autism – praag.org

Pentagon says Putin has Asperger’s

A study from a Pentagon think tank theorizes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, “an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions,” according to the 2008 report obtained by USA TODAY.

The 2008 report cites Dr. Stephen Porges, who is now a University of North Carolina psychiatry professor, as concluding that “Putin carries a form of autism.” However, Porges said Wednesday he had never seen the finished report and “would back off saying he has Asperger’s.”

Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy,” wrote Brenda Connors, an expert in movement pattern analysis at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Studies of his movement, Connors wrote, reveal “that the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality.”

The 2008 study was one of many by Connors and her colleagues, who are contractors for the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), an internal Pentagon think tank that helps devise long-term military strategy. The 2008 report and a 2011 study were provided to USA TODAY as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.

Researchers can’t prove their theory about Putin and Asperger’s, the report said, because they were not able to perform a brain scan on the Russian president. The report cites work by autism specialists as backing their findings. It is not known whether the research has been acted on by Pentagon or administration officials.

USA TODAY reported in March 2014 about the Office of Net Assessment’s support for the research, but the Pentagon did not release the details of its studies. At the time, Pentagon officials said the research did not reach Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel or his predecessors. That is still true, said Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

The Office of Net Assessment provides long-range plans for the Pentagon and helps shape future strategy. It has been particularly active in developing the military’s “pivot to Asia,” which has emphasized strategies to deal with China.

Connors’ team has done several studies on Putin for ONA beyond those from 2008 and 2011, Henderson said.

Connors’ program is called Body Leads. Military contract records show the Pentagon has paid at least $365,000 on outside experts to work with her since 2009. The two reports mention other work she and associates have done since Putin’s rise to power, including a 2005 study called “An Act of Trust to Move Ahead” and studies in 2004-05 and 2008 by movement pattern analysis pioneer Warren Lamb.

Source: USA Today

Bill Gates on developing thinner condoms

Vaccines aren’t dangerous, according to Bill Gates. It’s the belief that they can cause autism that poses a serious threat to the health of children.

The 58-year-old billionaire philanthropist spoke to “AMERICA with Jorge Ramos” in an interview that will air on Tuesday.

“Nothing has saved more lives than vaccines, and nothing has been more disproven than any link between vaccines and negative things like autism,” Gates told Ramos.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual letter on Tuesday, with Gates outlining his vision for eradicating the world’s worst poverty in the next 20 years.

Global health initiatives and vaccines are a major part of achieving that goal. The foundation website says that “vaccines are among the most cost-effective investments in global health, saving about 2.5 million lives each year.”

Gates spoke with Ramos about his foundation’s investment in research to create a thinner, stronger condom. The foundation awarded more than $1 million in grants toward the goal in November.

“The common analogy is that wearing a condom is like taking a shower with a raincoat on,” Dr. Papa Salif Sow, a senior program officer on the HIV team at the Gates Foundation told The New Republic at the time of the announcement. “A redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling, or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty.”

Ramos asked Gates why he decided to experiment with improving condoms.

“In general, if women want to have contraception, we think it should be available to them,” Gates said on Tuesday. “So whatever new ideas there are to make it more convenient, less side effects…we’re a big funder of innovation in that area, as well.”

Source: fusion.net

Autism tied to air pollution, diesel and mercury

Researchers seeking the roots of autism have linked the disorder to chemicals in air pollution and, in a separate study, found that language difficulties of the disorder may be due to a disconnect in brain wiring.

Researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of diesel particulates or mercury were twice as likely to have an autistic child compared with peers in low-pollution areas. The findings, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, are from the largest U.S. study to examine the ties between air pollution and autism.

One in 50 U.S. children are diagnosed with autism or a related disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children with autism may be unresponsive to people, become indifferent to social activity and have communication difficulties. A separate study from Stanford University and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to suggest that weak connections between brain regions for speaking and reward may be why.

“There isn’t a lot of data to strongly point at what are the root causes of the social deficits in children with autism,” Daniel Abrams, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University in California, said in a telephone interview. “We think it has this important motivation and reward component to it.”

The cause of autism isn’t known, though genetic factors are thought to be important, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The link to air pollution was initially made in 2006 by a group led by Gayle Windham at the California Department of Health Services. Another study, published in November 2012, also found links between air pollution and autism.

“People were skeptical” of the initial report from Windham’s group, said Marc Weisskopf, an author of today’s study and an associate professor of environmental health and epidemiology at Harvard University’s School of Public Health in Boston. “I went to do this in a larger setting, not at all convinced we would see anything.”

The Harvard researchers used data from the Nurse’s Health Study 2, a long-term study involving more than 116,000 nurses, begun in 1989. Within that group, the scientists looked at 325 women who had a child with autism and 22,000 women who had children without the disorder.

Using data from the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers estimated the women’s exposure to toxins, a method Weisskopf said is imperfect. Many of the compounds travel together in the air, so separating their contributions was difficult. What’s more, the EPA data is taken once every four years, so it’s an imprecise way of estimating exposure, and doesn’t take into account women’s contact from traveling to places other than their homes.

“There’s a lot of error in estimating what the mother’s exposed to,” he said. His study is large enough to suggest follow-up studies with more precise methods of detecting chemicals in the air, he said.

The study also found that including lead exposure was also associated with increased risks of autism.

About 2 percent of American school children were diagnosed with autism disorders in 2011 and 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the language study, brain imaging determined that the connections between brain regions for language and reward were stronger in children who don’t have the disorder than in those diagnosed with it, said Abrams. That’s important because communication problems are key diagnostic criteria for autism.

Insensitivity to human speech can affect a child’s early development, the authors said. Typical infants will listen to human speech and engage with sounds as a way to develop early language skills and emotional understanding, as well as to bond with their parents, the authors wrote.

The researchers looked at how the speech part of the brain was connected to other regions. Those with autism had weaker connections between the temporal lobe, where speech is controlled, and the dopamine reward pathway that elicits pleasurable feelings, the study found.

They also found weak links between voice regions and parts of the brain that process emotional information, Abrams said. In the future, the researchers plan to look at whether there are certain parts or types of speech that activate an autistic child’s brain, he said.

The study included 20 children with autism who were considered high functioning, with language skills and issues with communication. Their magnetic resonance imaging scans were compared with 19 children without the disorder who had similar intelligence. – bloomberg.com