Hi All - Below is a blog I am writing on my companies internal website & posting April 2nd. My company employees about 90K people world wide. Please review it & provide feedback. I will not be offended by any of your feedback.... Oh yeah, I am really bad at grammer & spelling so you can help me with that too...

For those of you who don’t know this is the first year where April 2nd & the month of April has been declared by the United Nations as Autism Awareness month. 1:150 children in the USA are diagnosed with the neurological disorder. Boys are even higher in the ratio where I have seen numbers as low as 1:60. Autism is graded on a spectrum ranging from the more mild scale Aspergers to severe Autism. Some researchers & even other countries are reporting even higher ratios. Some will argue that that the increase in children diagnosed with autism is due to the overall better understanding, awareness, & diagnostic attention that have lead to drive up these numbers. However, when you speak to those in the trenches: teachers, therapists, pediatricians they will admit that in their decades of service they have never seen so many children that are truly impacted by this disorder. They have seen nothing like it. I remember when I was growing up I knew of only one autistic child in our community. Now, I know of six parents who have a child(ren) on the Autistic Spectrum in my two story Folsom Intel building. You have to ask yourself what the heck is going on with this generation of children. It can not be denied any longer that something serious is impacting huge numbers of our children.

Autism is 100% in my immediate family. My little girl less than a month after her third birthday was diagnosed with autism. Up until that point she was exceeding or was meeting all developmental milestones for her age. Literally within a month we saw our little girl transform into a whole different person. This metamorphosis is controversially labeled regressive autism & impacts a subset of children with autism. Some children show the tell tale signs very early in development others are impacted just like my daughter. We watched our little girl who loved to pretend plan, reciprocate communication in 3-5 word sentences, new all her shapes, colors, ABC’s, & numbers to 10 loose all these capabilities. Her personality drastically changed, her concentration level drastically reduced. Stimulant & repetition behaviors became ever present.

The causes, treatments, & how it individually impacts each child still remains an enigma. Some will say it is purely genetics, others will say it is environment & genetics, some will say vaccines, etc. etc. My personal belief I will keep that mostly to myself, however, I do believe in most cases it is a genetic common predisposition that combined with environmental catalyst(s). The condition is life long for these children & there is NO cure to date. Our neurologist loosely told us 33% of the children regress even further, 33% stay the same, & 33% improve. These children require very special educational & therapeutic services to provide them a shot at a functional life. These services are becoming choked as the landslide of children hits the community. Waiting lists for behavior therapies are exceeding 6 to 12 months in our community. Insurance companies offer very limited coverage to help these children & are adding new caveats to what they will cover each year. With more children being impacted & fewer services to help these children the problem for all of us is only going to compound.


Below is a link to some of the characteristics that label autism & various resources. Let me tell you as a parent of a child on the Autistic Spectrum, that this criteria really is just the tip of the iceberg as to how these children are impacted. Also, I have pasted a link to several video resources that give you a glimpse to better understand.

I HOPE YOU ALL WILL JOIN MY CRUSADE IN SOME WAY TO BATTLE THIS TRUE EPIDEMIC.

Signs of Autism in a child: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/autism/DS00348/DSECTION=2


This video although a bit focusing on the negative, it is a glimpse of what parents deal with. It is a 13 minute video: http://www.autismspeaks.org/media/d_200603_EveryDay16x9_512k.wmv

This is a link to an orginization that helps promote awareness they also have some videos on their site that may help you understand & identify if your child is having problems:

http://www.autismspeaks.org/index.php?intro=1
Videos: http://www.autismspeaks.org/video/glossary.php

This link is called Autism University it is simply the google search with the keyword autism: Sadly, when our child was first diagnosed it was the only resource readily available to help us navigate this scary world. We litterally where given a diagnosis by a neurlogist & cast out the door crying to figure it all out ourselves.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-24,GGLG:en&q=Autism

This is a great resource to help parents navigate the world of autism. They are a community of parents that help other parents navigate the gautlet & provide the best for their children.
http://www.feat.org/




CNN autism link: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/news/autism/



Social Network for those impacted by autism (parents, caregivers, relatives, etc) :
http://www.foggyrock.com/