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The hidden story about vaccines, autism, drugs and food… Americas health has been BOUGHT. Your health, your family’s health. Now brought to you by Wall Street… “If you thought they hurt us with the banks, wait till you see what they’re doing to health care.” Vaccines. GMOs. Big Pharma. Three big, BIG, okay… HUGE topics in one film. Why? Why not 3 films, why put all this in one movie? Great question, 2 answers. 1st and most importantly: We need to band together. We need a mainstream film, not another radical movie that only interests the “already converted”. Over 5 million people supported Prop 37 in CA. Reportedly, over 2 million worldwide marched against Monsanto in a global protest. There...ane vaccine expansion, and our love affair with pharmaceuticals- it’s the same villain. It’s a risky story to tell, but would be a tragedy to passively consent to with silence. There is something horribly wrong with health care today. Huge money, billions and billions of dollars flowing into the same pockets. Meanwhile, MD’s aren’t being allowed to actually practice the art of medicine and anyone who questions vaccination safety, pharmaceuticals, factory farms, etc. is ridiculed and belittled. Meanwhile, the billions keep flowing, carried on a river of pain and anguish. Huge corporations funded by individual misery, one broken life at a time. Three huge stories, each worthy of multiple films, but each brought together by one staggering fact: it’s the same villain. These three story lines converge on Wall Street, in a tale of corruption, greed and shocking lack of conscience.

 

FEAT Daily Newsletter 12-02-01 (Part 1)

xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"> FEAT Daily Newsletter 12-02-01 (Part 1)

FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER      Sacramento, California      http://www.feat.org

“Healing Autism: No Finer a Cause on the Planet”

December 2, 2001        News Morgue Search  www.feat.org/search/news.asp

EDUCATION

·        Special Education Bill Killed

 

RESEARCH

·        Stem Cells, Forged Into Neurons, Show Promise For Brain Repair

 

CARE

·        Boy’s Airport Injury Still A Mystery

 

 

Special Education Bill Killed

[By Greg Toppo, AP Education Writer.]

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-congress-education1201dec01

.story?coll=sns%2Dap%2Dpolitics%2Dheadlines <-- address ends here

Democrats blasted a successful Republican effort to block billions in guaranteed funding increases for disabled students but say they’ll come up with a new proposal next week.

“Congress had found tens of billions of dollars to bail out the airlines, help energy companies and give tax breaks to profitable corporations in the last few months,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. “But when children with special needs show up, we shut the door.”

He commented after House Republicans on Friday defeated a proposal that would have guaranteed annual $2.5 billion increases over the next six years in federal funding for special education.

Saying they want to fund the program, GOP lawmakers worried that the money could wind up coming from a program aimed at helping economically disadvantaged children. “Why would we want to pit poor children against disabled children?” said Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Boehner offered an alternative -- $2 billion in additional annual aid, but subject to the annual spending debates that Congress conducts each year. Democrats rejected that.

The clash came on one of a few issues remaining on the education bill, a priority on President Bush’s domestic agenda.

The bill is expected to require annual math and reading tests for all students in grades three through eight, with proposals to give federal money for tutoring or transportation to families whose children attend schools with persistently low test scores.

The bill also is expected to give states and school districts more freedom over how they spend federal dollars.

Friday’s meeting of the House-Senate conference committee, which is producing the final bill, was packed with disabled students’ advocates. As lawmakers debated, a sign-language interpreter translated the proceedings.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who cosponsored the funding amendment with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said he had talked to several parents waiting to get into the hearing. “You think life is tough?” Harkin said. “Go and talk to those people out there.”

The Senate last spring approved the special education measure, which would have guaranteed an annual $2.5 billion increase for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, specifying that the money be kept safe from the yearly appropriations process.

It included $8.8 billion next year for special education programs; funding would reach just over $21 billion in 2007, the last year of the guaranteed increases.

Bush asked Congress to increase IDEA spending by $1 billion. House appropriators raised that to $1.4 billion, but the money is not guaranteed to increase each year. Opponents of the guaranteed money said it could lead schools to place more students in special education classes instead of getting them help in regular classrooms.

Boehner said the debate should wait until next year, when the special education legislation is due for revision in Congress. He and others also said the system should be overhauled before more money is poured into it. A presidential commission on special education is due to report to Bush in April.

School systems have long complained that the federal government requires them to educate children with disabilities but doesn’t give them enough money for expensive evaluations, equipment and services.

IDEA, enacted in 1975, called for Washington to provide 40 percent of funding for disabled youngsters’ education. This year, the federal government provided about 16 percent, or $6.3 billion. States and school districts share a much larger burden.

“We have failed to meet that guarantee, and we have failed year after year,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

About 6 million children receive special education funding, which pays for school instruction and help for everything from dyslexia to paralysis.

 

 

 

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* * *

 

Stem Cells, Forged Into Neurons, Show Promise For Brain Repair

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-11/uow-scf112801.php

In a set of meticulous experiments, scientists have demonstrated the ability of human embryonic stem cells to develop into nascent brain cells and, seeded into the intact brains of baby mice, further develop into healthy, functioning neural cells.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology (December, 2001), a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with colleagues from the University of Bonn Medical Center, show that the blank-slate stem cells taken from early human embryos can, in a laboratory dish, be guided down the developmental pathway to becoming precursor brain cells.

Transplanted into the brains of baby mice, the precursor cells subsequently showed their ability to further differentiate into neurons and astrocytes, the cell species that populate the different regions of the brain and spinal cord.

The work represents a critical step toward a high-stakes payoff for human embryonic stem cell technology - an inexhaustible supply of transplantable neural cells and tissue to repair everything from spinal cord injuries to the ravages of Parkinson’s disease. The new work was conducted largely at the WiCell Institute in Madison, Wis., and is now being continued at the UW-Madison Waisman Center.

“This is a very important step. The cells work” as they should, says Su-Chun Zhang, a UW-Madison professor of anatomy and neurology and the lead author of the Nature Biotechnology paper. Co-authors include James A.  Thomson and Ian D. Duncan, also of UW-Madison, and Marius Wernig and Oliver Brustle of the University of Bonn Medical Center.

The newly published work is critically important for two reasons: One, it establishes the fact that human embryonic stem cells can be guided down the developmental pathway to becoming brain cells and, two, it shows that they can be transplanted into animals and further develop into the more specific types of cells necessary for normal brain function.

“The neuron that we’re seeing after transplant is almost identical to what the neuron should be in the healthy brain,” says Zhang. “These are the cells that will be used, ultimately, to treat Parkinson’s and other central nervous system disorders.”  The human stem cells were transplanted into the brains of newborn mice to co-opt the developmental cues that occur as the animal grows and the brain develops.

“These transplanted cells had no experience in the brain, and we wanted to see if they would mirror the development of the mouse brain,” Zhang says. “And they do.”  Zhang stressed that the work, in essence, is a demonstration of a system for directing the cells to become the specific types of cells needed for repairing the damaged or ailing brain. Key steps yet to be performed before the technology can be attempted in humans is to assess function and actually treat a condition such as Parkinson’s in an animal model such as primates.

“We are nowhere near clinical application,” Zhang says. “It will still be some years before we can even try this in people.”  However, the new work is strong evidence that human stem cell therapies are likely to live up to their billing as revolutionary treatments for a host of heretofore intractable cell-based diseases.

Moreover, the work performed by Zhang and his colleagues exhibited an important ancillary result: the complete absence of teratomas or tumors in the mice that received the cell transplants. Of concern in any potential stem cell therapy is that tumors may arise from contamination of precursor cells by undifferentiated cells.

“We put a lot of cells, in one instance half-a-million, in a mouse,” says Zhang. “The more cells you put in, the more likely you are to have a tumor. The absence of tumors shows our methods for purifying the precursor cells are pretty good.”

* * *

 

Boy’s Airport Injury Still A Mystery

Police seek clues from medical records

 

[By Eric Firpo News-Press, Santa Barbara, Calfornia.]

http://news.newspress.com/topsports/1130airport.htm

Thursday’s showers probably washed away key blood stains, so police now hope medical records will provide clues as to how a 6-year-old autistic boy was injured after he wandered onto a runway at the Santa Maria Public Airport.

Tucker Sheller is in Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, and his condition was upgraded Thursday from serious to fair. He suffered a head wound and a broken elbow in the unexplained incident Monday night.

The boy lived in a trailer park on airport property. He slipped away as his mother, Theresa Sheller, was in the process of moving out of her mobile home on Blosser Road.

There is a chain-link fence between the trailer park and the runways.  But the boy, who is unable to speak due to his autism, may have squeezed through the bars of a gate loosely chained shut.

Or he may have entered through a nearby vehicle gate at the end of Blosser Road by walking in behind an unsuspecting driver who had punched a code to get inside.

There is speculation that the boy may have been drawn to the airport by the presence of Monster.com’s orange blimp, lit up that night like a huge pumpkin.

What police do know for sure is this: Just before 6 p.m. Monday, a Marine Corps pilot practicing take-offs and landings radioed the air traffic tower that he had flown over a child just as he was about to touch down.

Then, about 6:30 p.m., Tucker’s mother checked him into the emergency room at Marian Medical Center. He had a broken left elbow and a jagged inch-long vertical gash in the middle of his forehead, and his face and sweatshirt were covered in blood.

At first, the pilot thought he may have hit the boy. He told investigators he was about 10 feet off the ground when he glimpsed Tucker off to his left. “He was close enough to see that it was a child and that he was wearing a green sweatshirt,” said Lt. Mike Cordero of the Santa Maria Police Department.

The pilot landed to check out his plane on a well-lit ramp and found no sign that the aircraft had struck the child, nor did a more thorough aircraft inspection later by military investigators at the pilot’s home base, the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration looked at the boy’s wounds, took into account the twin-engine turbo-prop flown by the pilot, and fairly quickly discounted the possibility that the plane had hit the boy, police said.

Investigators assume that the plane, traveling at about 100 mph, would have killed Tucker had it struck him.

“The FAA right now does not believe the plane hit him,” said Lt.

Cordero. But if the plane didn’t hit Tucker, what happened?  He could have been knocked off his feet by the blast of the engines as the plane passed him, flight safety experts said. Or the same force could have kicked up a rock that cut his head, police surmise.

But it’s the absence of blood that has authorities most puzzled.  Doctors say Tucker’s head wound could have been caused by a fall onto a hard surface, said Lt. Rad Mawhinney, and that it would have bled profusely— and, in fact, it did.

In another tough-to-explain twist, it’s a perfectly clean wound. There was no dirt, grass, sand, pebbles, pieces of asphalt or debris of any kind in the cut or near it, or anywhere else on the boy’s body, Lt. Cordero said.

Three times before Thursday’s rain fell, crime scene experts combed the area between where Tucker was seen by the pilot and where he was found by two young men who were helping the boy’s mother move.

There is plenty the boy could have tripped on in the dark, police say.  Metal electrical boxes lie on uneven, grassy ground. There’s asphalt and some concrete. A stack of steel girders is piled along the fence line not far from the trailer park.

Not a speck of blood was found anywhere. “We’ve checked them all,” Lt.

Mawhinney said.

On Wednesday, police finally found traces of blood on the chain-link gate Tucker and the two young men squirmed through after the boy was found, but that doesn’t explain how he got hurt.

Nor is the blimp believed to be involved. It was under 24-hour watch and has since left the airport, though police still want to interview the guard on duty that night.

Police next want to more closely examine the boy’s X-rays and bring in a forensic specialist to give them a better idea of exactly what could have caused the boy’s cut.

“I think the medical records and the doctors’ opinions are going to really help us a lot,” Lt. Mawhinney said.

Meanwhile, airport officials are trying to deflect the suggestion that lax security contributed to the boy’s injury. The fence along the airport perimeter is checked twice a day, said airport General Manager Gary Rice.

It’s eight feet high and topped with three strands of barbed wire, which Mr.

Rice said meets FAA regulations.

If regulations were not followed, the airport could be fined, said FAA

spokesman Jerry Snyder.

Kids in the trailer park knew one of the codes to open the vehicle gate. That has since been changed, Mr. Rice said, as have other codes. And signs will be placed asking drivers to make sure no one sneaks in behind them.

A tighter chain now closes the gap that police suspect Tucker slipped through.

“We’ve clamped that up and clamped up the gate that’s down from it. I don’t know what else to do,” Mr. Rice said. “I had our insurance guy out here the next day and he said, ‘You’ve taken every precaution. You don’t have a breach of security.’ I think it would be a tough concept to put forward that there’s some negligence on the airport.” It’s an issue FAA and police officials said is a legal question that might take a civil court to answer.

Whether that will happen is uncertain. Tucker’s mother has declined, through hospital spokespeople, to speak to the press. Mr. Rice said some blame lies with Ms. Sheller, who told police Tucker was missing for perhaps 20 minutes before he was found.

A trailer park resident and neighbor of Ms. Sheller said she mostly kept to herself and usually stayed inside with Tucker. But she said the boy did slip away once before, when Ms. Sheller was moving in about two months ago. Sara Ortiz said the boy got on his bike and rode into Orcutt. His family found him at a shopping center about a mile away, she said.

Lenny Schafer, Editor@feat.org    CALENDAR EVENTS@feat.org Michelle Guppy

Catherine Johnson PhD    Ron Sleith    Kay Stammers    Edward Decelie

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ALL INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE.  THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.