From the Orange County [California] Register: Man with cerebral palsy will climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness, funds.

From the Grand Haven [Michigan] Tribune and Detroit Free Press: Man with cerebral palsy walks across the state on stilts to raise awareness, funds.

By the Associated Press in the New York Times:

Summer camps just for kids with chronic diseases are booming — places to learn about epilepsy or finally meet someone else with Tourette’s tics or slice open a cow’s heart to see what’s wrong with their own.

Now fledgling research suggests such special camps may offer more than a rite of passage these children otherwise would miss: They just might have a lasting therapeutic value.

… ”How do you live well with a chronic condition? I believe in part, the power of being amongst your peers normalizes the experience,” explains Sandra Cushner-Weinstein, a social worker at Children’s National Medical Center who founded the hospital’s weeklong camps for five illnesses, and is studying the impact on campers.

Jemma Leech wrote her way past 1,600 other children to win essay contest

From the Houston Chronicle:

”I am Jemma and I am immortal!”

Thus begins the one-page autobiography of Houston fifth-grader Jemma Leech who, though cerebral palsy has left her little control of her body, lives in a vivid world of images and words that modern technology now is beginning to let her share.

… In darker moments, Jemma writes about how others perceive her.

” ‘How can you,’ they say in hushed tones, ‘read, write and think like normal people do?’ ” she writes. ” ‘Surely that mother of yours is just making it up and should stop telling fibs.’ Well, d’you know? I do have a brain and I do have a mind — and the imagination of Dahl, the poetry of Keats, the drama of Shakespeare, the music of Verdi and the passion of them all in one.”

Her autobiography is here.

Here’s an earlier story on Jemma from the [UK] Times — Young, gifted and helpless: She is trapped in a body that doesn’t work. So how do you unlock her mind?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Premature births are on the rise in the U.S., amounting to more than half a million babies annually or more than one in eight American infants. Researchers are finding that the consequences of these early births can be devastating, leading to learning disabilities, neurological problems, lung diseases and cerebral palsy.

Infants born prematurely are also much more likely to die during childhood, or to remain childless when they reach adulthood, according to a study by Duke University researchers.

The study suggests that the number of disabled infants and adults will rise as advances in neonatology make it possible to save babies earlier. Contributing to the rising prematurity rate, researchers say, may be the growing use of assisted reproduction.

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From the Cleveland Plain Dealer: Policy Matters faults state’s autism scholarship program; Oversight is lacking, study says

A fast-growing state program that gives parents of autistic children up to $20,000 for private educational services lacks oversight and allows providers to exclude children based on religion and other factors, says Policy Matters Ohio.

The Cleveland think tank released a report today that gives generally poor marks to the “autism scholarship” program. The program allows parents to opt out of the public school system and use public school money to buy private services. Most private services don’t provide a school setting, which is another point of criticism in the report.

From the Columbus Dispatch: ‘All for some and none for some;’ A fix can’t come soon enough for Ohio’s wildly inequitable system of helping autistic kids

Under the current system:

• A private autism center in Franklin County consumed 50 percent of the public money spent on psychiatric treatment for autism last year even though it served just 4 percent of the children, state officials say. Step by Step Academy also billed $180,000 to treat one child while another family, waiting years for a Medicaid waiver to help pay for services, made do with $672.

• Ohio funds scholarships that provide up to $20,000 a year for families to purchase educational services for autistic children but offers nothing similar for those with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome or other forms of developmental disability.

From the Regina [Saskatchewan] Leader-Post:

Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer, who served seven years in prison for the murder of his daughter Tracy, says he is seeking a new jury trial. Tracy had cerebral palsy, and Latimer has maintained that he killed her to end her suffering. He claims he did not receive a fair trial.

His decision to serve his day parole in Ottawa, he insisted, is “not a great move to institute new policies in the federal government. All I want is some honest answers. And I really believe I deserve them.”

One of the answers he’s seeking relates to assertions by the courts that he and his wife could have used other medication to manage their daughter’s pain more effectively.

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From the [UK] Daily Mail:

British opposition leader David Cameron has risked angering hardline anti-abortion campaigners by saying he will vote to continue to allow abortions at virtually full term when a minor disability is diagnosed in utero. Cameron has a son with a disability.

… Members of Parliament are expected to vote on a proposal to change the rule that allows abortions as late as 39 weeks if the unborn child is diagnosed with a disability. But Mr Cameron said: “I won’t be supporting that. The current law should remain.”

… The issues raised by the legislation are sensitive ones for Mr Cameron because his five-year-old son Ivan was born with a severe form of cerebral palsy and epilepsy and needs 24-hour care.

A full-term pregnancy is approximately 40 weeks.

The story drew many comments, including this one:

Both Cameron and Brown have children with disability and yet both support abortion up to birth for disability. Is this their real position or are they simply trying to curry voters’ favor because they believe that most people in this country see disabled people as an encumbrance?
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