|
----- Original Message -----
From: "AutismConnect" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 12:43 PM
Subject: Latest news and [autismjobs] new vacancies 033
Hello,
Contents:
1. Latest news items - autism research findings on the brain and early
diagnosis, British government's mercury move and special-education news
2. Adam's Week
3. AutismJobs
Key addresses:
1. www.autismconnect.org
2. www.autismjobs.org
3. www.autismcymru.org
1. From the British point of view - but its importance does, of course,
spread much further afield - the most significant autism-related news event
occurred today, with the official announcement by the UK government that it
was withdrawing a vaccine containing the mercury-based preservative,
thimerosal, after fears that it could be linked to autism. Instead, a new
"five-in-one" jab is being introduced - probably in September - to immunise
British babies against whooping cough, diphtheria, hib, tetanus and polio.
A number of autism campaigners have welcomed the news of the
elimination of thimerosal as a victory. Once again, however, vaccines have
become the focus for party political wrangling. The fear is that anxious
parents may boycott the new vaccination in a repeat of the controversy over
the triple MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) jab.
Dr David Salisbury, the head of the government immunisation
programme, is planning to hold a briefing later today in an effort to allay
these fears. However, Jonathan Harris, of JABS - a British support group for
parents of vaccine-damaged children - said: "What on earth is going on for
parents? Many, many parents may have last week decided once and for all what
to do and then everything is changed. Confidence in MMR is very, very low.
How can they expect parents to have confidence in a five-in-one injection?
It seems a very worrying situation that they have decided to do this without
consultation." Mr Harris was particularly concerned that the meningitis jab
could be made mandatory, adding that the inoculation lowered the
effectiveness of other vaccines..
Michael Summers, chairman of the Patients' Association, agreed that
parents would need reassurance. "What we would hope is that perhaps next
week the chief medical officer would explain to the public precisely how
this has come about and whether proper trials have been conducted with a
view to establishing whether it is safe," he said.
Andrew Lansley, the opposition Conservative Party health spokesman,
said the way the change had been announced "further undermines confidence in
the approval system. Removing mercury from the preparation of vaccines is
clearly the right thing to do, but public concerns about combining vaccines
need to be addressed," he said.
The opposition Liberal Democrat health spokesman, Paul Burstow, also
welcomed an end to vaccinations containing mercury. However, he added: "With
regard to the proposed new five-in-one jab, we simply cannot afford to have
a repeat of what happened in the case of the MMR vaccine. Not only must the
science behind this decision be sound, but parents and the public must have
confidence that all possible risks have been discounted before the new
combined vaccine is put into use."
Britain's Department of Health has always insisted that there is no
evidence of a link between either MMR or mercury and autism. Its decision to
withdraw thimerosal comes weeks after it was announced that US researchers
at Columbia University in New York had found autism-like damage in the
brains of mice exposed to thimerosal. Despite the fact that other US and
European studies had discovered no link between mercury and autism, the
Columbia team said they had found that mice exposed to thimerosal showed
signs of changed behaviour and brain abnormalities. The animals had been
bred to be vulnerable to developing disorders of the immune system. The
study team argued it was possible that children with similarly-compromised
immunity may also be at risk.
Interestingly, as we report in another news item, the number of cases
of autism diagnosed in the state of California has declined for the first
time since official records began, and anti-mercury campaigners point out
that this news coincides with the withdrawal of thimerosal from infant
vaccines and products administered to RH negative mothers during pregnancy
in the United States.
In my view, however, if vaccines are part of the answer, they
represent only a small piece of the jigsaw which is the autism mystery. We
still do not know what is actually going wrong in the brains of people with
autism. Far more important, research-wise, from this point of view, are two
pieces of neurological research which have come out within the past few
weeks. The very latest study, by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University
and the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States, has found numerous
abnormalities in the activity of brains of people with normal IQs who have
autism. The new findings led these researchers to propose a new theory of
the basis of autism, called underconnectivity theory, which states that
autism is a system-wide brain disorder restricting the co-ordination and
integration among brain areas. This theory could partially help to explain
why some people with autism have normal or even superior skills in some
areas, while many other types of thinking are disordered.
The autistic participants in the study had an opposite distribution
of activation (compared to the control group) in the brain's two main
language areas, known as Broca's and Wernicke's areas, and there was also
less synchronisation of activation among key brain areas in the autistic
participants compared to the control group. The researchers believe that the
brain probably adapts to the diminished inter-area communication in autism
by developing more independent, free-standing abilities in each brain
centre. That is, abnormalities in the brain's white matter communication
cables could lead to adaptations in the grey matter computing centres. This
sometimes translates into enhanced free-standing abilities or superior
ability in a localised skill.
The researchers call their findings "ground-breaking" and say it
could lead to a sea-change in the way of thinking about the neurological
basis of autism. It could now, they claim, be viewed as a system-wide
disorder, putting an end to the quest for a localised region or particular
place in the brain where autism "lives" could come to an end.
The Pittsburgh research could have practical, therapeutic
implications: if underconnectivity is the problem, or a major problem, in
autism, then a cognitive behavioural therapy might be developed to stimulate
the development of connections in these higher order systems, focusing on
the emergence of conceptual connections, interpretive language and so on.
Eventually, pharmacological or genetic interventions might be developed to
stimulate the growth of this circuitry once the developmental neurobiology
and genetics of these brain connections are clearly defined by further
research studies.
In another thrilling study, researchers at the MIND Institute - the
fabulous institute attached to the University of California, Davis - have
conducted the largest study of its kind to date and have found that the
areas of the brain responsible for emotion and memory are abnormally large
in boys with autism.
The MIND researchers teamed up with scientists at the Department of
Psychiatry at Stanford University to conduct MRI brain analyses of 98 boys
between the ages of seven and 18 diagnosed with autism or Asperger's
syndrome. Some of the subjects had mental retardation in addition to autism.
Others had normal intelligence and autism. Their MRI scans were compared to
those of typically developing boys. In the non-autistic boys, the
amygdala -the area of the brain involved with processing emotions,
particularly negative ones such as fear - increased by about 40 per cent
over the age range studied, while the overall volume of the brain decreased
slightly. But the amygdala was significantly larger than 40 per cent in the
autistic boys aged seven-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half.
The study indicated that the amygdala became "too big, too fast" in
the autistic boys, according to the head of the study, Dr David Amaral. Dr
Amaral suggested that the difference in amygdala size related to the
inability of an autistic child's brain to use environmental experiences to
build appropriate brain circuits."
His team also found that the hippocampus - the area of the brain
associated with memories - also proved to be slightly larger in the autistic
boys at all ages of the study.
In a third important recent look at the neurology of autism, a group
of Portuguese scientists at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras
found that autism sufferers present a widespread range of antibodies against
brain tissue and one protein in particular seems to be the major target of
these antibodies. Immune abnormalities, including antibodies against the
central nervous system, have previously been associated with autism in some
studies - in particular by Dr Vijendra Singh at Utah State University in the
US - but this is the first study which claims unequivocally to prove such a
correlation, as earlier findings relied on analyses of a small number of
individuals and did not contain appropriate controls.
For those of you interested in how early it is possible to diagnose
Asperger's syndrome, you may well be interested in the latest research by Dr
Philip Teitelbaum and his wife, Osnat, at the University of Florida. I have
been following their work for many years, so I was especially intrigued to
read last week that they believe a simple test of whether a six-month-old
can hold his head high on a swing could help to diagnose Asperger's - years
earlier than at present.
The Teitelbaums are convinced that close observation of how
children's relexes go astray could be the key. Autistic children typically
experience a delay or absence in language use, making it possible to
diagnose them by the age of three. However, individuals with Asperger's
syndrome may develop language abilities on the same timescale as normal
children, hindering diagnosis until the age of seven or later. The
Teitelbaums have now examined videos of babies and toddlers later found to
have Asperger's and that these infants displayed movement abnormalities
comparable to those previously seen in autistic children, such as
characteristic facial paralysis, falling to one side while walking, and
failing to keep the head vertical when the body is tilted.
In viewing the family videos they received of 16 babies with
Asperger's, the Teitelbaums found disorders in some or all of the milestones
of early motor development, including crawling, walking, lying down, sitting
and the ability to right themselves. Some of the symptoms were similar to
those the Teitelbaums found in their 1998 study of infants later diagnosed
with severe syndrome. In the most recent study, the babies showed an
asymmetrical pattern in their movements. For example, some children crawled
by stepping with the foot of the right leg and crawling with the knee of the
left leg, or when lying prone, they extended the left arm forward to support
the chest while the right arm was trapped beneath the chest, the Teitelbaums
found. In addition, they discovered that, when lying on their sides, babies
with Asperger's syndrome would remain stuck there instead of smoothly
turning over in a corkscrew fashion, first with the hips, followed by the
torso and then the shoulders.Six of the 16 Asperger's babies did not sit
independently by the age of six months, and one baby, in his first attempts
at walking, failed to extend his arms in a protective reflex to prevent
falling and keeled over vertically like a tree falls over, Osnat Teitelbaum
said.
One simple way to treat children with the syndrome, she added, was to
swing them in a playground or backyard swing. This stimulated the inner ear
and helped to regulate balance, which appears to be defective in those with
autism and Asperger's syndrome. "One mother of a 6-month-old baby who
couldn't get any answers from her paediatrician called us and said her child
would not look at her or coo when she cooed to him. We suggested she swing
him, and after two or three weeks of doing this, she (the mother) said the
child had changed so much and started smiling at them."
The Teitelbaums recommend that the "tilting test" should be routinely
performed on all infants beginning at six months, particularly if there is a
history of autism or Asperger's syndrome in the family. "This simple,
non-invasive test takes 20-30 seconds and can be performed by the infant's
paediatrician or parents."
As usual, our recent news items also feature stories on special
education for children with autism. One particular case appears to show
bureaucracy going crazy in southern England. Parents who set up a special
school for their autistic children have been threatened with prosecution for
failing to send them to a mainstream primary school.
The Step by Step autistic school at Sharpthorne, in East Sussex,
opened in April this year because parents felt that local schools could not
cater for their children's special needs. The county's education authority
told the parents, however, that they would be taken to court if their
children's "unauthorised absences" from school continued. One mother has
said she is willing to go to prison "rather than deprive my son of the
chance of having a more fulfilling life. It is completely ridiculous to
threaten me with prosecution because Max goes to an autistic school at our
own expense. Max is not playing truant. We are not failing to control him.
We are trying to give him the best education we can find. Step by Step is
good for him, he has made so much progress there, and he loves it."
I believe this case highlights many deficiencies in local authority
and government understanding of the complexities of autism in many areas of
Britain. I myself know of some enlightened local educational authorities in
the UK, but this does not appear to be one of them. Moreover, I cannot
accept that the British government's drive to encourage local councils to
educate children with special needs - including autism - in mainstream
schools is an intelligent one. It is certainly a cheaper option for the
authorities, but many children with autism simply cannot function in an
ordinary classroom: the smells, the noises, the lack of a rigid structure
all make it impossible. They need a specialised environment.
2. In my latest Adam's Week column, "How brain findings are bringing us
closer to completing the autism jigsaw, I take a detailed look at the
significance of the exciting new research being conducted around the globe -
and how some of it relates to my 11-year-old autistic son, Johnny.
3. We are delighted to announce the following vacancies on autismjobs.
Positions in this issue are:
* Day Service Officer
* Residential Service Officers
* Care Officers
* Support Worker
* Specialist Support Worker
* Tutor
* Live-in Carer
To find out more about these jobs:
* Read this newsletter and click on the links within each advert.
To enquire about placing an advert:
* Send an e-mail with your contact details to [log in to unmask]
* We would also appreciate it if you would forward this e-mail to any
employers who you know are recruiting.
Adam Feinstein, Editor, AutismConnect
PS - unsubscribe details are at the bottom of this newsletter
=====================================================================
Employer : autism.west midlands
Job title : Various
Region : Midlands
Salary : £11,807 - £13,119 - 37 hr week
Closing Date : 23/8/2004
Job Ref. : AJ
Full/Part : Full
Job Function : Support
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Ba4kDiWb/
Job Description:
Have you ever considered a career working with adults with autistic spectrum
disorders (ASD)?
If so, Oakfield House provides residential and day services to 20 adults
with asd and Pinetrees provides services to 4 adults with Asperger Syndrome.
Both Services are located in Selly Park.
We now have vacancies for the following posts:
Oakfield House :
1 Day Service Officer 35 hours per week.
2 Residential Service Officers 28 hours per week.
Pinetrees
1 Care Officer 37 hours per week
1 Care Officer 28 hours per week
Salary range (£11,807 - £13,119) Pro rata based upon a 37-hour week.
A full driving licence is desirable (held for a minimum of four years)
Interested? For an application form and job description telephone:
0121 471 1913 between 10am and 4pm Monday to Friday.
Interviews will be held w/c 13th September 2004
autism.westmidlands is an equal opportunities employer
Registered company number 1953344 Registered
Charity number 517077
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Ba4kDiWb/
=====================================================================
Employer : Prior's Court School
Job title : Support Worker, Residential Department
Region : South East England
Salary : from £14,222
Closing Date : 31/8/2004
Job Ref. :
Full/Part : Full
Job Function : Support
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Ca4kDiWb/
Job Description:
We are looking for people who are caring, committed, full of energy and
flexible, who want to become part of an enthusiastic and supportive team.
We currently have vacancies in the role of Support Worker in the Residential
Department, to provide support to pupils with autism, learning difficulties
and challenging behaviour. Excellent Induction training and ongoing
personal development package.
Rota system: average 36 hours per week of early and late shifts
Holidays: 12 weeks (paid)
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Ca4kDiWb/
=====================================================================
Employer : The Painswick Inn Project
Job title : Specialist Support Worker
Region : South West England
Salary : see below
Closing Date : 3/9/2004
Job Ref. : AJ/2
Full/Part : Part
Job Function : Support
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Da4kDiWb/
Job Description:
A Specialist Support Worker is required to join our team supporting 16-25
year olds who have left residential colleges to make a success of
independent living in independent accommodation.
You are dedicated to work with a task-based, structured approach in a
creative and acclaimed holistic environment. Experience of direct work with
clients with Autistic Spectrum Disorders and a range of behavioural
difficulties is desirable. However, training will be given to the right
candidate.
Post A: 16.5 hours per week minimum
Post B: 21 hours per week minimum
These posts may be combined
Salary in the range of £14-17k pro rata, relative to qualifications and
experience.
Previous applicants need not apply.
Call 01453 759400 for an info pack
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Da4kDiWb/
=====================================================================
Employer : Parent
Job title : Tutor
Region : Africa
Salary : Good salary & conditions
Closing Date : 8/9/2004
Job Ref. : AJ/1
Full/Part : Full
Job Function : Tutorial
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Ea4kDiWb/
Job Description:
Exciting Opportunity in Africa!
An energetic and enthusiastic person is required to work with a bright and
cheerful high-functioning autistic boy, who is the teenage son of a British
United Nations family which has recently moved to Nairobi, Kenya.
The successful candidate will facilitate the boy's education and learning of
life skills, both at his school as well as tutoring at home. You must be
friendly, enthusiastic and enjoy working with children. You will need to
demonstrate reliability and dependability and be excited about helping a
young person develop.
This would be highly rewarding work and would suit someone with a creative,
friendly and flexible attitude that would relish the challenge to support
the boy in achieving his goals. Experience and an awareness of issues
concerning people with learning disabilities are desirable.
Good salary and conditions are offered. Start date is ASAP. Nairobi is a
vibrant, exciting town and is an excellent base from which Kenya and the
rest of Africa can be explored. Please email [log in to unmask] if you are
interested, with your particulars and a resumé of your experience
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Ea4kDiWb/
=====================================================================
Employer : Independent Living Norfolk
Job title : Live-in Carer
Region : East England
Salary : £525 per alternate week
Closing Date : 10/9/2004
Job Ref. : AJ
Full/Part : Full
Job Function : Support
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Fa4kDiWb/
Job Description:
A live-in carer is required to support a young man with autism £525 per
alternate week in rural Norfolk
T is a young man of 23 with learning difficulties, and a subtle form of
autism that really complicates life for him. From the age of 10 he lived at
a Camphill Community school, but when he went into adolescence, he could not
cope with the demands of living in a community house. He needs 1:1 support a
good deal of the time. At present it is best for him to have help to live on
his own.
Because T is so extremely sensitive, he now lives in a Supported Living
Project in a quiet village in an attractive part of North Norfolk. There is
a small team of imaginative, patient and energetic people working as T's
'personal helpers' on a daily basis. We are seeking live-in carers to spend
a week with T and then have a week off.
For the right people T is rewarding to work with. When he feels safe, he is
content and happy to do his work, to chat, and to play games. T has always
been interested in churches and in all kinds of music, which he loves and
which is a very important part of his life. Care qualifications are not
necessarily what is needed - we are looking for people with relevant
experience who would enjoy the challenge and satisfaction that living and
working with T and his team would offer. Training for the job will be given,
and there will be full support until T's carers have got to know him and he
feels safe with them.
Carers will need their own transport to get to this quiet rural location,
but the project does have a car for carers when on duty, so they must be
able to drive.
If you - or someone you know - would like to learn more, please contact
[log in to unmask] or Independent Living Norfolk (01603 785200) who have
full details - ref: SP0301TR.
Follow this link to learn more about this employer -
http://autismconnect.c.topica.com/maacwSXaa817Fa4kDiWb/
To view all of these jobs and more: visit www.autismjobs.org
To go straight to AutismConnect: visit www.autismconnect.org
To visit Autism Cymru: www.autismcymru.org
To unsubscribe:
* Please reply to this e-mail with the word 'unsubscribe' in the title of
the e-mail.
* Please do not use the link below.
====================================================================
Update Your Profile:
http://autismconnect.f.topica.com/f/?a2i2yB.a4kDiW.Y29sQGNv
Unsubscribe:
http://autismconnect.f.topica.com/f/?a2i2yB.a4kDiW.Y29sQGNv.u
Confirm Your Subscription:
http://autismconnect.f.topica.com/f/?a2i2yB.a4kDiW.Y29sQGNv.c
Delivered by Topica:
http://www.topica.com/?p=T3FOOTER
____________________________________________________________________________
This email and all attachments have been scanned by Kingston Communications'
email Anti-Virus service and no known viruses were detected.
____________________________________________________________________________
________________End of message______________________
Archives and tools for the Disability-Research Discussion List
are now located at:
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page.
|
