BAC Rutland

WASHINGTON – A national movement to purge the word “retarded’’ from lawbooks and medical terminology is nearing success, gaining support this week from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who apologized to advocates for the disabled for using the term during a private meeting last summer.

The campaign is led in part by the mentally disabled, who are increasingly politicized and eager to escape the stigma associated with the term.
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Reminder of Public Hearing on the FY 2011 State Budget

Information Notice
Joint Public Hearing on Fiscal Year 2011 budget
On Vermont Interactive Television

House and Senate Appropriations Committees
Monday, February 8, 2010, 4:30 – 7:00 p.m. – The House and Senate
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Dr. Andrew Wakefield is one of the most vilified medical practitioners of recent times, and now he carries the extremely rare dishonor of a retraction in The Lancet, on the paper he coauthored in 1998 suggesting a potential link between autism, bowel disease and Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

I believe that the public lynching and shaming of Dr. Wakefield is unwarranted and overwrought, and that history will ultimately judge who was right and who was wrong about proposing a possible association between vaccination and regressive autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).
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The British medical journal The Lancet yesterday offered a mea culpa of sorts for its role in launching a global vaccine scare. Its regrets come about 12 years too late.

The journal finally issued a full retraction of a study it ran in 1998 linking measles-mumps-rubella vaccines to autism. The paper, with Dr. Andrew Wakefield as lead author, sent British parents fleeing from inoculations and fed U.S. alarm over preservatives in vaccines.
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With a high prevalence of autism in Oregon many parents are desperate to find a cause and a cure. While the science has been unable to find either many other people and companies are attempting to find out what is going on behind the development of the Autistic Spectrum Disorder. One such person has been Andrew Wakefield.

Wakefield is a British-born, Canadian-trained physician who has done a number of studies on the alleged link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR). Wakefield was the lead author of a 1998 study, published in The Lancet, which sparked a large amount of media coverage.
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Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key administration posts:

• Larry Robinson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce (Conservation and Management), NOAA, Department of Commerce
• Jeffrey A. Lane, Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs, Department of Energy
• Paul Steven Miller, Governor, Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service
• Dennis J. Toner, Governor, Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service
• J. Patricia Wilson Smoot, Commissioner, United States Parole Commission, Department of Justice
• Lana Pollack,  Commissioner, International Joint Commission, Department of State

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pledged to have a “real clear plan” in place in every state for handling restraint and seclusion at the start of the school year. Now, halfway through the year, officials say information will be released in the coming weeks.

Last May, a Government Accountability Office report found hundreds of cases of abusive and even deadly incidents of restraint and seclusion in the nation’s schools, most of which involved students with disabilities.
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CLAIRE DANES wouldn’t mind a contemporary role for a change, if that can be arranged. Last year she played an ambitious careerist in the 1930s theater in “Me and Orson Welles,” now she’s an autistic animal scientist in the 1960s in the biopic “Temple Grandin.” So she’d like something “in the here and now” — maybe where she gets to wear heels on occasion, even show a little leg.
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Enable America, a non-profit organization devoted to empowering people with disabilities
to achieve independence through employment, is encouraging participation in the U.S. Department of Labor’s disability employment listening tour, which is being held now through early March.

“Enable America would like to commend and thank Assistant Secretary Kathy Martinez for setting up her listening tour,” said Steve LaBour, Executive Director of Enable America. “These sessions are a great opportunity for those working in the trenches to speak directly to the federal leaders who impact disability employment policy.”
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WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today introduced the Blind Persons Return to Work Act of 2010 (S. 2962), which will allow blind Americans to more easily transition from Social Security beneficiaries to income-earning, productive members of the workforce.

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a program meant to provide disabled Americans with financial support, actually discourages blind people from seeking employment by placing a limit on how much money they can earn.  This bipartisan bill replaces the monthly earnings limit with a gradual phase-out, allowing blind beneficiaries to systematically replace benefits with earned income.
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