Baysox.com

August 4, 2008 - The Bowie Baysox, Class AA affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, is proud to host the second annual Autism Awareness Night at Prince George’s Stadium on Friday, August 8. Gates will open at 6 p.m. and the Baysox will take the field to take on the New Britain Rock Cats at 7:05 p.m.

In honor of this night, the Baysox are offering any Autism organizations a special ticket offer. For each ticket the organization purchases for Autism Awareness Night, the Baysox will donate $2 back to the organization! To purchase tickets for your organization, please contact Lindsay Johnson at (301) 464-4853.

The night will be kicked off with a special check presentation ceremony when the Bowen Foundation will present a check to Autism Speaks. After the ceremony, Travis Lowman will throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Travis is a member of the Anne Arundel County Chapter of Autism Society of America and is also a member of the Special Olympic Softball team. During the seventh inning stretch, Raeann Robisch of Monrovia, Maryland will sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Raeann is a child with Autism who is also a member of the Frederick Children’s Chorus. She was on hand for last year’s Autism Awareness night to sing the National Anthem.

Several organizations will have informational tables set up around the concourse. The Anne Arundel County Chapter of Autism Society of America, Arc of Prince George’s County and Autism Waiver Coordinators, Autism Speaks, Pathfinders and One World Center For Autism will all be represented on the concourse. There will also be a “Quiet Room” where one parent and one child can watch some of the game in a cool, quiet environment.

After the game, the Baysox will have a fireworks extravaganza and kids 12 and under will be able to run the bases! It is also “Back To School Night” at Prince George’s Stadium, and the first 1,000 kids ages 12 and under will receive a free Baysox backpack. Parking, as it is for all Baysox games, is FREE!

Sydney Wilmer | LoudounExtra.com | Washington Post

Parents of autistic children packed a meeting Monday evening at Lansdowne on the Potomac to rally support for legislation that would ease the disability’s financial burden on families.

Appearing at an event billed as the Loudoun County Autism Summit, they spoke about the financial devastation that an illness not covered by insurance can cause. Most families pay about $50,000 a year in therapy costs for autism treatment, speakers said.

“My family has refinanced our home to get our child what he needs,” Cindy Davis said.

Davis was one of about 20 parents who spoke in favor of the state bill, which would require health insurers in Virginia to cover services such as speech and behavioral therapy for people younger than 21.

Most of the speakers shared similar stories. After their son’s or daughter’s autism was diagnosed, they said, they were forced to make difficult financial decisions about what treatments they could afford. Typically, Davis said, parents must choose between paying for treatment that could help address the child’s developmental delays and paying other bills.

As of December, 528 autistic students were enrolled in the Loudoun public school system, according to Mary Kearney, the school district’s head of special education.

“I’d like to see this bill passed. That’s why I’m here tonight,” said Beverly Tolbert, whose 8-year-old son is autistic. “There are a lot of kids out there being diagnosed. This is a problem. People need to be aware.”

Advocates said the proposed legislation, House Bill 83, would mandate insurance coverage for a program known as applied behavior analysis, which was approved by the surgeon general in 2002 as a way to treat autism.  MORE

Ann Ali | The State Journal

West Virginia’s teachers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand for autism training, according to the executive director of the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University.

Teachers often further their own educations, but West Virginia’s teachers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand for autism training, according to the executive director of the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University.

Large Increase

“We truly are seeing so many more students with autism in the school system; it really is an unusual thing we’re facing,” said Barbara Becker-Cottrill. “We have some fantastic teachers currently, but we’re just really scrambling to catch up with the tremendous demand right now.

“I truly believe it’s just an abnormal increase in the numbers that we’re seeing (of students with autism).”

Education History

Becker-Cottrill said one in 150 students nationwide will be diagnosed with autism.

West Virginia currently offers an autism endorsement on teaching certifications, and if a special education teacher wants that certification, he or she doesn’t have to start from scratch.

“You want someone to be the most highly qualified, but of course that means time and money,” said Liza Cordeiro, spokeswoman for the West Virginia Department of Education.  MORE

Science Daily

ScienceDaily (July 23, 2008) — Picking up on innuendo and social cues is a central component of engaging in conversation, but people with autism often struggle to determine another person’s intentions in a social interaction. New research from Carnegie Mellon University sheds light on the neural mechanisms that are responsible for such social difficulties in autism, and on the workings of these social brain mechanisms in all of us.

According to the study, which is available on the Web site of the journal Social Neuroscience, inefficient pathways for transmitting information between certain brain regions are to blame. The research implicates abnormalities in the brain’s inter-regional communication system, which connects the gray matter’s computing centers.

“The communication between the frontal and posterior areas of the social brain network is impaired in autism, making it difficult to understand the intentions of others” said the study’s senior author, Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon.

The study is the first to measure the synchronization between the brain areas that make up the Theory of Mind (ToM) network, which is responsible for processing the intentions and thoughts of others. It is the first to provide such concrete evidence of faulty social network connections. (more…)

New-Press.com

“New Ways to Diagnose Autism Earlier” read a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. There is no question that you can diagnose anything as early as you want. The real question is whether the diagnosis will turn out to be correct.

My own awareness of how easy it is to make false diagnoses of autism grew out of experiences with a group of parents of late-talking children that I formed back in 1993.

A number of those children were diagnosed as autistic. But the passing years have shown most of the diagnoses to have been false, as most of these children have not only begun talking but have developed socially.

Some parents have even said, “Now I wish he would shut up.”  MORE

Media Matters

On the July 16 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage claimed that autism is “[a] fraud, a racket.” Savage went on to say, “I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.”

Savage also stated: “[W]hy was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I’ll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket. Everyone went in and was told [fake cough], ‘When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], “I don’t know, the dust got me.” ‘ See, everyone had asthma from the minority community.”  MORE

Ann Bauer | Washington Post | Opinion

There is a family down the street whom I envy.

I’ve never met them. They live in a two-story white house — a mother, a father and their grown son. Outside is a trimmed yard with rosebushes and a wooden arbor where the men work on weekends.

The dad, who looks to be near 60, pushes a wheelbarrow or carries a set of shears. The son could be 20 — the age of my oldest child — or 40. He is a short, egg-shaped man. He walks behind his father, carrying large shovels and bags of dirt and the like. He works tirelessly, from what I can see, and talks most of the time.

On weekdays, when I am taking my youngest child to school, I sometimes see him holding a cloth lunch bag and boarding a small bus. I imagine that at work he is as cheerful and productive as he appears to be with his father on Sunday afternoons.

The fact that this man has Down syndrome is clear. He has the telltale almond-shaped eyes and short limbs. I know that he could suffer from any number of medical conditions, from heart defects to epilepsy, and that his cognitive functioning is probably impaired.

Still, I envy his parents.  MORE

HealthDay News | Washington Post

THURSDAY, July 17 (HealthDay News) — New research shows that some parents of autistic children appear to be “socially aloof,” providing more evidence that some aspects of autism are hereditary.

“This manifests as a tendency not to prefer interactions with others, not to enjoy ’small talk’ for the sake of the social experience, and to have few close friendships involving sharing and mutual support. This characteristic is really a variation of the normal range of social behavior and not associated with any functional impairment,” Dr. Joe Piven, director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities and co-author of a paper published in the July 17 issue ofCurrent Biology, said in a university news release.

After observing 42 parents of children with autism, the researchers concluded that some of the parents evaluated facial expressions differently, more like their autistic children.  MORE

Liz Hayes | Valley News Dispatch | Pittsburgh Tribune Review

Autism advocates are hailing the long-awaited passage of a state bill that requires insurance companies to start covering autism treatments next July.

House Bill 1150 — named for the estimated 1 in 150 children now diagnosed with the neurological disorder — requires insurance companies to provide up to $36,000 in annual benefits for autistic children and young adults up to age 21.

Those benefits will include coverage of diagnosis and therapies that experts believe can lead to improvement in behavior, communication and learning disabilities — the hallmarks of autism spectrum disorders.

Historically, behavioral therapies were not insured because they were not considered medically necessary. Many families relied on a loophole program through the state Department of Public Welfare that allowed them to qualify for medical assistance, regardless of family income.

“I’m very happy with (the bill),” said Cindy Waeltermann, president of the Autism Center of Pittsburgh and mother of two autistic boys. “We worked so many years to get it passed.” (more…)

Larry Carson | Baltimore Sun

Kristen Detwiler had just merged onto busy Route 100 in Ellicott City one afternoon last week when she saw a shocking sight: Her 7-year-old autistic son was running against traffic on the right shoulder.

“I slammed on the brakes and started running after him yelling, ‘Stop, Colin, it’s Mommy! Stop! stop!’” she recalled.

Detwiler gathered up her son as other motorists called 911. A county police officer arrived and accompanied Detwiler back to Veterans Elementary School, the site of a county-sponsored summer day camp from which her son had wandered off.

Though the boy was unharmed, Detwiler, an Ellicott City resident, said she is angry that camp staffers did not call police earlier and that after the incident, she did not receive a call from a high-ranking parks department official for two days.

“We’re talking about a lost kid with autism,” Detwiler said. “There should have been an ambulance, a helicopter, immediate police. It took them 30 minutes” to call 911.

County officials say that though staff members followed protocol for searching for a missing child, the search was too extensive, delaying a call to the police.  MORE