The Autism News

The Autism News | English

(Jenny McCarthy by Jeff Minton for TIME)

By Karl Taro Greenfeld | Time

In person, surprisingly, Jenny McCarthy comes across as corn-fed cute rather than overwhelmingly beautiful. She has a common touch, and a woman even slightly more beautiful would struggle to connect as she does. When McCarthy meets a mom, when she spits forth a stream of profanity and common sense — the foulmouthed comedian from Chicago never far from the surface — she is there as a mother, not as a celebrity or starlet. That’s what got her there, but that’s not who she is once she’s there. She speaks to so many frustrated, despairing mothers of autistic children because she is plausible, authentic. If you needed a woman to bring hope to these mothers, you couldn’t ask for better casting than Jenny McCarthy.

We are sitting around a sushi-laden coffee table in the Sherman Oaks, Calif., headquarters of Generation Rescue, the autism advocacy group she heads. It’s a gray, one-story house with white trim and a picket-fence-enclosed yard, across the street from the home she lived in for four years with her son Evan, 7, and John Asher, who is her ex-husband and Evan’s father. She has converted the house into a state-of-the-art school for very young autistic kids, an intensive early-intervention program called the Teach2Talk Academy. The school is a model in many ways, not least because of its 1-to-1 teacher-student ratio and sparkling facilities. It’s the kind of place she was desperate to get Evan into when he was first diagnosed with autism in 2005. (See TIME’s photo-essay “A Journey into the World of Autism.” )

The lacerating pilgrimage that parents of autistic children know all too well, lugging their child from specialist to specialist, from program to program, seeking help, answers, a cure — catalyzed her mission. First McCarthy was a mother “finding a window” into her son. Then she became a mother who felt she needed to tell other mothers how she found that window. Those mothers have become her flock. She greets them all, here in Sherman Oaks, on her way through airport terminals, in restaurants, on talk-show sets; she will stop, nod, listen, proffer advice, give a phone number and tell these mothers, these families, to never give up hope. “Hope is the greatest thing for moms of autism,” McCarthy says. “Hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning. I’m on a mission to tell parents that there is a way.” (See six tips for traveling with an autistic child.)

McCarthy’s way, however, is one that flies in the face of all credible research on what does and does not cause autism and whether it can be treated. McCarthy claims Evan was healed through a range of experimental and unproved biomedical treatments; even more controversially, she blames the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine for giving her son autism. And yet research conclusively shows that vaccines are safe for children; just last month, the U.K. scientist who had published a study linking the MMR shot to autism was found by a British medical panel to have acted unethically. McCarthy says she does not believe all vaccines are bad — though she swears she will never allow Evan to receive another — nor is she saying you shouldn’t vaccinate your child. Her position is more slippery but just as heretical to prevailing medical wisdom: do everything necessary to cure your child, no matter what the doctors tell you. (Comment on this story.)

This message has won her a wide audience, based on her three best-selling books on autism. She has just completed shooting the pilot for a daytime talk show for Oprah Winfrey’s TV network to begin airing later this year — which will be, she promises, yet another platform for her message. But her profile has also made her, among pediatricians, other doctors and many parents, a deeply polarizing figure. Though close to 80% of American children receive the standard battery of vaccinations, skepticism about their safety remains widespread, in part because of the antiscientific clamor of the McCarthy camp. Enough parents are refusing to vaccinate that some long-dormant maladies, like measles and meningitis, have re-emerged. Nonvaccination rates among kindergartners in some California counties have been reported at 10%. To McCarthy’s opponents, from the public-health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the pediatricians of the American Academy of Pediatrics, this makes McCarthy much worse than a crank: she’s a menace to public health. (See the top 10 Oprah protégés.)

But she can’t be ignored. If the debate about vaccine safety is settled — vaccines don’t cause autism; they don’t injure children; they are the pillar of modern public health — then why are so many parents reconsidering vaccinating their children? The answer has to do with our era’s strained relationship with scientific truth, our tendency to place more faith in psychological truths than scientific ones. McCarthy’s emergence — the Playmate turned pseudoscientist, the fart-joke teller cum mother warrior — can make one feel nostalgic for the time when celebs turned up on talk shows only to hawk their flicks or books, not to promote explosive public-health ideas. But McCarthy says she is speaking the truth — her truth.

Read an interview with Jenny McCarthy about autism and vaccines.

See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2009.

It goes something like this: in McCarthy’s world, there is scientific truth and there is emotional truth. There is the fact of a mother looking into her son’s eyes and knowing something has gone very wrong and the fact of about two dozen studies showing no link between vaccines and autism. There is the truth of the parents and the truth of the doctors. And she believes that some truths are more equal than others. “She’s a mom,” says her boyfriend, actor Jim Carrey. “That’s what she is. That’s her truth.” It all sounds so reasonable, expressed by the charming, gamine Jenny McCarthy. And this is what makes her dangerous.

‘Try Everything’
The Catholic girl from Chicago who got her start as a Playboy model was the second of four daughters of a steel-mill-foreman father and courtroom-custodian mother. She attended Mother McAuley High School. “It can be hard for the cute girl,” she recalls. “I was blond, cute, broke. I was beat up. I was thrown inside lockers. I was burned with cigarettes. My hair was lit on fire.” To earn money for college — she studied nursing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — she sent her photos to Playboy and was Miss October and eventually Playmate of the Year in 1994. Her subsequent career as a comedian and actress took her through MTV game shows, her own sitcom and various roles in B movies. She is now probably more famous as an advocate for her views on autism than she ever was as an actress, and it has given her a power out of proportion to her show-business success. (See the top 10 MTV moments.)

In 2005, McCarthy’s son Evan, then 2, began having seizures so severe he required repeated emergency hospitalization. McCarthy had noticed that Evan had some developmental delays, compared with his peers in a playgroup they attended, and he exhibited some atypical behaviors: arm flapping, repetitive actions and fixation on strange objects. She describes her panic at Evan’s diagnosis in her memoir Louder than Words: “I wished to God the doctor had handed me a pamphlet that said, ‘Hey, sorry about the autism, but here’s a step-by-step list on what to do next.’ But doctors don’t do that. They say ’sorry’ and move you along.” McCarthy began to try almost every treatment that turned up on Google. Evan went through conventional, intensive Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy as well as a host of alternative approaches, including a gluten-free and casein-free (GFCF) diet, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, chelation, aromatherapies, electromagnetics, spoons rubbed on his body, multivitamin therapy, B-12 shots and a range of prescription drugs. McCarthy says she made a deal with God. “Help me fix my boy,” she prayed, “and I’ll teach the world how I did it.”

She believes she did fix her boy. A psychological evaluation from UCLA’s neuropsychiatric hospital, dated May 10, 2005, was “conclusive for a diagnosis of Autistic Disorder,” and yet here, running toward us on a warm California afternoon, is Evan, shouting out, “Are you here to play with me? When are we going to play?” McCarthy’s boy is a vivacious, articulate and communicative child who seems to have beaten the condition. He is an inspiration, the fact of him as incontrovertible as any study done in any laboratory in the world. (See pictures of a school for autistic children.)

Or is this the truth? There are dark murmurings from scientists and doctors asking, Was her son ever really autistic? Evan’s symptoms — heavy seizures, followed by marked improvement once the seizures were brought under control — are similar to those of Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a rare childhood neurological disorder that can also result in speech impairment and possible long-term neurological damage. Or, as other pediatricians have suggested, perhaps the miracle I have beheld is the quotidian miracle of childhood development: a delayed 2-year-old catching up by the time he is 7, a commonplace, routine occurrence, nothing more surprising than a short boy growing tall. It is enraging to the mother to hear that nothing was wrong with her boy — she held him during his seizures, saw his eyes roll up after he received his vaccines — and how can you say that she doesn’t know what she knows? (See “The Year in Health 2009: From A to Z.” )

With the diagnosis of her son and the book she wrote about their journey together, McCarthy became the world’s most famous parent of an autistic child. “I knew I was going to be the voice of the families when this happened,” she says. “Because I had the platform. In my head, something said, ‘You can get booked on talk shows.’ If there was a purpose from God, he just picked someone who can get booked on talk shows. I just fell into this truth … The only reason I’m getting this much attention is because I represent hundreds of thousands of mothers who have the same story.” During appearances on Oprah, 20/20, Good Morning America, Larry King Live and other television shows, she decried what she claimed was a vast, profitable conspiracy to vaccinate children, which she said was responsible for the great upsurge in autism diagnoses. Often appearing with her boyfriend Carrey (who lives with Jenny and Evan), she glibly and with irate dismissal of the scientific evidence accused pediatricians and doctors of poisoning children and then withholding the treatments that could save them.

See Valentine’s Day cards made by first graders.

Read “Inside the Autistic Mind.”

During her appearance on Oprah in 2007, she launched a typical fusillade: “What number does it have to be … for people just to start listening to what the mothers of children who have autism have been saying for years … I told my pediatrician something happened … after [he was vaccinated] ?… Boom — the soul was gone from his eyes.” Later, when Oprah read a comment from the CDC stating that the vast majority of the science to date did not support her assertion, McCarthy replied, “My science is Evan. He’s at home. That’s my science.”

Such statements could not have won over mothers and found such a ready audience if there weren’t many who felt they were hearing someone state what they had long suspected. McCarthy may have been promoting her book, but she had inadvertently become the poster mom for a movement. “Jenny gave us a face,” says Kim Stagliano, a mother of three autistic girls and one of the founders of the popular blog Age of Autism. “I feel like Jenny going public was pretty brave … There is a certain personality within the Curebie community [parents who believe they can cure their autistic children], and that was who she was.” (See more about autism.)

The biomedical treatments McCarthy espouses — and it is hard to find a controversial, novel or alternative treatment that McCarthy doesn’t say has some merit — are often decried by mainstream pediatricians and other physicians and as being untested or unproven. Yet it is rare to find a family struggling with an autistic child that hasn’t tried at least some version of one of them. While every illness brings forth unproven treatments, autism, because there has been so little progress in terms of finding a cause, much less a proven cure, has been a field replete with controversial therapies that lure in desperate parents.

“Try everything,” says McCarthy. “Hope is the only thing that will get us up in the morning.”

Her critics, however, describe that as false hope. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has been outspoken in decrying the antivaccine movement and various alternative autism treatments in his best-selling book Autism’s False Prophets. He categorically condemns McCarthy’s message. “It’s not fair to these parents,” he says. “I think false hope is worse than no hope.” (See TIME’s photo-essay “A Journey into the World of Autism.” )

The Autism Riddle
The history of autism treatments has been too often filled with false hope. There are 730,000 Americans under age 21 who have been diagnosed with autism. But for decades, autism was considered an exceedingly rare disorder and was viewed as a life sentence. In the 1970s, parents sought out a range of alternative and unconventional treatments. There was patterning (in which the autistic child was retaught to crawl), multivitamin therapy, bee-pollen therapy and various restrictive diets. There was the gentleman who claimed he had cured his son by hugging him a lot — he wrote a best-selling book about it — and others who claimed they had cured their child by teaching him or her to swim. There has been the facilitation movement, in which “facilitators” supposedly helping nonverbal autistic children type words turned out to be making the statements themselves, and the secretin controversy, in which parents paid thousands of dollars for a hormone believed to successfully treat autism before several clinical trials showed no actual impact. All of these cost parents small fortunes and years of anguish. And all of them are still being practiced by some segments of the autism community today. (See six tips for traveling with an autistic child.)

Yet it is important to remember that?the first and still the only treatment that has been shown to make a demonstrably positive developmental impact on autistic children started out as a somewhat radical movement. Behavioral therapy — involving methods, not so different from animal-training techniques, that are now known as ABA, PRT (Pivotal Response Training) and a host of other acronyms — was vilified by many, including what was then the mainstream of autism, when it started in the 1960s. After clinical trials produced positive results, it became the basic treatment for autism. But the success rate for this therapy remains painfully low. A recent study by University of Connecticut psychologist Deborah Fein shows that at least 10% of autistic children undergoing ABA can overcome the disorder by age 9, while others show more modest improvement. That makes for a depressing picture for most parents of autistic children.

And that’s where McCarthy comes in. She is telling the parents that yes, your son or daughter can be healed. “I have three children on the spectrum,” says Stagliano. “I have yet to really get one actionable piece of assistance from my pediatrician. They offer nothing. Nothing … These treatments are filling a vacuum.”

See TIME’s special report “How to Live 100 Years.”

See pictures of a school for autistic children.

McCarthy’s conviction stems from her having “recovered” her own son from autism. “Evan couldn’t talk — now he talks. Evan couldn’t make eye contact — now he makes eye contact. Evan was antisocial — now he makes friends,” she explains. “It was amazing to watch, over the course of doing this, how certain therapies work for certain kids and they completely don’t work for others … When something didn’t work for Evan, I didn’t stop. I stopped that treatment, but I didn’t stop.” (See how genes, gender and diet may be life extenders.)

Well before McCarthy’s son was diagnosed, that was the course most parents were following anyway. I recall my parents in the 1970s trying out a range of therapies and various diets for my younger brother Noah, a low-functioning adult autistic: everything from chiropractic adjustments to megavitamin doses to copper bracelets. McCarthy was the first celebrity to embrace this approach publicly and to hit the airwaves pep-talking mothers to never give up. That is what she tells those parents who seek her out here at Generation Rescue — and the 200,000 mothers she has met on her various autism tours and speaking engagements.

Of course, McCarthy is not a doctor. She really has only the one prescription: hope. And then parents should try every treatment out there until they find one that works. She is careful to avoid the word cure, always using recovery. “I look at autism like a bus accident, and you don’t become cured from a bus accident, but you can recover,” she says. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

The Persistence of Hope
It is precisely that word that makes her views incendiary. “Recovery” from what, exactly? The treatments promoted by McCarthy purport to treat an injury, specifically one to the immune or digestive system of the autistic child — and the agent that activists like McCarthy most commonly point to as the cause of the injury is the MMR vaccine. The antivaccine movement has by now gone through numerous iterations in trying to explain how autism happens. The latest alleged culprit is the sheer number of vaccines: at least 10 administered, in 26 shots, during a child’s first 36 months. Each of these theories has been thoroughly discredited by scientific research, but that has done nothing to silence McCarthy and her Generation Rescue colleagues. “Come and see our kids,” says McCarthy. “Why won’t the CDC come and talk to the mothers, talk to the families? Then tell us there isn’t a link.”

For all her bravado, McCarthy prefers to cast herself as a voice of moderation. She claims her goal is to move the debate toward what she sees as the middle, where more research dollars are poured into alternative treatments and the search for an environmental cause. (A great deal of research is currently focused on finding a genetic cause.) She has backed off from her most heated rhetoric and says she is now not against all vaccines but is in favor of studying them further and modifying the schedule by which they are administered. The problem is that every study has shown there is no correlation between vaccines and autism and that the risk of injury from vaccination is far lower than the risk of disease from being unvaccinated. Alison Singer of the Autism Science Foundation bemoans the potential loss of research into causes and treatments for autism because of continued preoccupation with the vaccine issue. “I felt that 22 vaccine studies were enough,” she says. “Given that we don’t have unlimited resources, it made sense to say we looked at vaccines and found no causal relationship.” McCarthy, she goes on to say, “has been very successful at bringing the politics into the science.” (See Dr. Mehmet Oz’s prescription for living long and living well.)

McCarthy vows to continue her fight, spreading her truth, for “the rest of my life?… I would love to be on Stage 19, yukking it up as a Hollywood actress, but how could I not step up here and be the voice? And I’ll continue to be the voice.” It is impossible to overlook the larger and direct dangers inherent in her position on vaccines. Yet it is equally difficult to ignore the emotional core of what she is saying: Listen to parents. If doctors won’t, then McCarthy will. While I was reporting this story, I talked to my parents about what I was working on. They have been living with autism for the past 40 years. My father listened and then told me to ask McCarthy about a specific alternative therapy he had heard about and was interested in trying on my 42-year-old brother Noah.

I thought about this as I was driving out to the San Fernando Valley to see McCarthy and realized she was right: parents will never stop hoping.
Source: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1967796,00.html

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The Autism News | English

Dave M. Benett/Getty Images

By Natalie Finn | E! Online

Remember when Jim Carrey was just funny?

The French knight and lady love Jenny McCarthy are speaking out again on behalf of their pet cause, the continuing quest to prove a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, an incredibly controversial issue that has scared many and polarized many more.

The latest thorn in their collective side is what they perceive to be the virulent smear on the character and work of British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, who authored a landmark paper in 1998 about the possibility that 12 patients with autism and bowel disease were affected by their MMR vaccines.

According to Carrey and McCarthy, Wakefield is now having an awful time getting his current work published, for no good reason other than corporate treachery.

“Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent a historic study from being published that for the first time looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated primates and compares health outcomes, with potentially devastating consequences for vaccine makers and public health officials,” read part of a long, detailed statement issued Friday by the couple.

Wakefield and his colleagues are “on the brink of publishing their entire study,” they wrote. “It is our understanding that the difference in outcome for the vaccinated monkeys versus the unvaccinated controls is both stark and devastating.”

“Having denied the possibility of the vaccine-autism connection for so long while profiting immensely from a recent boom in vaccine sales around the world, it’s no surprise that [vaccine makers] would seek to repress this important work,” the statement continued.

Britain’s General Medical Council ruled last month that Wakefield had been “dishonest, irresponsibile and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain of children” while conducting his research in the 1990s.

In 2004, 10 of the 13 authors of the 1998 paper disassociated themselves from the article and the editor of the journal it was published in called it “fatally flawed,” according to London’s Telegraph.

Meanwhile, there are others, like the 40,000 people who subscribe to The Autism File, which grew from Wakefield’s study—as well as Carrey and McCarthy, apparently—who consider the doc a hero.

So obviously they’re not alone. But is it encouraging or irritating that McCarthy, whose son suffers from autism, and Carrey are issuing their own epic statements on these complex scientific issues?

Source: http://ca.eonline.com/uberblog/b165972_jim_carrey_jenny_mccarthy_jump_back.html

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The Autism News | English

By Benjamin Radford | Discovery News

Earlier this week, research published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Pediatrics found no evidence that special diets have any influence on autistic children.

This was a blow to some parents of autistic children who had hoped for a cure, but things took a more tragic twist when Diane Sawyer of “ABC Nightly News” followed a report of the autism study with,”We asked Jenny McCarthy, the actress and activist for a response.”

Um, okay.

The news directors at ABC News presumably have some of the world’s top experts on hand to provide context and commentary to the new study by scientists and researchers who have spent decades studying autism.

Instead, they asked McCarthy, a former model and actress who has no formal education in medicine or autism. Her expertise comes from being the mother of an autistic child — a sort of “Mommy Doctorate” M.D., which is sort of like saying that owning a car qualifies a person as a mechanic.

McCarthy has managed to tap into a strong anti-science, anti-medicine conspiracy theory sentiment that made convicted felon Kevin Trudeau (best-selling author of “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About” ) a rich man.

You might think that I’m too harsh on McCarthy. But who knows how many parents buy her best-selling books or see her on “Larry King Live” or ABC News and decide she must be right, and refuse to vaccinate their children for measles, chicken pox, mumps, influenza, polio, hepatitis and more, fearing the vaccine will make them autistic?

While she is sincere, she is doing real harm to innocent children and babies by repeatedly ignoring accurate and correct information about autism in favor of conspiracy theories.

McCarthy dismissed the latest scientific research as worthless, and the scientists who conduct autism research as incompetent: “We’re the ones seeing the real results. And until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence, which is, ‘This is working, it’s going to take so many more years for these kids to get better. Every parent will tell you something different that helped their child.”

As I watched this segment, I could almost hear the sound of hundreds of thousands of scientists shaking their heads in disbelief. Let’s parse this out:

“We’re the ones seeing the real results.” That is, according to McCarthy, the real results and advances in autism treatment are being made by ordinary moms like her who write pseudoscientific books falsely linking autism to vaccines. All those silly doctors with their randomized, double-blind studies don’t know what they’re doing.

“And until doctors start listening to our anecdotal evidence …” McCarthy, like many non-scientists, seems to think that stories and anecdotal evidence are just as good as — if not superior to — well-controlled scientific studies. Anecdotal evidence, basically first-person stories, must be confirmed with rigorous research in order to be validated.

Her suggestion alone sets medical science back several hundred years, but her last statement is even more remarkable: “Every parent will tell you something different that helped their child.”

McCarthy doesn’t seem to realize that with this observation she completely contradicts herself. She has claimed in her books and elsewhere that a strict diet can treat or cure autism, yet in the interview she said the opposite, that every parent says “something different that helped their child.” That is, some parents believe that a special diet helped their child; others say dressing their child in certain colors helped their child; another says something different, and so on.

This is not science, nor it is helpful. What are doctors supposed to do? Give desperate parents a long list of things that someone, somewhere thinks might help their child, despite no good evidence that any of them do?

There is no doubt that McCarthy is sincere in her beliefs, and genuinely wants to help autistic children. It’s just a shame that she ignores and dismisses the one thing that can actually help them: good science.

Click here to view ABC News report

Source: http://news.discovery.com/human/jenny-mccarthy-dismisses-pediatrics-study-on-autism.html

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The Autism News | English

Redskins Cheerleader Desiree Jennings was training for a half marathon in August 2009 when she received her seasonal flu shot, something she had done several years before

By The Barcelona Reporter

Desiree Jennings Redskins Cheerleader Ambassador is after having her life turned upside down by a routine Flu shot, and discharged by three major hospitals after four visits – despite worsening symptoms – Desiree Jennings is finallymaking great strides in her recovery.

The vibrant, 25-year-old Washington Redskins Cheerleader Ambassador has a website to tell her story and keep well-wishers from around the world informed of her progress as well as to promote “true informed consent.”

Jennings was training for a half marathon in August 2009 when she received her seasonal flu shot, something she had done several years before. This time, however, her reaction was severe and debilitating. Over the course of several weeks she lost the ability to walk or talk normally, and began to suffer violent seizures and recurrent blackouts.

Jennings was misdiagnosed multiple times with a variety of diagnoses since receiving the influenza shot, which she thought would protect her from illness. She has since been diagnosed by her treating physician, Dr. Rashid A. Buttar, with a number of conditions including but not limited to Acute, Viral Post Immunization Encephalopathy and Mercury Toxicity with secondary respiratory and neurological deficits.

Since then her story has made headlines here and abroad, with videos explaining her disorder garnering millions of hits on YouTube. The responses she has received have been overwhelmingly supportive, encouraging.and informative. Celebrity couple Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey helped point Desiree in the right direction through Generation Rescue, a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing and reversing autism.

The treatments with Dr. Buttar at the Center for Advanced Medicine and Clinical Research in Charlotte, NC are working, and the results are nothing short of amazing. Jennings can now walk and talk normally throughout the vast majority of the day and the seizures/convulsions have significantly decreased.

Although her full recovery will take an undetermined amount of time, her family is now for the first time, convinced she will make a complete recovery. She is now more than ever, driven by a desire to educate others to be informed of the potential side effects caused by vaccines and prevent others from suffering a similar fate.

Visitors to her new website, ww.DesireeJennings.com, will find regular updates on her progress, helpful details on her treatment and valuable information on the importance of “informed consent” – truly knowing ALL of the options before making important medical decisions.

“I set up the site to tell my story and warn people of the neurological side effects that can result from vaccinations,” Jennings said, “Especially knowing that in the majority of cases, these stories are seldom heard outside of immediate families and friends.” – Visit ww.DesireeJennings.com for more information

Related News: Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey Reach Out to Desiree Jennings

Source: http://www.barcelonareporter.com/index.php?/news/comments/redskins_cheerleader_desiree_jennings_disabled_by_dystonia_flu_shot_on_road/

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By Claudia Coffey | Fox 5

Local woman disabled by flu vaccine reaction

WASHINGTON, D.C. – There are new developments in the story FOX 5 first brought you about a Redskins cheerleader left disabled by a seasonal flu shot. Now, Desiree Jennings is adding a boost of star power to her cause.

An organization founded by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey is so touched by Desiree’s story that they have reached out to offer not only words of encouragement, but the organization’s support.

Desiree Jennings’ struggle is getting worldwide attention.

“It’s been unreal,” Jennings told FOX 5. “I didn’t think anyone would even care about my story. People are sitting there crying and I can’t understand why.”

She first spoke to FOX 5 about a severe reaction she suffered after getting a seasonal flu shot. Now, both Fairfax Inova and Johns Hopkins say Desiree suffers from a rare neurological disorder as a result of the flu shot. The condition is called dystonia, and it affects every aspect of her ability to function. One day after our story aired, Generation Rescue, an organization founded by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey , reached out to Desiree.

“They are extremely helpful,” Desiree said. “They have a lot of doctors that deal with vaccine interactions, and they have sent us so many other stories similar to mine. Unfortunately a lot of theirs are with children, which is worse. I can understand it happening to an adult, but not a little child that hasn’t had a chance to live their life and can’t speak, so I want to speak. They can’t, and I want to help them, too,” says Jennings.

McCarthy’s 7-year-old son Evan is autistic. She founded Generation Rescue along with actor Jim Carrey to educate people about ways to reverse autism. The organization is now raising awareness over the safety of vaccines including flu shots. Generation Rescue’s President Stan Kurtz was so touched by Desiree’s story, the organization is hoping to fly her to Los Angeles for treatment.

“And the story is, anyone that sees– it is just so compelling, Jenny was crying over it,” says Kurtz.

Kurtz also believes with the proper treatment, some of her symptoms may be reversible.

“Well, unfortunately we happen to be very good at handling vaccine injury. We’ve got a lot of doctors that have experience in doing that, so our doctors and our resources are completely available to her, and we’re going do everything we can to give her a lot of options to, to help take care to help recover from this condition as best we can,” says Kurtz.

For Desiree, it’s a glimmer of hope and a chance at getting her life back.

“Get back to my normal life, but still have had a chance to warn people as well,” says Jennings.

Still, the Centers for Disease Control says the seasonal flu vaccine is safe and recommends it to the general public. Desiree, in the meantime, wants to get her message out about her concerns over the safety of vaccines.

ORIGINAL STORY ON DESIREE JENNINGS AND HER CONDITION:

Woman Disabled by Flu Shot Reaction

WASHINGTON, D.C. – An Ashburn, Virginia woman is in the fight of her life after suffering a very rare side effect to the seasonal flu shot.

The vast majority of doctors say flu shots are safe. In this case, the FDA says they found nothing wrong with this particular batch, but sometimes there are complications.

That’s apparently what happened to Desiree Jennings, and now her life will never be the same.

At 26 years old, Desiree Jennings was the picture of health. She’s a Washington Redskins cheerleader and an avid runner. Her life changed forever on August 23 when she says she got a seasonal flu shot at a local grocery store.

“I was training for a half marathon then,” said Jennings, crying. “It just all went so fast.”

Ten days after receiving the shot, she came down with the flu. After that, her health spiraled downwards. She started passing out and had to be hospitalized twice.

“We went to an urgent care place and they wouldn’t even let her get out of my truck because she was seizing in the back so bad, so they called an ambulance immediately,” says her husband, Brendan Jennings.

Doctors at Fairfax Inova and Johns Hopkins diagnosed her with a rare neurological disorder called dystonia. They think it was caused by a severe reaction to the flu shot.

Desiree now has difficulty speaking, walking, and even eating. During an interview with FOX 5, she had several seizures. The effects are irreversible.

“The symptoms will get worse if I use my voice or walk when the brain signals are misfiring,” says Jennings.

Desiree reported her health problems to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) thinking there might have been something wrong with her vaccine. We also contacted the FDA and we were told they found no problems with the particular lot of flu vaccines that Desiree received, and the agency has not received any other reports of adverse effects from this lot.

Health experts stress that overall, extreme side effects are rare.

“The flu shot is safe for the majority of the public, and as I said before, your heart goes out to someone that experiences this sort of thing– thinking that they are doing something great for their wellness and their general health, but it does happen in extremely rare cases,” says Rachel Lynch with Fairfax Inove Health System.

For Desiree, she just happened to be one of those rare cases.

“I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” says Jennings.

Desiree and her husband plan to visit the Mayo Clinic in Arizona in November. They’re hoping to get more answers about this disease and how they live with it.

Desiree has received flu shots before in 2007 and 2008.

Source:

- http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/health/dpgo_101509_celebs_reach_out_to_desiree_jennings_flu_shot_reaction_4065808
- http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/health/101309_woman_disabled_by_flu_shot_reaction_dystonia

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The Autism News | English

By KimmyKrocker

GFCF Peanut Butter Cookies

An easy, delicious recipe for GFCF Peanut Butter Cookies…it seems I need to remember to keep my curtains closed while filming!

GFCF Halloween Sugar Cookies

These make great Halloween treats for your youngins…Only I didn’t realize how much danger I was in while baking them! Happy Halloween everyone!

Source: YouTube

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The Autism News English, English autism, autistic, biomedical, casein, celiac, dan, gfcf, Gluten Free, halloween, Jenny McCarthy, peanut butter cookies, rivalry, sibling, sugar cookies

The Autism News | English

from the clip: Rethinking Autism: Pet Peeves

By Lisa Jo Rudy, About.com Guide to Autism

RethinkingAutism.com is a new website, conceived and created by Dana Commandatore. According to the website Terra Sigillata

Dana is a former NYC advertising guru and the mother of Michaelangelo, a child with autism. His story inspired her to write the children’s book, Michaelangelo the Diver.Dana has now taken her creativity and contacts in her new home of Los Angeles to produce a series of controversial public service announcements to combat misinformation about the causes and treatment of autism and the acceptance and celebration of neurodiversity.

As I understand it, Dana has determined that since sexy Jenny McCarthy seems to be using her charms to “sell” her biomedical perspective on autism, why not use a sexy model to “sell” a different point of view? With that idea in mind – and tongue presumably planted firmly in cheek – she has made five short videos.

The videos, which star family friend and model, Leanne Tweeden, are basically highly-produced peep shows accompanied by stripper music. Behind the sexy, nearly-naked model are panels proclaiming messages about autism (she favors educational inclusion, feels that there’s no link between autism and vaccines, supports a neurodiversity perspective, etc.).

In theory, these videos – and the website, which includes a page of information about autism and Commandatore’s perspective on autism – are intended as a way to raise awareness and educate the public. So far as I can see, however, the public is far more likely to respond to the medium (sex) than to the message (let’s be sensible about autism).

In my opinion, Commandatore may get a good deal of personal publicity for her arty and provocative style. She’s also likely to get a lot of flack for her anti-feminist, disrespectful approach to autism education. She’s unlikely, however, to make much impact as an educator.

Source: http://autism.about.com/b/2009/06/19/sexy-autism-ads-clever-or-catastrophic.htm

Published on: Jun 19, 2009 @ 19:06 | Updated: Sept. 24, 2009

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The Autism News | English

Keeping in line with celebrity mom Jenny McCarthy’s mission to build a better environment for children, TOO GOOD(TM) by Jenny has partnered with PEM America to launch a line of affordable, non-toxic infant & juvenile products, including bedding, bath textiles, room decor and newborn gift sets. The licensing agreement was developed and negotiated by Los Angeles-based new business development consultancy Brand Sense Partners, LLC (BSP).

The line will debut in bedding and will reflect McCarthy’s passion for creating safe, non-toxic surroundings for children with a focus on safety, technology and design. TOO GOOD(TM) plans to pretest raw materials prior to reaching the manufacturing stage and will also test all products for lead and phthalates with results posted prior to the product arriving in any retailer. New improvements, such as reversible sets and Aloesoothe(TM), an innovative, Aloe-enhanced finishing technology, will help to further differentiate TOO GOOD from its competitors, while offering some of the best crib sheet options on the market. While some manufacturers have taken thread counts down, TOO GOOD will be utilizing higher thread counts and 100% cotton on all crib sheets, mattress pads and other products that are in direct contact with the child. TOO GOOD will also strive to bridge the gap between education and fashion. Specific textures, colors and icons will be used to enhance early learning and storytelling, while chic and clutter-free design will allow parents to provide more than one look which will bring continued smiles to parents and children alike.

“We are extremely excited to partner with TOO GOOD(TM) to introduce this line of safe and affordable children’s products,” said Keith Schneider, senior vice president for PEM America. “The TOO GOOD brand is part of McCarthy’s efforts to advocate for reducing children’s exposure to unsafe and unhealthy products and we are unwaveringly aligned with that mission as well.”

McCarthy’s son, Evan, was diagnosed with autism in 2005. After doctors informed her that there was no cure, McCarthy began to treat her son holistically through diet, nutrition and other interventions in his environment. Changes included using products that were BPA and phthalate free, providing gluten-free foods and participating in incremental vaccinations. Shortly after McCarthy began treating her son with these holistic solutions, Evan’s signs of autism subsided.

“It was never an option for me to become complacent after my son’s successful recovery,” said McCarthy. “My personal breakthrough inspired me to help all families and individuals find the safest, healthiest and most affordable products on the market. PEM America and I are working together to fill the market void in safe, non-toxic products for children, one TOO GOOD(TM) item at a time.”

McCarthy and PEM unveiled TOO GOOD(TM) at this year’s ABC Kids Expo on September 15th, held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. After an official press conference, select retailers were invited to meet with McCarthy and PEM as they showcased initial themes, product designs and packaging concepts.

Source: Press News Wire

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The Autism News | English

By George Pennacchio

LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Jenny McCarthy got her start on MTV. Now, she’s planning a return to television, but not as an actress.

In the past few years, Jenny has expanded her resume to include author and, most recently, spokesperson.

“We just kicked off our second ‘Lose for Good’ campaign. So if you wanted to lose weight or join Weight Watchers, now would be the time ‘cuz last year during this time, in six weeks, the members lost four million pounds, and hunger charities gained $1 million,” says Jenny, while helping plant a vegetable garden at the Arroyo Head Start in Altadena.

From now through Oct. 17, if Weight Watchers members lose four million more pounds, the company will donate another $1 million to help feed families and children in need through two charitable groups: Share Our Strength and Action Against Hunger.

“The charities are hurting right now. Even with my own one for autism, we’re strapped for trying to get people to donate,” Jenny says.

So she’s thrilled Weight Watchers is willing to give big money. She is also thrilled about her own future. After spending the last chapter of her life learning about her son’s autism and sharing her beliefs, she is hoping to help others.

“I just signed a development deal with Oprah to have my own talk show, and I will be shooting that pilot in the next couple months,” she says.

“I’ve been approached for years out in L.A. to have my own talk show, and I really wasn’t interested because I had much going on with my son and just wanted to get to a place where I felt OK and ready and wise to share words of wisdom. So, when Oprah asked me to sign a deal, I was happy to say, ‘now’s the time,’” she adds.

And after all, Oprah does have a good track record getting others started in the talk show arena.

“She has a pretty good stamp of approval, and I’m just grateful that I will have a platform to share some hopefully really valuable information with the rest of the world,” she says.

Jenny will also be back on ABC Family during the holidays with the TV movie sequel “Santa Baby 2.”

Source: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/hollywood_wrap&id=6998000

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The Autism News | English

For years, there was only ‘Rain Man.’ Suddenly, Asperger’s is the new ‘it’ disorder on screen and in fiction.

By Brian Bethune | Macleans.ca

On a 2006 episode of House, Fox’s popular TV drama about the misanthropic medical genius played by Hugh Laurie, Gregory House has to solve the troubling case of an autistic child. Is the 10-year-old boy screaming because he has an untreated physical ailment about which he can’t communicate, or because, well, as most of House’s team believe, that’s what severely autistic children do? House eventually saves the day, of course, but the specific illness of the week was not the real plot point. That turned on the question, now unavoidable to House’s colleagues, on whether their resident savant—sarcastic, brutally blunt, virtually friendless and utterly devoid of social niceties as he is—was himself autistic: specifically, did he have Asperger’s syndrome, the best known of the diagnoses at the high-functioning end of autism spectrum disorders?

The answer to that is left hanging, but were the good doctor to be diagnosed with any ASD, he would be just one of many such characters in recent pop culture—one of many such beloved characters. From the runaway success of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with its autistic teen hero Christopher Boone, to Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan and her assistant Zack Addy—two Asperger’s characters on one show—of Fox’s TV drama Bones, to Lisbeth Salander, the electrifying Asperger’s heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, viewers and readers have taken to a series of endearingly offbeat ASD protagonists, if not to the 10-year-old screaming in the corner. It’s all part of autism’s new normal, at least as it’s portrayed in pop culture, variously described by those who approve as evidence of growing social acceptance of “neurological diversity,” and by those less impressed as “our strange fetishization of Asperger’s.”

Autism is a brain development disorder generally diagnosed in early childhood. Its main visible symptoms are primarily social and emotional: limited interaction with other people, including a lack of eye contact, hypersensitivity to noise and other stimuli, restricted and repetitive behaviour. It has a strong (but poorly understood) genetic component, and controversies swirl around suggested environmental causes, particularly vaccines—a claim championed most prominently by actress Jenny McCarthy and dismissed by medical experts. The prevalence of autism has mushroomed since the 1980s. Better diagnoses explain most of the increase, and the degree to which autism itself may be more prevalent than in the past is another area of dispute. The impressive achievements of a few high-profile autistics like Temple Grandin, a leading authority on livestock behaviour and a bestselling author, have helped fuel an autistic culture—the idea that autism, at least at its high-functioning end, should be considered a difference and not treated as a disorder.

Increasing awareness of autistic people and their accomplishments—the same forces that brought first greater ethnic and then sexual diversity to the fore—is one impetus behind autism’s growing fictional prominence. Yet there must be more to it than that, or there would be more characters with physical disabilities on TV and in popular fiction. Within the limited formats of episodic TV and genre fiction there’s a limit to the physically challenged’s bag of dramatic tricks—the blind hero who’s more at home than the villains in a darkened room, for instance, has been a pulp fiction staple for decades. Neurological quirks, however, have endless possibilities for writers.

In real life, for instance, Temple Grandin thinks of her autism, specifically her lifelong tendency to think in pictures rather than in words, not as a handicap of any sort but as “a tremendous advantage” in her work as an equipment designer for the livestock industry. “I credit my visualization abilities with helping me understand the animals I work with.” She’s certainly been enormously successful in her field: one-third of the cattle and hogs in the U.S. are handled in equipment Grandin has designed. Similarly, staff at the Danish software firm Specialisterne, 75 per cent of whom have some form of autism, receive rave reviews for what one client called their “fantastic ability to locate errors and aberrations” in computer code.

Fictional autistic characters overwhelmingly display similar gifts. Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman in 1988’s Rain Man—the first, and for a decade, only famous autistic character—is a savant, with a deep but very narrow memory for certain facts. Christopher Boone knows every prime number up to 7,057; another autistic hero from teen fiction, 16-year-old Simon Lynch of Ryne Douglas Pearson’s Simple Simon, has mathematical abilities great enough to crack a NSA security code. Bones Brennan is a brilliant forensic anthropologist, trained in four martial arts, and a bestselling novelist who speaks Japanese; Zack Addy has an IQ north of 163, a photographic memory and two doctorates. House is, roughly speaking, more intelligent than the rest of his medical team combined. On the ABC series Boston Legal, it is Jerry Espenson’s Asperger’s that provides the attention to detail that makes him a master of financial law. Lisbeth Salander, 24, had a horrific childhood, but emerged as a brilliant computer hacker. The autistic, animal-loving, humanity-hating Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake was smart enough to plan and unleash a sequence of events that destroyed modern society; his real name, Atwood’s narrator recalls, was Glenn, “with two n’s, after a dead pianist, some boy genius.”

Atwood, like many others, thinks piano prodigy Glenn Gould had Asperger’s. “I bet, I’ll just bet, that he did even if they didn’t diagnose it back then,” she once remarked. “Want to know a factoid I learned after I wrote the book? When he was 10, Gould wrote an opera where all the people died at the end, and only the animals survived. That gave me a chill.” Posthumous diagnoses of autism, where people comb the historical record seeking possible cases, are a popular pastime. And those who look for ASD often find it in past admired intellectual and cultural titans, especially in math and music. Isaac Newton, Lewis Carroll—a mathematician when he wasn’t writing Alice in Wonderland—Mozart and Gould are all favourites. Nor are living icons spared: Bill Gates—technologically brilliant, socially awkward and fabulously wealthy—is the object of much Internet speculation about his neurological wiring.

In most cases, although not Gould’s, the suppositions are based on little more than the fact the geniuses in question tended to become deeply immersed in their work to the detriment of other aspects of their lives. Contemporary culture has a bias toward medicalizing human genius, especially of the mathematical variety, and still carries a traditional tit-for-tat assumption that talent in one sphere is balanced by weakness in another: athletes are dumb and smart people can’t jump. So prevalent are these tendencies that any character, particularly a child, who can add up three-figure sums without a calculator, has an odds-on chance of being assumed autistic. Early accounts of Reif Larsen’s new novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, almost universally claimed that its protagonist, a 12-year-old map-making prodigy, is autistic precisely because he is a prodigy. (He isn’t.)

Wonder workers are always welcome in popular media, but superhero skills are not the entire source of the autistic characters’ appeal. We also love them for their lack of social skills. We, at least those of us without autistic relatives, can laugh when Christopher Boone, in the midst of a harrowing journey alone to his mother’s house, barks like a dog at fellow passengers who come too close to him, or when House is unspeakably rude to some pompous hospital administrator. There are also rich comic possibilities in novels of manners; in The Family Man, the latest work by Elinor Lipman, an American master of the genre, part of the plot turns on a PR campaign to soften the edges of an Asperger’s star of horror movies. In one of her earlier novels, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (2003), when a female autistic doctor finally scores a boyfriend, she is hilariously clinical about their first kiss. “When he leaned in for the actual compression of lips, my arms went up and circled his neck, causing a lingering farewell and inducing a near-reluctance to part that was unanticipated.” One (female) reviewer wrote that, in the touchy-feely world of women’s lit, it was refreshing to have a heroine “as in touch with her emotions as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.”

And we appreciate the way autistic characters function in the manner noble savages did in literature centuries ago, as outsiders who don’t know the social rules and thus speak the-emperor-has-no-clothes truths no one else dares to utter. Christopher Boone was taught to not lie, but he had to learn himself, quite painfully, not to speak the truth when he met someone fat or ugly. Autistic characters are valued for the way they often point at (and point out) social hypocrisies, as though they were large—and exceptionally intelligent—children. In Margot Livesey’s Banishing Verona (2004), an older pregnant woman loves a younger Asperger’s man, not despite his neurological wiring, not incidentally to it, but because of it: she values him for his inability to cheat, pretend or lie. This, far more than ascribing savant-like mathematical abilities, is a portrait of high-functioning autistics as morally better than the neurologically normal. That is a fetishization of Asperger’s if there ever was one: the lover is still defined by his condition.

Some of the observers most troubled by pop autism are the parents of ASD children. Happy as many were to see so iconic a TV character as House (almost) outed, just about everyone who posted to support-group websites expressed anger with the comment made by House’s sole friend, Wilson. As the rest of the team speculated about House, Wilson remarked his prickly friend would welcome an Asperger’s diagnosis—as a licence to be rude. The social ineptitude writers use to mine laughs is frequently indistinguishable from the emotional distancing that can devastate the families of actual autistic people. Literature is more apt to deal with the issue than TV, and there is a poignant moment in The Curious Incident, after Christopher arrives at his mother’s. She’s so torn between fear and relief that she just wants to hold his hand, but Chris doesn’t like being touched, and she can find no wordless way of expressing her love or of being assured of his. And, naturally, the severely autistic, like the non-verbal child in the House episode, tend to appear only in victim roles.

Yet, so dominant is the positive message, especially on TV, that it stands on its head Susan Sontag’s famous maxim, that every age has a defining illness that reflects back its deepest fears. Autism may be the distemper of our times (succeeding AIDS in that role), but as portrayed in pop culture, it’s as likely to invoke envy as fear.

Source: http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/07/13/autistic-licence/

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