Something Has Happened

Two weeks ago I took a break from blogging to spend time with family who came to visit. Last week was a work catch up week, and I have only begun to catch up with all that has happened in the autism world while I was gone.

As I have been reading, I am seeing things that are surprising me. It is freaking me out a little.

Something has changed around the Cedillo Trial.

I have been following autism news for three years and I have never seen the kind of stories/events that are surfacing.

Dave Weldon and Carolyn Maloney have introduced bipartisan legislation, the Mercury Free Vaccines Act of 2007. Autism Speaks has uncharacteristically decided to back it and oppose AB 16 in Sacramento that would mandate that the State of California automatically adopt any vaccine that the CDC puts on the schedule (and pushed the HPV vaccine). They have never taken a stance on vaccines before. AS is also listing mercury research that was funded by CAN before the merger on their web site, but someone who spends a lot of time on the site said they didn't remember every seeing this page there before. (Anyone know if this is new, or remember seeing it in the past?)

AS has also stepped into the insurance coverage legislation in PA and announced legislative efforts on their web site.

The CDC issued a response to Verstraeten/VSD on their web site with lots of references to thimerosal studies. (I haven't had a chance to read it yet), but how long has it been there? It is not dated and David Kirby, who is a guy who keeps track of these things, didn't even know it was there until a few days ago.

The run up to the Wakefield MMR Trial has reignited doubt in the vaccine in the UK and articles like these are coming out:

At Last They Admit It, This Jab CAN Harm Your Child

The Truth About MMR

DANGERS OF MMR JAB 'COVERED UP'

The Autism Research Institute is now being backed by the giant Autism Society of America, which is now teaming up with Easter Seals who will now make Autism their priority.

Over the last three years, my blog has been visited occasionally by CDC and NIH and a few other government agencies. These visits were few and far between, and always interesting to me when they happened. But now, ramping up with increasing frequency since about April, my blog has been regularly visited by The Powers that Be CDC, NIH, FDA, EPA, HHS, the House and the Senate, The Department of Justice (who are the governments "defendants" in the Cedillo Trial), The Department of Veterans Affairs, The US Forestry Service, The Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, The US Census Bureau, dozens of foreign, state and local governments, a slew of Canadian government agencies, dozens of medical centers/health organizations/universities/dental schools including CHOP (Paul Offit's hospital), Johns Hopkins, The Cleavland Clinic, our pharma friends at Johnson & Johnson and Glaxo Smith Klein, Immunize.org, media corporations Tribune and Gannett, The World Health Organization and even one visit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Apparently the Department of Justice is curious to know when and if the Evidence of Harm movie will be coming out.



Here is my blog traffic graph for the last three years.



2005 - nice little blog with decent traffic. 2006 - took a break from blogging for most of the year. 2007 - Started to write again. Feb/March stats broke but I didn't notice. April was Autism Awareness Month (Damn that is a lot of awareness). May - residual autism awareness?? June - suddenly I am twice as fascinating as I have ever been on my best month! July - on track to have 8,000 visitors despite the fact that I have been on vacation most of the time.

As much as I would love to believe that it is my brilliance that people are coming for, it is probably a safer bet that more people (and more people in positions of power to do something) are awakening to the reality that autism is preventable and treatable and are taking valuable time out of their day to investigate for themselves.

Last month I said that the tide had turned. I think I might have been righter than I thought I was and that the tide might start moving faster than I had anticipated.

Even if I had 40 hours a week to sort all this stuff out, I don't think I could do a decent job. I am just going to start posting references to stories with out much comment just so I can get as much out as possible.

Draw Your Own Analogies

Johnson & Johnson Clears Their Own Product of Autism Link

Critique of JnJ's Rhogam Study

If you don't want to find something, look where it is isn't.

Hey Kids, Get Vaxed!

Bird Flu Vaccine. Now with TWICE the Mercury!

FDA's newly approved Bird Flu vaccine contains 100mgs of Thimerosal which means 50 of Mercury!

http://www.fda.gov/cber/label/h5n1san041707LB.pdf

Whereas you needed to be 550lbs to safely take the mercury laden flu shot with 25 mikes of merc according to the EPA, now you must weigh 1100 lbs to safely take the bird flu shot. Oh... and you need two doses 28 days apart.

How is this making vaccines safer?

If bird flu comes, just don't go outside.

Update: I seem to remember some bad movie from the 70's where people caught a horrible disease from a bird and locked themselves in a clinic and created an vaccine but in the end the vaccine killed them and everyone else ended up being fine. Does anyone remember this movie?

The California Numbers: Autism Declining Among Three Year Olds

During a presentation Kirby gave in May, he mentioned that someone had paid California to study only the three year olds and that in the first quarter of 2007 their autism rate declined.

This quarter they went down again.

And how sad is it that a private citizen had to pay California to run autism numbers on 3 year olds? If they wanted to know what was going on with the children in that state, they would have run the numbers on their own.

Is Autism Declining?
David Kirby
HuffPo
Posted July 12, 2007 | 02:28 AM (EST)

For quite some time, the American government, health establishment and mainstream media have repeated the mantra that mercury containing vaccines were eliminated "several years ago," yet the number of autism cases continues to climb - the inference being that injecting organic mercury into newborn babies has now been proven to be 100% safe.

The problem, though, is that there is no proof that mercury was eliminated "years ago" and, more importantly, now there are signs that autism rates among the youngest children might actually be falling.

On Wednesday, the California Department of Developmental Services released data from the second quarter of 2007, showing that the number of 3-5 year olds with autism in the state system increased by 169 children over the first quarter of 2007. This is about the same quarterly increase seen in the state over the past several years.

But it turns out that a private citizen has paid the state each quarter to analyze the autism numbers according to year of birth, and not just by age group. State law requires that such privately funded analyses be made available to anyone else who asks for it.

So I asked for it. What I got was rather interesting.

After breaking down the current data among 3-5 year olds by year of birth, you notice that the number of cases among children born in 2002 (who are now roughly five years old) and 2003 (or roughly four years old) continued to go up.

But among those kids born in 2004 (who are now turning three years old) the number of cases has fallen, as compared to kids born in 2003.

For example, at the midpoint of 2006, there were 2,250 children born in 2001 (or roughly, five-year olds) with autism counted in the system. By the same period of 2007, the number of kids with autism born in 2002 had risen to 2,490, an increase of 240 children, or 10.7%.

Among "four year olds," the increase was even more dramatic, with 326 more kids diagnosed with autism midway in 2007 than in 2006, a startling jump of 17%.

But among the very youngest kids counted, the story was the opposite. At the end of June 2006, there were 688 children born in 2003 with autism diagnoses. This June, the number of kids born in 2004 with autism was 632, a statistically significant drop of 56 children, or 8.1% less than last year at this time.

This marks the second drop of its kind among the youngest children in California (which tracks "full spectrum" autism only, and not milder forms of the disorder). It follows the first quarter of this year, when 251 children born in 2004 entered the system, compared with 264 kids born in 2003 who were enrolled in the first quarter of 2006 - a modest decline of 13 students, or 4.9%.

Keep in mind that these drops are being reported despite the fact that:

1) Rates among kids born just one or two years earlier continue to spiral upward

2) California has experienced a recent baby boomlet (the number of 0-4 year olds rose by 9,369 in 2002, according to census estimates; but jumped by 62,393 in 2004).

3) Legal and illegal immigration continues to rise from countries that still use the full amount of mercury in childhood vaccines.

4) Aggressive early intervention campaigns have consistently brought down the average age of autism diagnoses.

Intriguing though the numbers may be, it is far too early to know if this refreshing downward movement will turn into a bona fide trend. The deficit of 56 children could be made up by the end of the year.

But the decline does not come in a vacuum. Minnesota, for example, tracks autism among children as young as two years of age, (though the counting is done through the school system, and is considered less reliable than California's data).

The rate of two-year-olds diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Minnesota peaked in 2003, at 4.45-per-10,000 kids. By 2005, the rate fell to 3.88-per-10,000, and last year it was 3.55-per-10,000, a drop of 20.2% since 2003.

We will have to wait until these kids get a bit older to see if the decline holds true.

Meanwhile, back in California at the massive Kaiser Permanente healthcare, officials reported that, among 5-9 year olds in their system in 2006, the rate of ASD was 93-per-10,000. But among the youngest kids, 2-4 years old, it was 66-per-10,000 - some 40% lower.

One would naturally expect to see fewer 2-4 year olds than 5-9 year olds with an ASD diagnosis. But in 2004, Kaiser began recommending routine ASD screening for all children at 24 months of age. Presumably, the majority of the 2-4 year olds in the system have now been screened for ASD, which must, by definition, appear before age 3 for a diagnosis to be made.

Sadly, more 2-year-olds at Kaiser will end up with ASD, and some stragglers among the 3-and-4-year-olds will also turn up. But whether they can make up the 40% deficit compared with their older siblings remains to be seen.

Are autism rates dropping? I would never say they are for sure. We simply have to wait and see.

But there are tantalizing hints that autism is indeed starting to decline among the very youngest children, born and vaccinated more recently, when mercury was transitioned out of most shots.

Which brings us to the, mercury was removed "several years ago" mantra, whose best retort is probably: "Says who?"

According to the Boston Herald, the last mercury-containing shots given to US children expired back in 1999. The Washington Post, meanwhile, put the date at 2001, the FDA said it was 2002, the Institute of Medicine and the Immunization Action Coalition said 2003, and the Council of State Governments claimed it was "early 2004."

Who's right? We may never know. But we do know that companies were still manufacturing mercury-containing shots for American kids in 2001, and most vaccines have a shelf life of about two years. And we know that 90% of flu shots given to pregnant women and infants still contain the full amount of mercury today.

The number of California kids born in 2004 who have autism is, by any measure, still too high. True, we don't know how many of those 632 children were exposed to mercury in routine vaccines overseas, or flu shots here at home. But with numbers this lofty, it's highly unlikely that thimerosal alone was responsible for the entire autism epidemic.

If mercury is but one cause of autism, there must be other causes as well.

Let's say that autism cases among three-year-olds fall by 10% or so by year's end. Could thimerosal be the cause of 10% of autism cases? That would still mean tens of thousands of Americans injured by mercury in their vaccines. Moreover, identifying the cause in just 10% of cases might help us discover what is causing the other 90%.

But I am writing way ahead of myself here.

Regardless of one's position on the mercury-autism contretemps, I hope everyone can agree that an actual drop in the numbers, no matter what the cause, would provide a welcome respite from the endless chorus of grim news we all seem to face these days.

[At the request of Kristina Chew and David Kirby I had removed the following two updates. I have since thought better of it and replaced them. I thought it was a move to keep the peace, but as no peace has been kept, I will repost it. Censorship, especially after the fact, is rarely a good idea, and I am sorry that I did it. I will be offering a full discussion on the matter in another post.

As I cannot repost the deleted comments from Ms. Chew and Ms. Clark, I invite them to repost them to the comments section if they wish.]

UPDATE: Roy Grinker, epidemic denier at GW, leaves an comment on the HuffPo piece, but doesn't use his real name. Kirby calls him out and offers a public debate.

RE: This comment on Huffpost:

“Unfortunately, Mr. Kirby continues to believe that California's DDS enrollment figures constitute epidemiological data. They do not. The author even makes a claim about statistical significance! He also introduces a new term into the discussion -- "full spectrum" -- (which he suggests is equivalent to Autistic Disorder) -- and states that the DDS counts only Autistic Disorder, not PDD-NOS, or Asperger's, or Down's Syndrome children with autism, or any other phenotype. This is absolutely wrong. Not even the best epidemiological studies are particularly good at distinguishing among the subtypes. It is truly disappointing to see the Huffington Post continue to publish phony epidemiology.”

Signed: Mfano

But “backstage” I see that his email is actually rgrink@gwu.edu

If Dr. Grinker would like to debate this subject out in the open, using his real name, I would be more than happy to take part. You would think that someone of his stature would have more pressing things to do with George Washington University’s time and bandwidth than send anonymous, erroneous comments to national political blogs.

Update: From "celiacdaughter" on the EOH list:

...If you search some of his (Mfano) previous posts you will also note that he enjoys using the third person when discussing himself:

"So Foresam, tell us: how Grinker should look for autistic adults? The woman Grinker and Chew wrote about in the blog wasn't on record anywhere as autistic. Grinker doesn't say, but she probably bit herself and smeared feces too. No one missed her. She was called mentally retarded and given lots of treatment and care. She just wasn't called autistic"...

Update: Back to the original point. A mom in Iowa says Autism rates are dropping there too.

"It seems to me, there is a story in the Iowa stats as well. Iowa being the first state to remove/ban thimerosal, with exception to influenza, and our rates reflect a 20% decrease."

http://www.vaproject.org/statistics/autism-statistics.html

National Autism Prevalence Trends from United States Special Education Data

The following is taken from the official State statistics produced by the Department of Education in the United States, for numbers of children aged 3-5 served by IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) who have autism. It compares the increase over five years between 2000-01 and 2005-06:

State	2000-2001	2005-2006	Percentage Increase
Alabama	84	178	112
Alaska	27	X	X
Arizona	94	287	205
Arkansas	95	106	12
California	3,422	7,968	133
Colorado	53	157	196
Connecticut	152	412	171
Delaware	62	101	63
DC	16	39	144
Florida	847	1,598	89
Georgia	272	550	102
Hawaii	88	149	69
Idaho	28	86	207
Illinois	670	1,256	87
Indiana	456	777	70
Iowa	128	102	-20
Kansas	87	172	98
Kentucky	168	270	61
Louisiana	121	294	143
Maine	150	311	107
Maryland	371	641	73
Massachusetts	231	1,370	493
Michigan	631	1,212	92
Minnesota	345	1,159	236
Mississippi	34	69	103
Missouri	134	283	111
Montana	40	44	10
Nebraska	37	154	316
Nevada	89	422	374
New Hampshire	55	112	104
New Jersey	397	734	85
New Mexico	6	96	1,500
New York	2,244	X	X
North Carolina	261	780	199
North Dakota	17	39	129
Ohio	326	397	22
Oklahoma	9	57	533
Oregon	429	782	82
Pennsylvania	594	2,063	247
Puerto Rico	147	116	-21
Rhode Island	48	121	152
South Carolina	121	281	132
South Dakota	35	80	129
Tennessee	153	416	172
Texas	1,108	2,123	92
Utah	58	247	326
Vermont	14	48	243
Virginia	222	548	147
Washington	64	409	539
West Virginia	14	33	136
Wisconsin	410	485	18
Wyoming	21	37	76
Total	15,685	30,171	92

Source: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act data, US Department of Education.
X - Figures not available

Documenting Autism Recoveries

From Steven Edelson of the Autism Research Institute:

Dear ARI e-newsletter subscriber,

To date, more than 1,100 families with recovered or nearly-recovered children have registered on our website, www.AutismIsTreatable.com. Our list continues to grow on a steady basis! This is remarkable and much-needed news for all of those families working to help their own children recover from autism.

Starting next week, I will be driving through the Midwest to meet with families whose children have recovered or nearly recovered from autism. During these visits, I will be collecting records, reports and videos looking at children who were diagnosed with autism (and had the characteristic symptoms); and videotaping them to show how well they are doing now.

If your son/daughter has recovered or has almost recovered from autism, please consider participating in this project. The criteria for your child to be included in the project are:


1. Your child can no longer be diagnosed as autistic. Other people who meet the child would never have imagined that he or she once had autism.

2. Your child is no longer considered autistic by the school teacher and no longer needs an aide while attending mainstreamed school classes.

3. Your child has less than one hour per week of speech therapy (or none at all).

4. You can provide official documentation of your child's autism diagnosis from an established autism clinic, a government-sponsored assessment center, a hospital, a psychologist, and/or a physician.

(It is all right if your son/daughter is receiving help for reading and his/her verbal ability is slightly lower than his/her same-aged peers.)

If your child meets the criteria described above and you live on or near the route outlined below, we invite you to participate in the project. Since I will not be able to visit every city in the Midwest, I plan to stop for a day or two in several moderate- to large-size cities.

The tentative dates and driving route:


· July 16 to 26
o Hwy 10 E - from Phoenix to San Antonio
o Hwy 35 N - from San Antonio to Oklahoma City
o Two possible routes from Oklahoma City to St. Louis (not yet determined)
§ Hwy 35 N to 70 E
§ Hwy 44 E
· July 30 to August 10
o Hwy 55 N - from St. Louis to Chicago
o Hwy 90/94 W - from Chicago to Seattle
Note: I will be stopping in cities along the driving route that are not mentioned above.

A map of my route is located at: www.autism.com/roadtrip

If you do not live near or along this route and you are willing to drive several hours to participate in this project, ARI can pay for travel and one night of lodging costs.

Unfortunately, I will not know the exact dates when I will be in each city until three or fours days before my arrival. If your schedule is somewhat flexible, an ARI staff member will call you once the date, time, and place have been determined. The appointment should last about two hours.

When you meet with me, please bring:


· Most, or preferably all, of your documentation, including diagnostic assessment(s), on your son or daughter. I will bring a small photocopy machine with me to copy the documents. However, I would appreciate it if you could copy the documents in advance and/or scan them (pdf format) and save them on a cd-rom disc. ARI will reimburse you for any costs involved in copying your documents.

· If available, please bring any drawings your son or daughter made while he/she had autism as well as recent drawings.

· If available, please bring videos providing evidence that your child was truly autistic. I will bring equipment with me to copy most video formats. It will be very helpful if you can cue the videos to those behaviors often associated with autism, such as hand-flapping, rocking, echolalia, or self-injurious behavior.
Please note: Your son's/daughter's identity will remain anonymous when reporting these findings.

I look forward to meeting informally with groups of parents in the evenings. As Director of the Autism Research Institute, it is critical for me to stay in touch with the autism community, to hear your feedback on interventions, and the role that ARI and DAN! have played in your child's improvement. If you would like to arrange such a "get-together," please send an email to: recovery@autism.com.

We look forward to hearing from interested parents. Please call our office at: 619.281.7165 for more information. ARI's staff will ask you several questions that should take about 10 to 15 minutes. Your help, as always, is very much appreciated!

Best Regards,

Stephen M. Edelson, Ph.D.
Director

Bill Welsh of Autism Treatment Trust Shames UK Epedemic Deniers

Give'em Hell, Bill!

Undeniable Fact of Autism
The Scotsman
Wed 11 Jul 2007

It will come as no surprise to parents that one child in 58 in the UK has autism (your report, 9 July). The diagnosis of this devastating childhood condition has increased to such an extent since 1990 that many families are now affected. What is very worrying is that it has taken so many years for the "experts" to even concede that there is an autism epidemic.

Psychiatrists and psychologists and those within the traditional autism support and services organizations must bear the responsibility for this tragic state of affairs, as it is they who have continually denied what we have been witnessing with our own eyes. Foreign epidemiological studies that never survive close scrutiny are paraded as proof that an estimated 100-fold increase in autism is a mirage, or that the controversial MMR vaccine cannot possibly be implicated. The Scotsman article clearly helps illustrate what is a farcical and irrational stance in the face of the latest Cambridge University revelations.

By sustaining their standpoint, these interest groups have hampered clinical examination, and therefore medical treatments.

Autism Treatment Trust opened a consultation and treatment centre in Edinburgh in April 2006 and to date has comprehensively tested almost 200 autistic children. The results are very revealing. For example, heavy-metal toxicity is a common feature, with significantly high levels of lead, aluminium, tin and antimony present.

Inflammation, particularly of the bowel, is often identified. Immune dysfunction is a recurring theme. Food allergies and intolerances regularly emerge.

These abnormalities are all treatable. The simple fact is, autistic children are ill and have been failed at every turn.

This is a shameful episode.

BILL WELSH
President, Autism Treatment Trust
Great King Street
Edinburgh

The Impact of One Autistic Child

Walgreen VP Randy Lewis has an autistic son named Austin.

Austin changed Randy and Randy changed Walgreens and Walgreens changed the lives of more of the disabled and is now changing the way companies think about our children.

Contrast this with my last post. The solution to disability is not terminating the lives of the disabled.

... and also Walgreens Rocks!

The Blessings of a Least Of These Downs Syndrome Child

Virginia is the mother of a young adult with Downs. She grieves for the children who would have been her daughter's friends, had their parents chosen life.

This is the future of children with the genetic predisposition for autism if the gene track is put at the forefront of research.

Not healing our children, eliminating them.

I will say it again, disabled children are a blessing. In the pain and the struggle all the unimportant crap falls away and as Virginia notes, you have to slow down. Life becomes purposeful by necessity.

If we do not come together to serve these children, not the disorder, not the research community, not a medical program, not the pharma infrastructure, not non-profits, not even the parents, but the best interests of the child in front of you, and then the next child in line, then we just move faster and faster down the road toward moral bankruptcy.

What has happened to children with Downs must not happen to our children.

Virginia Arbery: Ending Down syndrome pregnancies bears all the marks of a pogrom
Dallas Morning News
09:06 AM CDT on Sunday, July 8, 2007

The year Julia was born in New Hampshire, 1987, I was the only geriatric pregnancy in the state issuing in a Down syndrome child. When I recovered from the pediatrician's insult – I was 37 – I learned from him that the other nine mothers in the state to deliver Down syndrome babies were still in their 20s.

I asked him why this was the case; conventional wisdom had led me to believe that the likelihood of giving birth to a Down syndrome child increased with maturity. When he told me that most woman over 34 usually had amniocentesis done to avoid giving birth to a Down syndrome child, I was stunned. After first being dismayed by – what to call it? – my demographic solitude, I soon turned my attention to what Down syndrome meant practically for my new infant. The books we quickly read, and the instruction from excellent social services helped us. Operating outside the realm of reason and structure were other powerful supports – call them graces.

At the end of Julia's first week, I learned that a publisher friend of ours had lost his wife to colon cancer. We had known them since graduate school, and the widower came over to tell us that his wife gathered their eight children around her bed to pray for Julia and us every night of that first week.

Even as she said goodbye to her own children and to the infant she had given birth to – an operation might have saved her and killed the baby inside of her – Susan was thinking about our challenge. I felt a liberating happiness over Julia, as did our little girls and their dad, for reasons too deeply private to explain.

Julia's life soon began to bring out the excellences of others. She brought our little college community even closer together, a joy to the students and a prize to anyone who held her. Early Intervention trained us to stimulate areas of her brain by waking up facial muscles, working to get her to sit up or to crawl – a task she never mastered, scooting instead with her two hands and bottom.

I would go from teaching the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers, to a large room uptown with five other mothers propping up their floppy babies. Nothing else has ever quite brought home the meaning of "all men are created equal endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

We were all working for that fullest expression of life and happiness for our babies. I thought about the "prudent" mothers who had aborted their own children with Down syndrome. I grieved for those who, exercising their reproductive rights – a new appropriation of the older notion of liberty, which was rooted in duty – would never know the profound satisfaction of raising such a child.

I will never forget Julia's first birthday with all her sisters around her. When we finished singing happy birthday, Julia put her hands together and clapped for the first time. Of course, we all cried on cue. Things that were so ordinary for the others became accomplishments – triumphs.

Julia slowed us down, and, instead of waiting for each stage of development to naturally emerge, we would coax it along, beckoning it with intentionality and art. She taught each child an intelligence of the heart, and she began to teach me patience.

Each member in our family could give a personalized account of his or her relation to Julia. Every daughter, for instance, has a perspective on her own vanity because of her. Julia expected to be 3 inches taller when she turned 16; I solved that problem by buying her 3-inch platform wedges.

But often it's not that simple. For instance, on the way to school she will pull down the visor mirror, look at herself, and say, "When I get to heaven, my eyes are going to be like my sisters', and I am going to be 5-foot-11, and my voice is going to sound like Kelly Clarkson's." I tell her that God made her the way she is, that she wouldn't be Julia any other way, that we love her just as she is, and that she is beautiful.

Of course, not everyone thinks that way. Some told me I should not make the same mistake twice – to have my tubes tied. I'm glad I didn't. Our one son was born after Julia, when I was 40, and our seventh daughter – now a sophomore at Ursuline – two years later.

Our son just graduated from Cistercian Preparatory School. Over the past few years, he and his classmates have helped to organize the bi-annual Down syndrome Dance. Will's friends love Julia, and she shamelessly loves them back. They'll all be here at her 20th birthday party Tuesday. She will probably sing "Desperado," as she did at the recent graduation of two of her sisters, belting it out on key and bringing the house down.

I understand that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is offering women a safer method than amniocentesis to determine whether a child has Down syndrome. The College makes the argument that it is more responsible to inform parents of their options beforehand so that they can decide whether or not to let the baby live.

This argument shakes me to the core, for it bears all the marks of a pogrom – the license to be aggressive against the most benign population conceivable.

Until now I have never been an advocate of special needs' issues. I have quietly reared my daughter and her brother and six sisters. But I can remain silent no longer. Twenty years ago, many of Julia's potential friends who are like her were intentionally eliminated, perhaps out of fear or perhaps out of a desire for a regular family with regular children.

I think of those thousands of children who will never change those families for the better. They will never be at a Down syndrome dance, never hug their grandmothers, unafraid of their wrinkles or of people's imperfections. Who will love us as well, as simply, with such undesigning candor if we invent a world protected from our difficult blessings?

Ironically, scientific work on turning off the additional action of the genes that cause cognitive impairment in Trisomy 21 now offers more hope than ever before, especially at Stanford School of Medicine's Center for Research and Treatment for Down Syndrome (dsresearch.stanford .edu). More research dollars are going into killing these children before they are born than into this noble project of helping them. And why? Because citizens value their freedom?

Are my husband and I less free because we might have Julia with us our whole lives? Hardly. We would probably be enslaved to many more false notions of reality. In any case, we must trust that there will be a meaningful work and life for Julia. Maybe one of her sisters will take her in. Maybe she'll live in a group home.

These are all decisions we will have to make as a couple, as a family and with Julia. These will not be easy decisions. One thing is sure, though: She is our defining blessing. How could we have known that in advance? To accept her full humanity is to accept our real selves in all our imperfections.

My son put it well in describing how Julia likes to personalize her lead pencils, tapping them on the table top as they become characters in her daily life – at school or at home. We will sometimes hear ourselves oddly repeated in her animated version of our loss of temper or other foibles. In describing this game Julia plays, our son wrote that as she taps her pencil people, she taps into us.

Virginia Arbery teaches in the Master of Humanities Program at The University of Dallas and is the mother of eight children. Her e-mail address is varbery@sbcglobal.net.

A Tribute to Autism Parents

Wendy Fournier of NAA put this together.

Thanks Wendy.

World Health Org Bans a Hep B Vaccine After Infant Deaths

WHO bans vaccine, sends experts to probe child deaths in Vietnam
Thanh Nien News

The World Health Organization has suspended the use of a Hepatitis B vaccine worldwide after three newborns died and another became seriously ill in Vietnam after getting shots in the last few weeks.

Nguyen Tran Hien, head of a council set up in Vietnam to investigate the cases, told the council’s first meeting that two international experts from the UN health agency would arrive in Vietnam Saturday to work with local investigators.

The cases occurred between April 23 and May 7 in Ho Chi Minh City, Ha Tinh Province, and Thanh Hoa Province.

One baby fully recovered after taking ill.

The WHO-approved vaccine is made by South Korea's LG Life Sciences and distributed in Vietnam through a UN program.

Earlier this month, Vietnam instructed all localities nationwide to stop using the vaccine.

WHO's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals has asked that countries around the world stop using shots from the affected batches until the cause of the illness can be determined.