From The Columbus Dispatch:

By now, Americans are used to encountering health-care messages in the mall or grocery store.

Flu shots are everywhere. Information on diabetes and other common conditions isn't hard to find.

But it still might surprise some people when Walmart stores begin offering mental-health help this month.

On Sept. 18 and 19, Walmart customers will find information on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder at the Columbus store at 3900 Morse Rd. and at stores in Lewis Center, Reynoldsburg, Canal Winchester and Marysville.

These "awareness centers" are being set up in partnership with Shire Pharmaceuticals, which makes one of the medications approved for treating the disorder.

The kiosks will include guides on how to recognize signs and symptoms of ADHD in children. Doctors will not be available to discuss concerns, but customers will be encouraged to make appointments with their doctors if they have more questions, said Kara Holmes, a Shire spokeswoman.

Mental-health experts welcome more information on ADHD but caution that actual diagnosis is complex, and the decision to enter into treatment should be made carefully with the help of a doctor who understands the disorder and the various medications that can be used to treat it.

Any effort to identify those suffering from a condition through a list of signs and symptoms will catch more people than those who actually have the disorder, said Dr. Daniel Coury, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

He said the kiosks will be useful as long as people use them as a starting point.

"It does take careful evaluation, or people can be misdiagnosed or over-diagnosed," Coury said.

A careful evaluation should include interviews with the child, the parents and other adults who know the child, including teachers, he said.

An estimated 3 percent to 7 percent of the population has ADHD, Coury said.

Laura Moskow Sigal, executive director of Mental Health America of Franklin County, said she welcomes educational materials in retail settings.

"A lot of times, (ADHD) goes undiagnosed because parents think kids are supposed to be wild and running around the room. Anytime you can educate folks about some possible treatments, it's a good thing," she said.

The Walmart kiosks will focus on children but might also be helpful for those adults who suffer from ADHD and don't realize it, Sigal said.

Like Coury, Sigal said nobody should make a snap diagnosis about ADHD.

"It's important to explore all the possibilities that may explain the child's behavior. It could be a depression, or a family going through job loss or divorce."

She applauded Walmart for partnering with Shire to educate customers and possibly help people seek help and reduce the stigma associated with mental illness.

From BioNews:

Tests to diagnose learning disabilities, autism and blindness using a child's whole genome could become a reality in clinics by 2011, according to a leading Dutch academic.

Professor Joris Veltman, an Associate Professor in Genomic Disorders from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre is already trialling the tests at his clinic. Professor Veltman's tests use next generation DNA sequencing machines, which he has adapted for use in genetic testing. Current genetic tests look at mutations in a few genes. But next-generation DNA sequencers allow all human genes to be quickly decoded, by a method called exome sequencing.

This has been key to understanding the cause of rare diseases like Schinzel-Giedion syndrome, which has mental retardation as one of the clinical features. Using exome sequencing, Veltman's team recently showed that this condition is caused by different mutations in a single gene, called SETBP1.

'In many cases, exome sequencing allows us to make diagnoses simply and quickly', he says. 'It is changing dramatically the way we do genetic diagnoses'.

The new technique can also be used to advance scientific research into other genetic diseases. By sequencing all a child's coding DNA and comparing it to DNA from healthy parents, Professor Veltman's team can identify unique mutations in DNA that aren't present in a child's parents.

'We can identify de novo - those that aren't present in the parents - mutations or deletions and link these to disease even if they have never been seen in other patients before', he says. Some genetic disorders are caused by missing or 'deleted' sections of DNA.

Professor Veltman warns this technique will initially be expensive, but predicts it will become cheaper as it becomes more widespread.

'At the moment, this is still expensive. We now talk about exome sequencing costing a few 1000 euros. For diagnostic use, we need each test to cost less than 1000 euros', he says. 'But with upscaling, we see this as a possibility in the near future. In the Netherlands, it will be possible to start doing this diagnostically by 2011'.

From NorthJersey.com:

After a recent evaluation of West Milford High School, the township’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Committee is less than thrilled with the district’s progress in complying with federal accessibility laws.

Committee member Janice Sangle said that the 11-member group, which includes disabled residents and local officials, found dozens of examples of non-compliance that extend from issues of inconvenience to possible safety infringements, during a three-hour walkthrough on Aug. 26.

"I don’t think I can open one door in there," committee member and wheelchair user James Novack said. "It’s a definite problem."

Sangle, a wheelchair user who almost single-handedly revived the committee in 1996 after four years of dormancy, said she was disappointed with the lack of improvement in the building since the ADA committee last visited the high school as a group around one year ago. Problems with non-compliant curbs, doorways and restrooms are still prevalent in the 33-year-old building, 20 years after the ADA was enacted, she said.

Novack went a bit further, saying the district should be embarrassed at neglecting even simple violations that, if fixed, would go a long way toward compliance. Compliance is vital for not just the handful of high school students with permanent disabilities, but students and visitors with temporary ailments, like broken legs, as well, he said.

"I told [district officials], ‘I’m not picky. It’s the law,’" Novack said.

District Superintendent Bernice Colefield said the concerns are being taken seriously, but added that there are issues, mostly financial, with what the committee has been seeking.

"We are not ignoring them, but certain things are restricted," Colefield said.

The superintendent said the district makes every effort to accommodate visitors and students alike, but said finances are preventing immediate action on structural renovations. Still, she added that the district will respond to the committee’s concerns through a planning effort that will begin with an architectural review and a cost analysis for the possible upgrades.

Once the ADA committee submits an official list of possible violations, Colefield said the district will meet with township officials to compare the municipal code with ADA regulations and determine a prioritized action plan. Sangle, who has multiple sclerosis, said she hopes this effort will lead to the establishment of a high school that can be visited and utilized by people with all types of disabilities without special accommodations.

"The school system needs to prioritize just to be able to get people into the school," Sangle said.

The upgrades requested are exclusively physical, as the committee expressed no displeasure with the district’s educational operations. By no means minimizing the hazards that non-compliant doors pose, Colefield highlighted the district’s efforts when it comes to accommodating students as well as providing equal access and inclusive facilities.

Still, Sangle said the district should include more programs designed to educate students about disabilities. Maybe educating the community from the bottom up will help encourage ranking district officials to implement physical changes to the building itself, she said.

"I believe there really needs to be outreach, but not only to the Board of Education," Sangle said. "We really have to educate the community on ADA and about people with disabilities. This way, people would have a better idea of what a person with disabilities really encounters."

With or without an educational element, Novack said the physical violations issues need to be handled, and quickly. While having wheelchair accessible fountains now installed on both floors of the high school is a positive step, Novack said more should have been done in the last year.

After the committee’s visit, the district finished replacing parking signs and repainting parking stalls and is now working on improving the layout of the van-accessible parking spot near the front of the building.

Colefield said some projects are just unfeasible during the school year, due to tight scheduling restraints. However, she vowed to be watchful of the situation and have the district do what it can without much funding, like tightening railways, making doors easier to open, adjusting reach distances and improving the layout in the main office, which is a common complaint.

Other efforts, like enlarging stall spaces and bathroom doorways, in addition to being expensive, will take time, as they need to be assessed for their potential structural and financial impact, she said.

Still, the committee remains concerned about the timetable, and the district’s overall motivation, when it comes to making upgrades for the sake of ADA compliance. Novack said that none of the bathrooms, even those near the auditorium that were recently renovated, are currently in compliance, and the district gives him no confidence that they will be fixed soon. Compliant sinks, and the like, are only replaced when the previous version breaks, he said.

The problems at the high school not existing on their own in relation to the district’s operating budget also gives the committee reservations.

Novack said that the upgrades in the high school could cost around $250,000, adding that he fears the district may have five times the amount of violations lingering at the seven other schools in West Milford. The district’s budget does not currently include funding for significant ADA improvements, Colefield said.

The public is invited to share suggestions with the ADA committee during its meetings. Typically, the group meets on the second Tuesday of each month at 1 p.m. in town hall. Visit westmilford.org for specific meeting dates and times.

From the Idaho Mountain Express:



The Wood River Ability Program has been awarded a $20,000 grant from U.S. Paralympics, a division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, to help wounded veterans train in Sun Valley.

The committee awarded $1.25 million to organizations for expansion and creation of programs to help recently wounded and disabled veterans participate in physical activities such as skiing. Wood River Ability Program Executive Director Marc Mast said he hopes the grant will help introduce 40 to 60 wounded veterans to alpine and Nordic skiing, and that some of those veterans would want to continue on to Olympic-level programs.

The awards ranged from $10,000 to $50,000, and though U.S. Paralympics administers the grants, the funding comes from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

This is the second year that the Wood River Ability Program has applied for the grant, but the first time it has received funding. Mast said this year's application was successful because of the seven athletes the program entered in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.

"They are very aware of what we do, and they're willing to help us out," Mast said.

One athlete who trained here last winter was Army Spc. Andy Soule (pictured), who nabbed a bronze in the 4.5K biathlon (which combines cross-country skiing with rifle shooting) in 2010.

Soule was the first American to medal in biathlon in either the Olympics or Paralympics, and his training was partially aided by the program, who helped him find affordable housing and a job in the valley so he could live and train here. A double-leg amputee, Soule lost his legs while deployed to Afghanistan in April 2005. He was thrown from his vehicle when it ran over a road mine, and his injuries resulted in amputations of both legs above his knees.

The Wood River Ability program has been working extensively with the Sun Valley Economic Development Corp. and Sustain Blaine to have Sun Valley designated as a training site for both the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams. The Blaine County Recreation District and the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation are also working on the three-year business plan that the application requires.

Economic Development Corp. spokeswoman Diana Takvam said the organization hopes to submit an application for official certification of Sun Valley to the Olympic committee by April.

She said certification would fit the corporation's economic development strategy by helping to promote the Sun Valley "brand" and re-market it as a place where national-level athletes could congregate.

Mast said the grant from U.S. Paralympics is a sign that Sun Valley is a likely candidate for certification, and should the valley be certified, there's more money where that came from, possibly from official Olympic sponsors such as Coca-Cola.

From the UN News Centre:


The United Nations is moving swiftly to vaccinate 1.5 million children after a polio case was detected in an area of north-eastern Afghanistan which had been free of the disease for more than a decade.

The polio case was identified in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province. It had been assumed that the source of the virus was in neighbouring Tajikistan, which is currently in the midst of a large outbreak, but now it appears that it may have been the result of cross-border population movement from Pakistan.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Ministry of Public Health have launched a rapid response plan to prevent the spread of the disease.

For three days starting this Sunday, 1.5 million children under the age of five will be vaccinated in five adjacent provinces: Badakhshan, Takhar, Kunduz, Baghlan and Balkh.

To ensure that no child is left unvaccinated, house-to-house visits will be carried out, mobile clinics will be set up, fixed teams will be established in hospitals and immunization posts will be created at border crossing points.

“Afghanistan’s northern regions have been polio-free for some 10 years, making it all the more important to contain possible spill-over effects from outbreaks in neighbouring areas,” said Peter Crowley, UNICEF Representative in the country.

Polio, sometimes called poliomyelitis, is a highly infectious and sometimes fatal disease, and is often marked by acute flaccid paralysis among sufferers. It has been eradicated from much of the world, but experience shows that the virus can travel far relatively rapidly.

It has been eradicated in most parts of the world, but remains endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nigeria.

Peter Graaff, WHO’s Representative to Afghanistan, stressed that even beyond next week’s mass immunization campaign, surveillance must be stepped up in the area.

“We will also need to have ever-stronger cross-border coordination mechanisms, which include synchronizing vaccination activities, data-sharing and joint supervision, building on what already exists between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said.

Every year, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health and its partners carry out at least four nationwide and four sub-national immunization campaigns in the country’s southern, south-eastern and eastern regions. Each national drive targets some 8 million children.

In June, WHO announced that it had immunized more than 1.2 million children after an outbreak in Tajikistan. The agency also vaccinated more than 1 million children in Tajikistan in May.

From The Globe & Mail in Canada:


Donna Thomson (pictured) , wife of the Canadian high commissioner to Britain and disability-rights pot-stirrer, leads the way up a grand staircase at her official London residence and leaves one life for another.

Below, in the tasteful maple-syrup decor of the reception rooms, she and her husband, James Wright, entertain world leaders, business tycoons and, recently, the Queen and Prince Philip. In the private apartments above, they live with their severely disabled 22-year-old son Nicholas (pictured), who has cerebral palsy and is supported by 24-hour attendants, his chronic pain managed with anesthetic delivered by spinal-cord pump.

“Hello, mister,” his mother says, entering the bedroom where Nicholas, in his wheelchair, is watching TV. His room is decorated with souvenirs of his favourite teams, the Ottawa Senators and Liverpool FC. Ms. Thomson asks if he’s bought to tickets to see the England football team play at Wembley; Nicholas, handsome and dark-haired, responds with one of the few words in his vocabulary, “yeah.”

Later that day, Ms. Thomson will leave elegant Grosvenor Square (the U.S. embassy is across the road, Selfridges a coin’s throw away) and manoeuvre Nicholas onto a London bus, the only way to get to the neurologist’s office. The official high commission car (licence plate: Can1) can’t accommodate his wheelchair.

How many of the guests dining on Arctic char and Niagara wine downstairs would know that there is a whole other level to Ms. Thomson’s existence – an upstairs where things aren’t quite so perfect? “Would they know that I have one foot in ICU and one foot in Buckingham Palace?” she says wryly. “It is a very odd life.”

More people will uncover this duality with the publication next week of Ms. Thomson’s book The Four Walls of My Freedom, an account of Nicholas’s life but also a moral, philosophical and economic examination of how we assess the value of a life, especially one that seems, in our price-tag culture, to lack worth. She admits, quite happily, that she wants to turn conventional thinking about disability around and to provoke radical change in a government that has provided such a nice roof over her family’s head.

Nicholas’s motto, his mother says, is “piss on pity,” and it’s likely that she’d have that emblazoned over the historic door at 3 Grosvenor Square, if regulations allowed. After years as a disability-rights campaigner in Canada, Ms. Thomson had no desire to tell her family’s story: “The disability community did not need another piece of misery porn or worse still, inspirational lit,” she writes in The Four Walls of My Freedom.

Oddly – for it’s the heart of her book – she didn’t think anyone would want to read about her family’s struggles: How she was once investigated, and cleared, by child welfare for giving Nicholas too much pain medication; how her decision to force him into his wheelchair to go to school every day probably worsened his pain. Speaking about this is the only time she becomes even mildly choked up: “I didn’t want to give up on thinking he could be an active person. … I couldn’t accept it. And now I can.’’

She decided she might have something to add to the debate about disability when she discovered the “capability approach,” a method of assessing the potential of the lives of the world’s poorest, devised by Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen.

“Sen had done a lot of work in exploring the ways in which people can have a life that they value,’’ says Ms. Thomson, 55, after we’d moved downstairs and sat beside a totem pole to talk about her book. “It was an epiphany.”

She began reading everything she could by Dr. Sen and by other economists and moral philosophers who were examining different ways of measuring well-being and potential, especially among people at the margins – the very poor, the disabled. What if a life was judged not by its monetary worth or possible economic benefit to society, but as a series of complex and rewarding relationships? What if the act of caring – for an elderly relative, a neighbour or a disabled son – could be seen not as a burden, but as a gift? What if voluntary caregivers were given financial rewards, tax breaks, time off work?

Ms. Thomson tried to track down Dr. Sen, who was teaching at the University of Cambridge, to see if he thought the capability approach could be used to assess a person with a disability, but every time she went to hear him speak, he was mobbed by adoring fans. “He really is a rock star in that world,” she says.

Eventually, she badgered him into meeting her at Trinity College in Cambridge, and was fully prepared, if he had pooh-poohed her ideas, to say, “Oh crap. I’ll have to throw out the book.” Instead, Dr. Sen listened politely and said, “I think it’s a very valid approach, and I’ll be interested to see the results.”

While she wrote the book during the four years her family has lived in London, Ms. Thomson says its “extremely political agenda” is aimed at her home country, where she thinks a radical new deal is needed. She points to the Ontario government’s mandatory volunteering requirement for high-school students as one way to go, or vouchers, which would be given to caregivers who could then “spend” them on services as they chose or tax breaks for companies with progressive social policies.

Ms. Thomson writes eloquently about the loneliness of the caregiver: As a young mother in Ottawa, she had two degrees, a promising career in theatre and spoke Russian, but spent most of her time alone caring for Nicholas and his younger sister, Natalie, while her husband was handling security files at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

On the morning we meet, the British papers all report a story about a severely disabled young woman who’d been found dead next to the body of her mother, her sole caregiver. After the mother died, the young woman starved to death. Ms. Thomson, of course, had read the reports.

At one point, she notes, the mother had put a bed sheet with the word “help” on the roof of her house. The local authorities offered support, “but it was stuff she didn’t want. It’s so awful.”

The mother was named Stephania Wolf, and her wheelchair-bound daughter was Samantha. They made the front pages for one day in August, and then they were gone.

From ABC News in Australia:

A new study has found that for cancer survivors a health-related disability has a much larger impact on a person's psychological well-being than cancer itself.

The study by public health body the Sax Institute has been published in today's Medical Journal of Australia.

Professor Emily Banks from the Australian National University and the Sax Institute says the study asked 90,000 people across Australia about their health.

She says of those who reported having had a significant cancer, there was a high risk of depression and anxiety for people with a disability.

"Among those who had cancer, those who needed help with daily tasks, those who had a significant health-related disability, actually had between a 500 per cent and an 800 per cent increase in the risk of psychological distress," she said.

Professor Banks says the good news is that for those cancer survivors who were physically able, there was only a slightly higher risk of psychological distress than the general population, showing people are adaptable.

Well, they haven't sorted my proper log in yet but I'm posting anyway! Hi - my name's Dan Slipper. BBC Ouch were at the Liberty Festival in Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday 4 September. Check out pictures of the... Guest

From The Guardian in the UK:


Disability and housing organisations are accusing the government of potentially forcing thousands of disabled homeowners into arrears or even having their properties repossessed because of cutbacks in mortgage benefits and care packages.

The most scathing attack comes from the National Housing Federation (NHF). It says some 64,000 people with disabilities now get monthly help through the Support for Mortgage Interest (SMI) system. This is a complex calculation, paid directly every four weeks by the government to mortgage lenders on behalf of disabled borrowers, currently at the rate of 6.08%.

If the 6.08% is in excess of the interest payable on a disabled person's mortgage, the "extra" goes towards paying off the principal debt; if it is less, the borrower must make up the difference or slide into arrears.

But the method of calculating the SMI – which is also paid to people who have lost their jobs – is changing and from October the amount will be set at a level equal to the Bank of England's published monthly average mortgage interest rate, currently 3.63%. This is still well above some current mortgage interest rates but far below others, even before expected base rate rises in late 2010 or in 2011.

Ministers announced the SMI change in the June emergency budget, but campaigners have only recently realised the effect. .

Some SMI beneficiaries are first-time buyers while others are existing owners who may have recently suffered a physical or mental impairment and whose properties now require substantial modification. Potential SMI income is considered by some lenders when they decide whether to grant a loan to a disabled applicant.

It is thought that the SMI recalculation will hit about 5,000 owners with profound physical and mental disabilities who have used the payments to secure niche – and expensive – mortgages on shared ownership homes. For these properties, the mortgage covers a share of 25% to 75% and the owner pays rent to a housing association for the remaining share of the property.

"This policy will hit thousands of people with disabilities, cutting off many from the prospect of owning their own home. The fact that ministers have not carried out a comprehensive impact assessment into such a major decision is very disquieting," says NHF chief executive David Orr.

Ray Boulger of mortgage broker John Charcol says the government may be financially justified in making the change, but believes the process is being mishandled.

"The 6.08% figure existed in 2008 when typical interest rates were running at 5% so there is an argument for change given the sharp reduction in rates since that time. But by not tailoring the SMI rate to the individuals' needs, there will always be some who get too much and some too little. It's disappointing that the coalition has just changed the figure and not changed the process into one that's fairer," says Boulger.

Disability Alliance, a charity working to help disabled people out of poverty, says it is discussing the SMI change with the government. "The reality is that this is just one of a series of disadvantages that disabled people have. First, it's difficult for them to find appropriately accessible property, then it's very hard to obtain a mortgage because there may be reduced earning potential," says its policy director, Neil Coyne.

Some disabled home owners and their families are now suffering additional financial problems thanks to council cutbacks. As part of attempts to cut public spending, many authorities are reviewing their facilities grants. These are discretionary sums, often a few hundred pounds, paid to owners who must install ramps or fit stairlifts when a household member becomes disabled.

Anastasia Kelly, executive director of the Sheffield Centre for Independent Living, an advice body for the disabled and their carers, says: "There's an inconsistent response from different local authorities because there are no national guidelines on how payments are made. Now we have to help a lot of people who are finding it harder to get these grants as councils review spending,".

The proposed SMI changes will also worsen the problems of those with disabilities who rent their homes.

"Because of the high cost of housing and the difficulty in getting a mortgage, especially if the earning potential is limited through disability, the majority of disabled people rent rather than own. The lower SMI payments mean even fewer disabled will secure mortgages, so the pressure on the rented sector will rise still further," says Conrad Hodgkinson of the Accessible Property Register.

He set up the register in 2003 to publicise homes on sale that have modifications for physically impaired owners, but he says the crisis for many is in the "pretty dire" rented sector.

"There's a lack of supply of homes to rent to begin with, plus a lack of information about whether the homes are adapted for disabled residents. Now there's the severe financial problems, made worse by the SMI issue and other cutbacks," he says. "The picture is absolutely desperate for many disabled people."

From BBC News:


Exeter's Judith Hamer (pictured) is one of Great Britain's most promising young wheelchair basketball players.

Alongside holding down a job and training five days a week, the 19-year-old finds time to act as a role model for other disabled youngsters, encouraging them to get involved with Paralympic sports.

Hamer was born with one leg significantly longer than the other and endured many operations to correct the problem before deciding to have her right limb amputated in 2006.

Fast-forward four years and Hamer is now part of the GB wheelchair basketball squad, whilst also using her experiences to a positive effect - persuading others in her position that playing sport to a highly competitive standard is possible.

Hamer said: "I was really lucky that Paralympics GB saw me and wanted me to help, get involved and encourage new people to join in with sports.

"Sport can be a really great thing for a lot of people - it opens a lot of doors.

"I was only playing for two years before I joined the GB squad.

"2012 will be the biggest thing I ever do, and I won't be able to play at a home Paralympics ever again."

In July, Hamer was part of the GB squad that finished sixth at the Wheelchair Basketball World Championships, and is now hoping to build on that experience in the run up to the London Paralympics:

"We're aiming higher than that now," she said.

"We're seeing this cycle as a development cycle, to improve our ranking at 2012, so now our target is third or fourth, so that's a big step up from eighth at the Beijing Olympics.

She added: "All the major tournaments I've been to have been on home soil, so I'm used to playing in front of a home crowd, and it's definitely an advantage."

At club level, Hamer has recently joined Aylesbury-based Super League club, The Aces, where with the help of head coach Haj Bhania she is hoping to increase her ability on the court even further.

She said: "I was playing in division two for the past two years and that was really good for me to get used to playing and learn how to play, but now I have to move to a higher division to push myself further."

From Erictric:


Here’s some interesting information with regard to Apple’s iPod Touch 4G, due to be released in the middle of next week. According to Apple’s website, it would appear as if the iPod Touch 4G will be equipped with vibrating functionality.

Specifically, the website notes that when one user initiates a FaceTime call, the recipient of the invitation will receive a text notice and will also receive a “vibrating alert”.
Apple has always intended FaceTime to be used by the deaf community:


On June 7, 2010 Apple announced FaceTime, a new application for the newly announced iPhone 4 that will let iPhone 4 owners chat with one another using video chat. It requires that both iPhone 4 users are on a WiFi network and won't run over 3G just yet. However, Apple did point out some of its compelling uses, such as allowing two deaf people to communicate using sign language. The service can use either the iPhone 4's forward facing camera, or its 5 megapixel rear one.

From the National Center for Law and Economic Justice:


State public benefits agencies increasingly rely on their website as a means of providing information to the public, and as a means of applying for Medicaid, Food Stamps, and cash assistance.

Cary LaCheen’s new report, discussing the findings from web accessibility research of state and some local public benefits agency web sites in California, Florida, Michigan, New York, and Texas, describes a host of problems that make it difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to apply for benefits online, request an application, search the website, or contact the agency by email, and for anyone to find basic information on how to apply for benefits.

The research was conducted for NCLEJ by students in the Legal Skills in a Social Context program at Northeastern University School of Law. The accessibility problems found violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and state web accessibility laws and policies.

NCLEJ, which believes the problems identified by the research are likely to exist in other states, has called upon the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Nutrition Service at USDA to require the states included in the study to fix the problems identified, to issue guidance to states on web accessibility, to convene an interagency workgroup to develop materials to assist states, and to provide technical assistance to state agencies on the issue.

As the federal government and states prepare to implement health care reform, and millions of additional people become eligible for Medicaid, it is critical that state public benefits agency websites are accessible to people with disabilities and usable by everyone, so eligible individuals have ready access to information on the Medicaid program and the application process.

Click here for the report: The Closed Digital Door: State Public Benefits Agencies' Failure to Make Websites Accessible to People with Disabilities and Usable for Everyone.

From ABC News. She is pictured at the Emmys with one of the producers of the HBO biopic about her.



Temple Grandin stole the spotlight at the Emmys, standing up right in the middle of the awards show again and again, smiling far wider than the Hollywood stars beside her.

Temple is not a movie star, but an HBO biopic about her life has thrust her into the spotlight.

Long before her life made it to the small screen, Temple became an inspiration to so many. She is a renowned scientist, credited with single-handedly improving the lives of cattle. She's also autistic.

"She was one of the first people to challenge these completely absurd and very accepted theories of autism. Autism was meant to be the product of a frigid mother," said actress Claire Danes.

Danes portrays Temple in the HBO film, "Temple Grandin."

Temple was born in 1947 in Boston, Massachusetts. At just three years old, doctors diagnosed her with autism. Her mother, like so many parents at the time, had no idea why her daughter wasn't talking, wasn't smiling and wasn't hugging.

Doctors told Temple's mom, Eustacia Cutler, that a lack of love might be the reason for her daughter's behavior. Doctors said that there must have been a lack of bonding with the mother, that she hadn't given Temple affection when she most needed it.

Temple's mother knew that wasn't true. She refused to give up.

She took her daughter to a neurologist, a speech therapist and later, a private school. Her mother staged an intervention for her child that was unheard of at the time, a move that Temple said changed everything.

"It's absolutely awful mothers went through all that pain. They were blamed for something they didn't cause," Temple said. "You know, autism is a neurological disorder of the brain. It varies from someone who is non-verbal all the way to the geniuses of Silicon Valley. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of early intervention education."

As she grew older, Temple's family would recognize she had a remarkable mind able to catalog images, fixate on moving objects to pick apart how they work.

Then came the summer that changed her life. Temple was 16 years old when her family sent her to visit her aunt's ranch out west in Arizona.

She was able to see in the animals at the ranch what most of us could not. Temple noticed little things, like how a horse's ears moved in the direction they were looking. That scene came to life in the HBO film.

"I love that scene with the horse ears. One of the things that helped me in my work with animals is I'm a visual thinker," Temple said. "The movie did a fantastic job in showing how my mind works visually. My mind is like Google for images."

Temple and those around her treated her unique mind as a gift. At Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, she graduated with honors. She went on to get a Masters and a Doctorate degree in Animal Science.

Temple has authored several books, becoming a champion for the children who have followed her path and the animals she befriended along the way.

One of her books, "Animals in Translation," argues that both autistic people and animals are hypersensitive, a theory that began back on that ranch so many years ago.

Temple's ability to understand animals' feelings helped her create animal welfare guidelines that have become a standard in the meatpacking industry.

And all these years later, after the movie won top honors, Temple bursting with joy hugged the producer. This from the little girl who once didn't hug.

"Oh, absolutely, I was hugging everyone that night," Temple said.

As she stood at the podium, she had a message for that determined mother who is still cheering her on.

"Stand up, ma," Temple said.

From Presbyterian USA. Here's the Temple University Disability Studies blog remembrance of Rev. Rice.


The Rev. Howard Leland Rice, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly and San Francisco Theological Seminary chaplain and professor of ministry from 1968-97, died Aug. 8 in Claremont, Calif., at the age of 78. He was one of the earliest practitioners of spiritual disciplines and formation that led to the current renewal of those practices in the church.

Rice was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis prior to his appointment at SFTS — he arrived at the seminary the same year as this reporter arrived as a student — and spent his time on the San Anselmo campus either on crutches or confined to a wheelchair. After Rice’s retirement, his diagnosis was changed from MS to spinal cord damage. Last spring he battled a stubborn bone infection for weeks, resulting in his decision to accept hospice care. He passed away peacefully surrounded by his family.

A memorial service will take place Aug. 20 at Claremont Presbyterian Church.

"Howard had a huge heart for people, for ministry, and for the church that he served so long and well," said Elizabeth Liebert, SFTS dean and professor of spiritual life. "Always standing with the underdog, he was persistent to the point of stubbornness in defending them. He is beloved by hundreds of students, pastors and church folk, whose hopes and struggles he held dear. We mourn the loss of mentor, colleague, spiritual adviser, friend and consummate pastor."

In the early 1970s, when one of his students gave him a copy of Morton T. Kelsey's The Other Side of Silence, Rice became a tireless advocate of feeding the soul as well as the mind, and recruited other pastors and scholars in the Bay Area to help him lead spiritual retreats for local pastors.

For the next 20 years Rice helped Presbyterians and other Protestants discover spirituality within the Protestant-Reformed tradition. During his moderatorial year — 1979-1980 — he organized three spirituality retreats throughout the country and encouraged each presbytery to send one participant.

Rice was instrumental in "Companions on the Inner Way," a retreat/conference program that has served hundreds of pastors and lay persons. He played a significant role in developing SFTS’s pioneering program in spirituality, which led to the creation of the Diploma in the Art of Spiritual Direction and the Diploma in the Art of Spiritual Formation programs.

In 1991, Rice published the landmark book, Reformed Spirituality: An Introduction to Believers, which continues to be widely studied in seminaries throughout the United States.

To honor his retirement from SFTS in 1997, Rep. Lynn C. Woolsey of California presented a tribute to Rice before the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2007, SFTS trustee and alumna the Rev. Jackie Leonard, made a first gift to the seminary toward endowing the Rice Family Chair in Christian Spirituality.

Rice graduated from Carroll College in 1953 and from McCormick Theological Seminary in 1956. Ordained by Winnebago Presbyery, he served pastorates in Minneapolis and Chicago before going to SFTS.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and a daughter, Amanda. A second daughter, Wendy Rice Dreitcer, died in 2004 of a brain tumor.

From The Guardian in the UK:

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding why older women become less fertile, suffer a miscarriage or have a baby with Down's syndrome.

The discovery could ultimately lead to treatments that would increase the chances of a successful pregnancy for growing numbers of would-be mothers in their late 30s and early 40s.

Researchers led by Dr Mary Herbert, an expert in reproductive biology at Newcastle University's Institute for Ageing and Health, have identified why some older women produce abnormal eggs, according to findings published in the journal Current Biology.

It has been known for a long time that would-be mothers who are nearing the end of their fertility are at higher risk than usual of having eggs that are affected by chromosomal abnormalities, but the underlying cause has been unclear.

The new study has identified problems arising from a woman's declining stock of proteins called Cohesins, which act as binding agents to hold chromosomes together by keeping them inside a ring. They are vital to ensure that chromosomes split evenly when cells divide.

Women's supplies of Cohesins fall as they age, Herbert and her colleagues discovered. Tests on eggs taken from both young and old mice indicated that the amount of Cohesins in women's bodies declines after their mid-30s.

When that happens it means that chromosomes are less tightly held together and they are therefore more likely to result in defective eggs, which can cause problems such as miscarriage and Down's syndrome.

Every cell in the human body, apart from eggs and sperm, contains two copies of each of the body's 23 chromosomes. Sperm and eggs must lose one copy each as they prepare for fertilisation. That process involves a complicated form of cell division.

This problem is compounded with eggs, because the attachments that hold chromosomes together have to be maintained by Cohesins until the egg divides just before ovulation.

When Herbert's team studied chromosomes during division in the egg, they found that the lower levels of Cohesin in eggs in older females led to some chromosomes becoming trapped and unable to divide properly.

"Reproductive fitness in women declines dramatically from the mid-30s onwards. Our findings point to Cohesin being a major culprit in this", said Herbert. More work was needed to understand why Cohesin declines over women's reproductive years, and such knowledge could lead to ways being developed to stop that loss from occurring.

Dr Peter Bowen-Simpkins, the medical director of the London Women's Clinic network of private fertility clinics and spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said the study was "very exciting" and could lead to real improvements in older women's chances of having children.

"This breakthrough could mean the difference between success and failure – them having a baby or not – for the fast-growing number of women who are trying to conceive after their late 30s," he added.

From BBC News:


The first specialist college for young people with Asperger syndrome in Wales has opened its doors.

Priory Coleg Wales (pictured) in Pontypool, Torfaen, will cater for students aged between 16 and 25.

Its courses aim to boost pupils' independence and improve their chances of getting a job and enjoying a better quality of life.

Some places at the college will be funded by the assembly government, social services and the NHS.

Ten students begin day courses this year, with plans for 50 or 60 in the future.

While the students will initially be from south Wales, it is hoped the co-educational college will have a residential capacity from September 2011, when it will be able to take youngsters from farther afield.

Priory Coleg Wales is in the grounds of Coleg Gwent, the largest further education college in Wales.

Its launch follows a report by the assembly government in May 2009 which concluded 58% of schools did not feel there was adequate further education provision for young people on the autism spectrum in Wales.

Priory Coleg Wales principal Simon Coles said: "It's the first specialist provider for young people with Asperger syndrome in Wales.

"Many of these students will have found mainstream school very difficult, will have been out of education for some time or may have mental health problems as a result.

"These are young men and women who do not understand the world and the world does not understand them - they may spend a lot of time in their bedrooms on the computer, or under the duvet.

"We hope to be able to give them the social skills, understanding and independence needed to function in the world."

All students will have access to the standard Coleg Gwent curriculum, including more than 150 academic and vocational courses, A-levels and GCSEs.

The philosophy of the college is to provide as many learning opportunities within mainstream educational settings as possible.

Students will also receive counselling, therapy and help with tackling everyday tasks.

It has been welcomed by the National Autistic Society Cymru, which in 2007 called for better support and services for young people during transition between school, higher education, training and employment.

National co-ordinator Shirley Parsley said: "We hope it will go some way towards providing much needed person-centred support for young people with Asperger syndrome locally.

Work-based learning

"People with Asperger syndrome can have average or above average intelligence, fewer problems with speech, but may still have difficulties with understanding and processing language.

"Because of this, pupils with the condition will often have specific support requirements, such as social skills training, or help with essential life skills.

"All too often, this type of low-level support is not available, which can prevent pupils with Asperger syndrome from reaching their academic potential.

"Parents are always telling us that this is down to a lack of awareness, so we hope the Priory Coleg Wales will become a good practice example for both mainstream and specialist colleges in Wales."

Pupils will benefit from work-based learning and work experience to help with transition and preparation for further study or employment.

The group already has similar institutions in Swindon, Wiltshire, and Frome, Somerset.

From The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio:


Today she is a successful central Ohio entrepreneur, having already created and sold an information technology company before starting a new firm that focuses on helping companies hire top-notch talent.

In the 1970s, Janis Mitchell's (pictured) school placed her into a class for students with mental disabilities after her dyslexia was diagnosed in the first grade. "They thought that I was lazy and stupid," she said.

The president and CEO of Precise Resource in Westerville, Ohio, is now pushing for new legislation, introduced by a bipartisan pair of state lawmakers, that would better define dyslexia. It also would create a pilot program in three Ohio school districts designed to screen early for the disability and get students needed help.

An estimated 8 to 15 percent of the population has dyslexia, a language-based disability that causes difficulties with reading, writing and pronouncing words.

"We've got some work to do both to identify as well as teach folks how to deal with it," said Rep. Ted Celeste, D-Grandview Heights. "In particular, to do that in a way that will help them read and learn so they are not feeling stigmatized."

Celeste is co-sponsoring the bill with House Minority Leader William G. Batchelder, R-Medina, who has been heavily involved with the Masonic Order's dyslexia learning center in Cleveland.

"Dyslexia causes a child to have reading problems, and those problems are not endemic in any way to intellectual capacity," Batchelder said.

"It's unfortunate that some schools don't recognize what these problems are. We have found that by working with schools, when they get the message, they do make an effort to identify these young people."

Screening and additional tutoring needed to help students with dyslexia is not cheap, Batchelder said, noting the Masonic Order spends about $5,000 per child. But bill supporters say the long-term savings would outweigh the upfront costs.

The goal of the pilot projects would be to evaluate the effectiveness of early reading assistance and determine whether they can reduce future special-education costs.

Mitchell said her mother, a teacher herself, fought to keep her out of the mentally disabled classroom. She had extra tutoring and assistance all through school and into college.

"If you can teach them the proper way to read before fourth grade, you can stop all that extra tutoring," she said.

"If by fourth grade they haven't screened that, that's when we get into the heavy cost in Ohio schools that adds up way beyond the $5,000."

From Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center:


Matt Roloff will speak at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center Sunday, September 26, at 1 p.m.

Roloff, patriarch of the Roloff Family on TLC's reality series Little People, Big World, discusses his advocacy for the rights of little people.

In 1999, Matt wrote and published Against Tall Odds, which chronicles his business and professional success in the face of enormous medical and social adversity.

He is the former president of Little People of America (LPA) - a social and advocacy group for little people.

Q&A session will follow the presentation. Admission is $20 for Non-Members (includes Admission) and $10 for Members.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a project of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. This new world-class museum is dedicated to preserving the memories of those lost in the Holocaust and teaching current generations about the need to fight hatred, indifference and genocide in today’s world.

From The Irish Times:


A succinct description of what a reader might expect from this unusual memoir is perhaps best provided by the author herself when she notes that she emptied her life to the extent that she made of it a cell. “I haven’t made a charming minimalist environment for the contemplation of the good, I have fixed up a metal cave, I think I did it with drink first and with a good disinfecting blast of high-pressure shame after that. Then I went blind.”

Candia McWilliam (pictured) was born in Edinburgh in 1955. Her father was an architectural writer and academic who worked for the National Trust for Scotland. “Painstaking effortlessness, curiosa felicitas , was my father’s apparently idling, actually supercharged, gear. There may have been something irresistible to him about my mother’s lavish appearance and her extremer way. But it was also, time showed, at some level repulsive. The quick term for this is, I suppose, a fatal attraction.”

Her mother killed herself when Candia was nine. The event, like much in this disturbing, irritating and often wonderful book is treated in the brittlest of tones. “I will now try to remake my mother’s last day during which she took me to the Nubian goat farm at Cammo to choose a pointer puppy, a dog that must have been a sop to me, or perhaps to herself, like the drugged meat burglars are said to throw for guard dogs.”

From boarding school McWilliam went on to Cambridge, and spent the years after doing some journalism and working at Vogue . In 1981 she married Quentin Wallop, 10th earl of Portsmouth. They had two children before the marriage ended. A second marriage, to an Oxford don named Fram Dinshaw, took place in 1986, and in 1988 McWilliam published her first novel, A Case of Knives. The couple had a son before splitting in 1996, a break initiated by McWilliam – then deep in the throes of alcoholism – and an act that still haunts her. Dinshaw looms distressingly large in the book.

She got sober, though by the time she began this memoir she had been suffering from writer’s block for some years. She had published a collection of stories in 1997; her last novel was published in 1994. It was the blindness – or the urge to tell of it – that allowed her to break through the block. The problems began in 2006. Her eyes and vision were fine, but she had been struck with blepharospasm, a rare neurological disorder that made it virtually impossible for her to open her eyes.

Hers was never going to be a memoir treacly with redemption: “I haven’t yet met another ‘functionally blind’ person, as I feel that attending Alcoholics Anonymous is already a great enough adventure in fellow feeling, and I can’t face more.” Yet she has written a book that is painfully, sometimes cringingly, revealing. There were moments I admired her honesty – the willingness to speak frankly of loneliness and regret – but there were as many moments when, like Dinshaw (who, according to McWilliam, is often bored or exasperated by her oft-professed self-loathing), I just felt fed up with yet another passage insisting on how fat, ugly and useless she is.

The abuse is not confined to the self-estranging period of her blindness – during which she experiences herself as “a monstrous dowager with Tourettian facial tics and the creep-and-lurch gait of a not sufficiently surreptitious drunk”. It is, rather, a net cast back over her entire life. McWilliam was a beauty, and her novels had won awards. But she saw herself during those younger years as a person of “putrid, tarty, fat, pretentious artifice”.

The repetition of such admissions makes the book an uncomfortable read. For this memoir is not a presentation of past afflictions overcome. It often reads instead like excerpts from a sharply written but private journal in which “issues” are being worked through on the page, the text we hold in our hands an enactment of the trouble its author is describing: a tendency towards public and private self-ridicule. I don’t think I’ve read another memoir at once so naked and so meticulously – and often beautifully – crafted.

McWilliam is often at her best when writing about people she doesn’t know well (the self-involvement, and thus self-abasement, is here non-existent): the shaman who treats her, the women with whom she shares hospital rooms. Her description of bodily sensations – a grand-mal seizure, a broken leg, the packing of seaweed in a putrid wound – are impressive. The Scottish island of Colonsay, her adopted home, is rendered with loving exactitude. She describes her blindness with chill precision. Not being able to read is an incalculable loss, but she notes that nothing “that insists upon concentration, as this limitation does, is all bad. Memory grows less swooning, more muscular, recall more instructable, like a messenger, and as potent and alarming”.

But Dinshaw is the subject to which she keeps returning. During the time of her blindness Dinshaw and his partner, Claudia, invite her to stay with them. Dinshaw tries to coax her into liking herself, but “when he is really bored he says that I might as well, since I have made such a mess of my own life, rejoin myself to theirs”. Her adoration of Dinshaw (and of Claudia) borders on the abject, and the reader wants to yank her free. “To this day I take very few breaths that are independent of the thought of Fram . . . I feel no experience full or ratified until I have described it to him . . . He is my home. I am homeless.”

In 2009 McWilliam underwent a procedure called Crawford brow suspension, in which tendons from behind her knee were removed and sewn in beneath the skin, stitching the eyelids to the brows.

Out of her experience of blindness, and the years of darkness before, she has produced a book that is both fascinating and exasperating, admirably candid and perhaps, in parts, inadvisable. An antidote to memoir schmaltz (a “self un-help” book), it is ultimately life-affirming. Suicide – given the death of her own mother and, in her own worst times, the hovering thought of it – is an idea returned to, and turned from, repeatedly. “That is what truth to life is. The way to be true to life is to remain alive.”

From The NY Times:


When Darius McCollum (pictured) was arrested on August 31, the circumstances were all too familiar. Once again, he stood accused of taking a bus or a subway car for a ride.

On Sept. 1, Mr. McCollum was in another familiar place: a courtroom, to answer to charges related to his 27th arrest — this one for stealing a Trailways bus from a maintenance facility in Hoboken, N.J.

Mr. McCollum, 45, was ordered held in $100,000 bail at an arraignment in Queens Criminal Court, as prosecutors mentioned his extensive criminal history in New York, New Jersey and North Carolina, and noted that he did not have any significant ties to New York.

After the arraignment, Mr. McCollum’s lawyer, Stephen Johnson, told reporters that his chief focus in the case was getting help for Mr. McCollum’s medical condition, Asperger’s syndrome.

“I think the objective here is to address his disorder,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s the nature of the disease. He cannot help himself. He’s fixated.”

Mr. Johnson denied reports that Mr. McCollum was homeless and said he lived in Manhattan with his fiancée. He described his client as extremely intelligent and harmless, and pointed to Mr. McCollum’s peaceful surrender to the police on Tuesday as an indication that his client’s actions were not premeditated but spontaneous. “He doesn’t show consciousness of guilt,” Mr. Johnson said. “The fact that he was so calm when he was caught shows he doesn’t know what he did wrong.”

According to the police, after Mr. McCollum was arrested, he admitted that the keys were in the bus when he found it and that he “jumped in and drove away.” The defendant also told police that he had stolen another bus about 20 days earlier.

Mr. McCollum told police that his medical condition was to blame for his infatuation with trains and buses.

Mr. McCollum was first arrested at age 15 after he drove an E train to the World Trade Center in 1981. He was most recently arrested in 2008 for impersonating a subway worker and has served previous stints in prison.

He appeared calm in court and did not speak. He faces 15 years if convicted; his next court date is set for Sept. 15.