating conversation with Thomas Felicetti of Beechwood Rehabilitation Services of Langhorne, Pa. I came across work he had done more than a quarter-century ago that strongly suggested a 'chemical connection' in autism.

He summarized that work in the journal Milieu Therapy in 1981, and it is riveting to read in light of everything that has come after -- namely, hundreds of thousands more cases of autism. Felicetti set up a study at the Avalon School in Massachusetts where he was teaching at the time.

'The experimental design was rather simple and straightforward,' he recounted in the paper -- comparing the occupations of 20 parents of autistic children, 20 parents of retarded children and 20 parents of 'normal' children who were friends and neighbors of those attending the school.

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/lifestyle/consumerhealth/article_1191011.php/The_Age_of_Autism_Something_Wicked_--_1