KaylaPearson.com

Thursday, November 20, 2008 My horoscope for today.
Leo (Jul 23 - Aug 22)

You need a bit of recovery time from all you’ve been doing, yet it’s still difficult to find it today. You may be pulled in a variety of directions now, yet the underlying message of the day is to reconnect with the most practical rhythms. You might feel out of step with what’s happening, but this isn’t a great time to alter your path. Take care of managing your most basic needs and be ready to roll with the waves of change.

So what does this mean I ask myself? What are going to be the “waves” of change I hope whatever it is it is good because I can’t handle any more bad.

I always have everyone telling me around here you should do this or you should do that. But in all honesty and everything I just don’t see how everyone acts like it is so easy. O yes I do get it wait a minute, there not the ones going through the situation. I have someone telling me all the time that you need to do this or you need to do that. I just don’t get it ? Do I not do enough? I mean I work pretty much full time, I handle the house all three of the kids and the animals. And I deal with all of Lucian’s things. I think she thinks just because she raised three kids she expects to know what it is like but in all reality and respect she has no freakin clue what I go through, she has no idea how tired I am and then she expects me to just be in a great mood all of the time. They are switching my hours around at work so I work a combination of days and nights and that is tough. Just getting used to one or the other is bad enough but both. So it makes it hard to develop a routine and stick to it when it is always changing. I am truly trying as hard as I can sometimes harder than I have ever tried before. Yet to still find out it is not good enough. I don’t understand why it is always me that gets this my sister and brother dont ever get treated this way. It’s like they were born sin free. Like I said in a previous blog I understand that I am not perfect, I understand I have made alot of mistakes but I don’t think I should feel the way I do and I have felt that way for along time. I strive everyday to make self and better person inside and out. As well as striving to make sure my family is going to be ok and we are going to have every thing we need. I guess I don’t really have to worry about anyone of the people I’m talking about reading this because they no about my blog site but they think it is a joke. Something I take very seriously because I am doing this for our son And for myself because I enjoy doing it. I’m talking about my mom and my dad and my sister and brother. Even though they no our situation, you would think they would be a little bit more understanding but that is just not the case or well atleast it come off that way , and if it wasnt they could say something. It was like when we were going back in fourth from the hospital and driving home to see the kids every night, it was why cant one of you stay there and one of you come and stay witht eh kids, are you kidding me? I guess the thing that got me was it made me feel guilty. Guilty for not being in both spots at the same time. But Atleast i came home to spend time with hem every night. I new my oldest kids were ok and healthy and were being taken care of. Our son I wasnt sure about him and I know he needed us he cant speak for himself and no one knows him like we do. It is just little things like me asking my mom to get put on there phone plan so i dont have to pay a hundred dollars a month only 20 why not I ask myself she has my sister and my brothers girlfriend and my sister on her plan and my dad has my sisters boyfriend on his plan yet I’m the one that has a hard time with everything. I just didnt get it they all were iving with my parents up until a month ago when my parents new house finally got finished. Now my sister and brother and my sisters boyfriend all live in the old farm house that used to be my grandma and grandpa’s. So they don’t have a house payment or anything like that. I dono I wonder if I am jealous and then I think I have nothing to be jealous about. I have alot they dont have. Maybe they think my sister is better than me because she is already enrolled back into school well when you dont have hardly any bills and you have your mom to keep your son all night long and you can just take off and leave when ever you want it makes it a little easier to do those things. My parents always keep her son.I dono how she stands it, I would miss my kids way to much. I love my family but I just don’t think some things are looked at right. So you know I went though 3 jobs since Lucian has been in and out of the hospital and were just trying to get back on our feet, and we will it is just going to take some time. I just wonder sometimes what they see that I am not doing right to get the same respect that my siblings get. After a month or two of begging my brother and his girl friend broke up and my mom let me have the phone line on her package. The thing that made me mad was she lied to me about it she said that this girl was paying her like 100 dollars a month and I new she was bull shitting me. How is it going to a hundred dollars a moth for her unless she is using all of there minutes and has a bunch of other stuff on her bill but I new it wasn’t true and I later came to find out the truth. It just made me feel like they did not want to help me at all and honestly if i would have had another choice I would have told them to forget it, but with Lucian I have TO HAVE A PHONE. So I dono and I guess it just irritates me alot. No one around here has had a child with special needs so they really dont know how much time it takes. It is a 24 hour job alone with just down syndrome and then making sure your not missing something every day with everything else Lucian has had wrong. It would make me so mad when they would try and tell me how to handle the situation when they dono because they have never been though it. It was like they thought I was joking when I was pregnant and told them I couldn’t breathe and i didnt feel good or I couldn’t eat or whatever it may have been at the time. I dono I guess there is just alot of things I dont really understand. I just hope everything gets easier.

Nothing new really going on. Lucian has been doing great. Lexi is getting a cold or something I think it is the same things she has been trying to fight off for a month now. She just gets a croup cough at night and has a runny nose during the day. It is getting so bitterly cold outside. We have a chance for some snow flurries today. I am not looking forward to any kind of snow or ice, because that means it just makes it harder and more time consuming to get out and to get to where I have to be. I was glad we got Lucian’s g tube back in by ourselves, we just wanted to go in the other day and have it checked so we new for sure we did it right. To here her tell us after she checked it that we did it right makes me so happy, I was always so worried about that, then after a year of him not pulling it out I really was convinced it would probably not happen. Thing is I’m not sure if he even pulled it out, Travis found him with it out after he woke up from a nap and he wiggles alot and sleeps on his tummy so i am wondering if it did not get cought on the carpet or something like that even though we always put down a blanket. When he try’s to crawl sometimes I notice it getting stuck to. He never acts like it bothers him at all, he did not even cry when we where putting it back it he just laid there like mom dad what are you doing to me. I was hoping we were going to get to see doctor rogers when we brought him in but we saw his nurse, so we will have to wait until Friday to see him. We as well as Lucian always love to see him. I think he is going out of town for a week after this Friday and I always hate when he goes out of town. I always worry about something happening to him, o i would just die. I do understand he has to get away sometimes and I don’t blame him at all. We are very weird about letting anyone else touch Lucian unless it is doctor Rogers. Hell it took us awhile to just be able to trust our pediatrician, and I think alot of that helped by the fact that she is in the same building with doctor rogers and she always talks to him and checks on everything before she just does stuff with Lucian which we greatly appreciate for sure. She has been out for a little bit though. She fell in the parking lot and broke her arm. Poor Doctor Branham. That really sucks it will be nice to see her back. Jordan is doing pretty good in school so that is great to hear. I am just so worried about Christmas. I have my mom up my butt to do this and to that, but in all reality she really has no idea at all. I think everyone around here just thinks our lives are all hunky dorie. Not the case at all the next couple weeks are going to be the hardest. I just pray to god he is watching out for us and will help us handle the situation and get us the things we need.

Busy clinicians performing a well-child visit may overlook the symptoms of pediatric sleep apnea, making it a frequently underdiagnosed condition. Sleep apnea may affect the physical and emotional growth and development of 1% to 3% of the pediatric population, making this a problem too large to overlook.

Research suggests that restorative sleep is as important for children as adults. It is also clear that serious consequences may develop if the child does not get quality sleep. Some of the physiologic effects of apnea on developing systems include:

* Problems with social and emotional development caused by the frequent arousals and intermittent hypoxic episodes that affect self regulation of motivation and affect;

* Behavioral problems such as aggression, hyperactivity, and attention deficit disorder; and

* Problems with neuron-cognitive function such as memory, learning, and problem solving.

These types of problems often make it difficult for children to do well in school. Children may also have issues with problems such as bedwetting, peer-to-peer social interaction, and self-soothing sleep behaviors. As children grow older, these problems are often related to poor self-esteem and depression. In serious conditions, pediatric sleep apnea may be linked to growth failure, pulmonary hypertension, left and right ventricular hypertrophy, and polycythemia. Heart failure and cor pulmonale have been seen in severe cases.

A number of factors may be responsible for pediatric sleep apnea. Common causes include immaturity of the respiratory centers in the brain seen with some premature infants, tonsil and adenoid hypertrophy, and congenital abnormalities of the upper airway that may be seen in Down’s syndrome and Pierre Robin syndrome. Obesity is an increasingly common condition that may contribute to sleep apnea. Less frequent causes of sleep apnea include allergic rhinitis, diabetes, seizure disorders, and parasomnias. Sometimes it is difficult to know if these conditions cause sleep apnea or if sleep apnea increases the risk of some of these conditions through biochemical and/or structure changes that lead to disease development.

Three basic types of sleep apnea have been identified: obstructive, central, and mixed apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is the most common type of apnea in children and is characterized by recurrent periods of partial or complete obstruction of the upper airway resulting in disruption of normal gas exchange and sleep fragmentation. Parents may observe snoring, restless sleep, daytime sleepiness, and irritability. This type of sleep problem is most often seen in children 2-9 years of age. Obesity may be a big contributor to this type of OSAS.

Central apnea is a failure to initiate or sustain breathing, and this occurs when the respiratory center in the brain fails to send the correct signals to the respiratory muscles. Patients may observe that their children stop breathing for short periods of time, from a few times to hundreds of times a night. Patients experience frequent nighttime awakenings, excessive daytime sleepiness, and may have headaches when they get up in the morning. This condition is typically associated with decreased blood oxygen levels and increased blood carbon dioxide levels that result from congenital hypoventilation syndrome and Arnold-Chiari malformations.

Mixed apnea is a combination of both central and obstructive apnea. Normally, breathing is an automatic process. Mixed apnea occurs when, for short periods of time, there is no respiratory effort of the muscles to pull air into the lung; in turn, the normal contraction of the pharyngeal muscle is altered and collapse occurs, causing an obstructive component to the apnea. The parent will observe a pause in breathing and then a snoring or snorting noise as the child tries to pull air into his lungs. This type of apnea is most often seen in the infant pediatric population and may occur even when the baby is awake.

The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines call for assessment of pediatric sleep apnea during a well-child visit by asking questions about snoring. If snoring is reported, then a more detailed history is obtained to uncover any other symptoms of sleep disorders. Difficult arousal, sleep length, parasomnias, morning headaches, enuresis, daytime energy levels, eating habits, and behavior or learning problems should be included in the sleep history. Physical evidence of enlarged tonsils and adenoids, obesity, craniofacial abnormalities, and neuromuscular disease would increase the suspicion of sleep apnea. Any of these findings on history or physical would warrant a referral to a pediatric sleep specialist.

Nocturnal polysomnography is the gold standard for diagnosis of the condition and is used to help document the severity of ventilatory impairment and its impact on normal sleep architecture. Accurate, early diagnosis is clearly of benefit to the child.

Treatment for sleep apnea varies with type and underlying cause. Those with obstructive apneas are treated primarily by removal of the tonsils and adenoids, which may resolve the problem 75% of the time. Those children with obesity do not find as much relief from symptoms post-tonsillectomy, and weight reduction is imperative in this group. Obese children require repeat polysomnography studies to document the remaining levels of obstruction. Treatment of allergic rhinitis may also be helpful to some children.

Mechanically bypassing the obstruction with continuous positive airway pressure and bilevel positive airway pressure may also be helpful in children if appropriately fitting equipment is used.

n the United States a new nonprofit organization established to create new opportunities for young people with Down syndrome; Down Syndrome Education USA has plans for the first Down Syndrome Education and Research Center based in the US. The new center, associated with and works closely with Down Syndrome Education International (DownsEd) will be a joint venture with the Down Syndrome Foundation of Orange County and will accommodate expansion of the Foundation’s highly successful Learning Program. The center will be based in Orange County, California and is expected to open in early 2009.

The new center will offer education programs and resources to children with Down syndrome, their families and education professionals across the US. The center will also conduct and sponsor scientific research focused on practical ways to support cognitive development, language, literacy and math teaching for young people who have Down syndrome.

Down Syndrome Education International is testing a reading and language teaching program for children with Down syndrome. The nonprofit is working with researchers at the Centre for Reading and Language at the University of York in the United Kingdom (UK), to assess the impact of targeted teaching approaches when implemented in schools.

The pilot will deliver a highly structured language and reading teaching program to children with Down syndrome attending primary schools in England. The teaching will be delivered by the children’s teaching assistants. By designing a targeted teaching approach that can be implemented by existing staff using regular classroom resources, it is hoped that not only will robust evidence be provided by the study, but also that adoption by schools will be simple, quick and widespread. The study will commence in 2009 in primary schools in the UK.

What is it about Sarah?

For many folks on the Right, she represented an influx of social conservatism in the campaign. All she had to do was arrive at the scene with her son Trig to demonstrate her pro-life bona fides. Some estimated 90 percent of Americans faced with the knowledge that they might give birth to a child with Down Syndrome wouldn’t have made the choice she and her husband, Todd, did to let the child live.

I detect some assumptions here. (1) Palin’s carrying Trig to term was a choice. (2) The choice was hers and her husband’s to make, not God’s or the government’s. (3) She deserves praise for having chosen the choice she chose.

But if Palin (and Lopez) were truly “pro-life”—if they truly believed that abortion, especially elective abortion in the first trimester, is murder or at least unjustifiable homicide—then having Trig was not a choice. It was a simple matter of obedience to God’s law, which is infinitely more sacrosanct than man’s law. Palin no more deserves praise for it than I deserve praise for not having lately gunned down any friends, colleagues, or strangers.

What this demonstrates is that even in the minds of anti-abortion zealots, abortion is now implicitly viewed in the same light as divorce: an unfortunate choice, a reprehensible choice, a choice that may even contravene the will of God, but still a choice. And, again implicitly, the choice that Sarah Palin had every right to make. In both directions.

This is why, even if Roe v. Wade is eventually overturned, it will always be legal to get an abortion somewhere in the United States of America.

A congressionally mandated scientific panel has concluded that Gulf War syndrome is real and still afflicts nearly a quarter of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict, according to a report released Monday.

The report broke with most earlier studies by concluding that two chemical exposures were direct causes of the disorder: the drug pyridostigmine bromide, given to troops to protect against nerve gas, and pesticides that were widely used — and often overused — to protect against sand flies and other pests.”The extensive body of scientific research now available consistently indicates that Gulf War illness is real, that it is a result of neurotoxic exposures during Gulf War deployment, and that few veterans have recovered or substantially improved with time,” according to the 450-page report presented to Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake.

The report bolstered the hopes of thousands of U.S. and allied veterans who have struggled to have their varied neurological symptoms, including memory loss, concentration problems, rashes and widespread pain, recognized by the government.

“I’ve had vets go to the VA and be turned away and told that this is something that doesn’t exist,” said John Schwertfager, vice president of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans advocacy group.

But some scientists were not convinced that the new report had found the long-sought smoking gun.

“Even though we know that the Department of Defense did ship pesticides, it doesn’t mean that the people who were exposed to them were the ones who ended up having symptoms,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who has worked on previous reports on the illness. “We felt that there needed to be better records of where people were, what they were exposed to and their prior health status going in.”

The new report is the product of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, which was chartered by Congress because many members thought that veterans were not receiving adequate care. On the 15-member committee appointed in 2002, scientists made up about two-thirds and the rest were veterans.

Several reports had already been issued by the prestigious Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, blaming stress and other unknown causes for the soldiers’ symptoms.

“There’s something about going to the Gulf and serving in the Gulf that has caused something bad and persistent and real, but we have not found any evidence for a specific cause,” said Dr. Harold C. Sox, chairman of a 2000 institute study and editor of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Veterans blame the institute’s reports for the difficulties they’ve faced in getting treatment for their problems.

“Everyone quotes the Institute of Medicine documents as meaning nothing’s going on here,” said Roberta F. White, associate dean of research at the Boston University School of Public Health and the congressional panel’s scientific director. “Some people feel that the IOM reports have been permission to ignore these guys.”

The new report cites dozens of research studies that have identified “objective biological measures” that distinguish veterans with the illness from healthy controls.

The major causes of the disorder appear to be self-inflicted. Pyridostigmine bromide was given to as many as half of the troops in the fear that the Iraqis would unleash chemical warfare against them.

According to the report, at least 64 pesticides containing 37 active ingredients were used during the war. They were sprayed not only around living and dining areas, but also on tents and uniforms, White said.

There was less evidence to support a link to the U.S. demolition of Iraqi munitions near Khamisiyah, which may have exposed about 100,000 troops to nerve gases stored at the facility, according to the panel.

The panel said it could not rule out a link between the illness and exposure to oil well fires and multiple vaccinations. But it could find no evidence linking it to depleted uranium shells, anthrax vaccine and infectious diseases.

In addition to increased rates of memory loss, fatigue and pain, Gulf War veterans have higher rates of brain cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, the panel also noted.

The panel called on Congress to appropriate $60 million a year to conduct research into finding a cure for the disorder.

“The tragedy here is that there are currently no treatments,” said the panel’s chairman, James H. Binns, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense and a Vietnam veteran.

Binns emphasized that the report was not written to yield recriminations about past actions.

“The importance . . . lies in what is done with it in the future,” he said. “It’s a blueprint for the new administration.”

Sequenom Inc.’s best-known product is designed to test for Down syndrome, but the genetic testing products company said Tuesday that there may be an even larger market is other kinds of prenatal testing.

San Diego-based Sequenom hopes to begin marketing its SEQureDx test in early 2009. Speaking at a health care conference, Chief Executive Harry Stylli said the market for testing for prenatal chromosomal disorders like Down syndrome could be $3 billion to $5 billion worldwide. But a larger opportunity may exist in testing for tiny variations in the genetic code that can cause inherited diseases like autism, heart ailments, cystic fibrosis and birth defects.

“We expect this opportunity … to actually grow and dwarf chromosomal disorders over time,” Stylli said. “It represents the greatest number of disorders, even though some of them are very rare.” He added that the field has “immense growth potential.”

The genetic variations are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or “snips.” Over time, the company hopes to find the genetic markers associated with many other birth defects, allowing for testing that will determine if a fetus will be born with them.

Speaking at the annual Lazard Capital Markets health care conference, Stylli said there are already multibillion-dollar markets for many inherited diseases. About 6 percent of all babies have a birth defect, Stylli said, and 30 percent of those are due to an inherited condition.

“There are many other things that you’d like to be able to test for,” Charles Cantor, Sequenom’s chief scientific officer, said in a telephone interview. “Down’s is the single most common fetal defect, but it’s the tip of the iceberg

In the early 1990’s, they first came to the Twin Cities. Thousands of refugees fled from civil war in Somalia and settled in Minnesota, believing that they had left tragedy behind them in Africa. What they never expected to find in their new country was a mysterious disorder that would strike their children at an epidemic rate.

Last summer, stories about the explosion in autism among American-born Somali children got the attention of the U.S. autism community.

The numbers are staggering. July 25, Amelia Santaniello at WCCO-TV reported that autism was something unknown back in Africa. Santaniello cited autism specialist for the Minneapolis schools, Anne Harrington. ‘It’s so glaring here in Minneapolis, I couldn’t not see it.’

Harrington should know, she’s been working with autistic students for over 20 years.
Her numbers are scary.

While Somali children make up only 6 percent of the student population, they are 25 percent of those in the autism special education program. Harrington pointed out that these kids are also affected with the most severe forms of the disorder.

Harrington was also interviewed by Reuters reporter Elizabeth Gorman. In “A mysterious Connection: autism and Minneapolis’ Somali children” on July 24, Harrington talked about the role vaccines might play in this crisis. ‘They’re given more [vaccines] than we get and sometimes they’re doubled up. Then their children are given immunizations. In Somalia, their generations have not received these immunizations, and then suddenly they’re getting just a wallop of them in the moms and then in the babies. That’s certainly a concern that’s been expressed to me by the Somali population.’

In another part of the Reuter’s piece Harrington was quoted saying, ‘It’s got to be preventable.’

August 24, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran the story by Maura Lerner, “Autism statistics alarm Somalis.” Lerner interviewed autism medical expert, Dr. Dan McLellan, who made it clear that this is a serious problem for the Somalis. He said 10 percent of his patients are Somalis. McClellan believes ‘there’s something up with this,’ but he admits he can’t explain it.

In the same piece, Judy Punyko from the Minnesota Dept. of Health was cited as the head of a newly formed study group that would look into autism in the Somali population. She said, ‘We want to understand the numbers. That’s my goal,’ meaning that they didn’t know for sure just how bad the rate is for the Somalis in Minneapolis schools. She further said, ‘We have a condition that has no known cause and there is no cure. And people are looking to us to provide them with answers.’

On November 15, the public gathered to get those answers. Officials addressed autism in the Somali community with a day-long forum held in south Minneapolis. Representatives from the Minnesota Dept. of Health, the public schools, the Somali community, and various autism groups were in attendance.

A handout told the audience, “The primary objective of this Forum is to raise awareness in the Somali community about developmental delays in children with specific emphasis on autism and to engage the community.”

Among other things, attendees would “learn concrete facts about autism. . . and connect to appropriate screening, assessment, and treatment services.”

What I found was an attempt by public health officials to downplay the seriousness of the Somali situation and to ignore the demand for answers from the parents of affected children. Most of all, it was used as an opportunity to publicly deny any connection between vaccines and the outbreak of autism among the Somali children in Minneapolis.
Dr. Sanne Magnan, Commissioner of the Minnesota Dept. of Health opened the meeting by talking about available services. She then addressed the vaccine issue, making it clear, “There is no association.” She cited the CDC website as the official source for the facts about vaccine safety. Next to clear air and water, she told us, vaccines are the greatest modern improvement in health care. She was obviously unwilling to consider the claims of parents who believe vaccines caused their child’s autism. She told us, “Those are the facts,” which meant of course, that anything challenging her denial was relegated to the opinion category.

Magnan called autism a “complex disorder” and she said, “For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution-and it’s usually wrong.”

Magnan wasn’t available to respond to parents because she had to be at another meeting immediately after her talk.

Other education and health experts talked, noting the services provided for children with autism. Among the speakers were three of the same people covered in the Somali-autism news stories back last summer.

Anne Harrington was there but she didn’t talk about Somalis being over-vaccinated like she did in the Reuters piece from July. Nor did she again say it’s preventable. Instead, she talked about the help the schools provide and she made a strange comment about how “reassuring” it was to see that the rise in the autism population in MN was the same as the rest of the country.

Dr. McLellan was heard from again in the first panel to present information. His main message didn’t sound anything like what he had said in the Tribune. He wasn’t concerned that there was ’something up with this.’ Instead, he knew all about autism and he wasn’t worried. He wasted no time in getting out the message that autism is nothing new. He told us about the “long history of autism’ which went back to the 1500’s. His position was clear: we’ve always had kids like this.

McLellan noted that 1943 was the beginning of the modern understanding of autism. No longer was autism seen as possession by the devil or as a mental illness. According to the doctor, genes are to blame. “Genes program our brains” as children move from one stage of development to another. He had a generalized definition of autism which was something about kids with autism having “major difficulties with how they cope with life.”

Only once did vaccines get a mention. McLellan told us that the vaccine schedule has been around since the 1960s and we haven’t had any problems.

Judy Punyko, epidemiologist for the MDH, was also on one of the panels. She talked again about her big project: a major prevalence study to look into the Somali situation. We were cautioned that this would “not be an incidence study.” Punyko has been working all these months to get the numbers from the schools so the MDH could determine if there’s been a real increase. This was happening because “last summer there were some concerns” about the number of Somali kids suddenly diagnosed as having autism. The study would find out if there are really more kids or if it just seems that there are. “Are there a lot of Somali kids with autism?” There might be. There might be even lower numbers among the Somalis than the general population. This study would tell us.

Punyko warned us that her study wouldn’t however tell us what was causing autism. It will also take several months to gather data and determine the results. She advised us that she’d have her findings in March.

The person who had the most to say about vaccines and autism was the woman in charge of the vaccine program for the Dept. of Health, Kristen Ehresmann. She’s also the mother of a son with autism. She assured parents that she understood their concerns.

Ehresmann told us about the life-saving benefits of vaccines. She also noted that next to clean water, nothing has more beneficial for the health of our kids than vaccines. She warned us about kids dying from vaccine-preventable deaths if parents don’t vaccinate.
She had the answers about vaccine safety. She wanted us to know, “Vaccine safety standards are higher than for any other drug.” Many studies are done before vaccines are licensed.

Regarding thimerosal in vaccines, she said that it’s been used since the 1920’s. Most Americans over the age of six received thimerosal in their vaccines and there haven’t been any problems.

Ehresmann announced that since 2002, no vaccines have contained more than a trace of thimerosal, except for influenza vaccines.

Even after thimerosal was removed, autism rates have continued to climb and this is further proof that it’s not related to autism, according to Ehresmann.

Ehresmann believes it’s a coincidence that some children regress into autism following vaccinations. In response to one question about immigrants getting repeated vaccinations upon entering the U.S., she said “It would be okay.”

When answering a question about thimerosal, Ehresmann made the remark that there’s “a small amount of mercury” in thimerosal.

In my opinion, the best speaker of the day was in the last panel. Abdulkadir Khalif, father of a three and a half year old year old son with autism, addressed the vaccine controversy. He stated that if autism’s always been around, “it’s not what I see in my child.” He told us about his belief that components of vaccines are the trigger for autism. He received resounding applause when he announced to the crowd that the cause and the cure for autism would be found. (This was something that wasn’t said by MDH officials that day. Instead, we were simply told by them that autism is a lifelong disability with no known cause or cure.)

During the lunch break, I had the opportunity to sit down with several participants to get their perspective on the day. Two parents, both fluent in English, gave me their opinion.
One was the end speaker Adulkadir Khalif. He told me about his son, Abdimalik, who was normally developing, but following routine vaccinations, regressed into autism. His bright, verbal little boy suddenly stopped talking or recognizing his father. Khalif came to this forum with plenty of questions, but he got no answers that day. He told me that there was nothing new in what the speakers had said. He commented that Somalis know how “to Google” for information too. He believes that officials are simply in denial. To get a true picture of what’s happening, he said they need to focus on who got sick. Are Somali children who have autism only the ones born in the U.S.? If that’s true, then something here is affecting children.

Among the parents I talked with was a young mother, Hodan Hassan, who said that officials have to address concerns about the vaccine schedule so kids don’t get so many so soon. So far they’ve only said they “will consider” this action. Later she sent me an email about the day and told me, “It did not go the way I thought it will happen. I know now that we were not even respected.”

Khalif also wrote to me about his reaction. He told me that the parent panel, where he talked about the link to vaccines, was purposely put at the end. Speakers like Health Commisioner Magnan, pediatrician McClellan, and chief of the immunizations section at the MDH, Ehresman, had all left by that time.

To the Somali mother who felt that they weren’t shown respect at this forum, I can only say that it’s nothing new and it’s not because they are a newly arrived immigrant group.
I couldn’t miss the similarity between how MN health officials are addressing the Somali autism crisis and how the Institute of Medicine reported their findings in 2004 as well as how the CDC handles autism.

Minnesota state epidemiologist Punyko is still unable to give us a definitive answer about autism among Somali students but she hopes she’ll know something by March. This is what the autism community is used to. The CDC has been counting U.S. children with autism for years and they still don’t know if there are more of them or if they’re just the result of “better diagnosing” and no real increase at all.

When the IOM Report was released in 2004, it gave vaccines a clean bill of health. They have no connection to autism. All the important studies said so. It was supposed to end the controversy, but it’s now the most heated issue in medicine. The MDH made a impressive showing for the Somali community. They assured people that vaccines couldn’t be the reason that they now had all these disabled children to care for. Officials could talk about services and support groups but that’s not why parents came to the meeting. They wanted answers and there were none, just as the IOM Report had nothing worthwhile for parents.

Minnesota health officials may think that they’ve addressed the issue but nothing was settled. What’s happening in the Somali community in Minneapolis is happening everywhere and authorities can’t continue to pretend that it’s not. As a nation, having so many disabled children that no one can explain is a prescription for disaster. As I’m always saying, show us the adults with autism at a rate we see in our children. So far, no one has ever been able to produce the studies on autism among adults. All the officials at the Minneapolis meeting who showed no alarm, no sense of urgency over the reported autism rate of one in every 28 Somali schoolchildren, can’t point to a similar rate of autism in Somali adults. That should call all the safety claims into question. That should be scaring everyone at the Minnesota Dept. of Health.

A new study that has recently come out has found that nearly 30 percent or 1/3 of Canadian Adults who have been diagnosed with asthma by their doctor may not have the disease. The findings suggest that literally thousands may be taking medication that they don’t need. The original study was to see if obese people were being misdiagnosed but the study found that misdiagnosis was occurring as well in those who were of normal weight.

Symptoms like wheezing, or shortness or breath can often be a sign of other problems like respiratory infection or COPD. The most common medicines used to treat asthma are steroids. Steroids are not harmful for someone who truly has the disease, but for someone without the disease they risk being exposed to harmful side effects from the drugs and also spending money for the drugs unnecessarily.

Previous research has suggested that asthma is often diagnosed by physicians primarily on the basis of symptoms, despite the fact that clinical guidelines recommend using a spirometer to measure lung volume and airway flow. What can be done? If you have been diagnosed by your physician with asthma and have not been given a test using a spirometer ask for one. You also have the option of getting a second diagnoiss if you are not happy or satisfied with the original one.