Vaccine-Autism Case Revived Amid Measles Surge
A legal effort could upend a nearly 40-year program that compensates people who say they were injured by vaccines, Lauren reports. A federal court heard oral arguments in October on a bid to reopen one of the test cases in a 2000s-era vaccine-autism proceeding that seemingly settled the issue of whether childhood shots could cause the neurological condition — and thus require the federal government to pay injury claims to thousands of families.
The attempt by Rolf Hazlehurst, a Children’s Health Defense attorney whose son was diagnosed with autism in the early 2000s, hinges on fraud allegations he and then-CHD leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leveled at two Justice Department attorneys in 2018. Content published on the website of the anti-vaccine group has suggested that Hazlehurst only recently gathered enough evidence that was admissible in court.
“I sincerely believe that we are on the edge of being able to prove the United States government is lying about vaccines and autism,” Hazlehurst said in a CHD-produced video published last year, after thanking Kennedy and other lawyers in the group.
Hazlehurst and Children’s Health Defense wouldn’t comment on the Oct. 30 oral arguments, citing the court’s unique disclosure rules. An HHS spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A City Responding to a Lead Crisis in Schools Reached out to the CDC for Help. The Agency’s Lead Experts Were Just Fired
A few months ago, a test revealed that a child in Milwaukee had elevated levels of lead in their blood. The results triggered an investigation into the family’s home, then the child’s school and then more aging school buildings still riddled with lead paint.
With 68,000 students in the Milwaukee Public Schools district and dozens of buildings potentially affected, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, knew that he needed more help, so he reached out to the National Center for Environmental Health, a division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to make a plan to address the threat.
For the past two months, Totoraitis has been working with a medical toxicologist to triage, essentially, which schools and children might need additional screening and how to understand the lead levels they might find.
On Tuesday, he got an email that made his stomach drop. The environmental health team he had been working with at the CDC had been cut, swept up in a massive layoff of federal health workers that’s hitting entire divisions of some agencies. Many employees were immediately placed on administrative leave and are no longer able to access their work.
Study Strengthens Link Between Maternal Diabetes and Autism
A large new study adds to evidence that diabetes during pregnancy is linked with an increased risk of brain and nervous system problems in children, including autism, researchers say.
Whether diabetes actually causes those problems remains unclear. But when mothers have diabetes while pregnant, children are 28% more likely to be diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder, according to an analysis of data pooled from 202 earlier studies involving more than 56 million mother-child pairs.
The risks for children of mothers with diabetes during pregnancy were 25% higher for autism, 30% higher for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and 32% higher for intellectual disability. They were also 20% higher for trouble with communication, 17% higher for movement problems and 16% higher for learning disorders than in children whose mothers did not have diabetes while pregnant.
Diabetes diagnosed before pregnancy appeared to confer a 39% higher risk for one or more of these neurodevelopmental disorders compared with gestational diabetes that begins in pregnancy and often resolves afterward, the researchers reported in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. Diabetes affects up to 9% of pregnancies in the United States, with the incidence rising, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Early-Life Ozone Exposure Linked to Increased Risk of Childhood Asthma and Wheezing
A recent JAMA Network Open study investigates the impact of early-life ozone (O3) exposure on asthma and wheezing in children alone and in combination with other air pollutants. In 2021, approximately 6.5% of children living in the U.S. were diagnosed with asthma, the most common chronic disease affecting children throughout the world. Exposure to various environmental pollutants has been implicated in the development of asthma, some of which include fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and O3.
To date, few studies have evaluated how long-term exposure to O3 impacts asthma progression in children. Furthermore, existing studies have produced mixed results without considering how other circulating pollutants in the environment may also contribute to any observed asthma exacerbations.
Gaining additional insights into the relationship between O3 exposure and chronic airway disease development is crucial to support progress in preventative strategies and future treatments. It is particularly important to understand whether early life exposure to O3 impacts children’s health, as this period is critical for their immune and respiratory development.
VR System Developed to Simulate Environments for Early Detection of Autism
A team from the Human-Tech Institute-Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has developed a new system for the early detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The system has achieved an accuracy of over 85%, thus surpassing traditional methods of detecting autism in early childhood, which are usually based on psychological tests and interviews carried out manually.
The results of the work of the UPV team have been published in the Expert Systems with Applications journal. In the study, the team from the Human-Tech Institute analyzed the movements of children performing multiple tasks in virtual reality to determine which artificial intelligence technique is most appropriate for identifying ASD.
“The use of virtual reality allows us to use recognizable environments that generate realistic and authentic responses, imitating how children interact in their daily lives. This is a significant improvement over laboratory tests, in which responses are often artificial. With virtual reality, we can study more genuine reactions and better understand the symptoms of autism,” says Mariano Alcañiz, director of the Human-Tech Institute at the UPV.
