When will we be able to direct computers with our brains? Sooner than we think

From The NY Times magazine:

“Fingers!” Gerwin Schalk sputtered, waving his hands around in the air. “Fingers are made to pick up a hammer.” He prodded the table, mimicking the way we poke at computer keyboards. “It’s totally ridiculous,” he said.

I was visiting Schalk, a 40-year-old computer engineer, at his bunkerlike office in the Wads­worth Center, a public-health lab outside Albany that handles many of New York State’s rabies tests. It so happens that his lab is also pioneering a new way to control our computers — with thoughts instead of fingers. Schalk studies people at the Albany Medical Center who have become, not by choice, some of the world’s first cyborgs.

One volunteer was a young man in his 20s who suffers from a severe form of epilepsy. He had been outfitted with a temporary device, a postcard-­size patch of electrodes that sits on the brain’s cortex, known as an electrocorticographic (ECoG) implant. Surgeons use these implants to home in on the damaged tissue that causes seizures.

Schalk took advantage of the implant to see if the patient could control the actions in a video game called Galaga using only his thoughts. In the videotape of this experiment, you see a young man wearing a turban of bandages with wires running from his head to a computer in a cart. “Pew, pew,” the ship on the computer screen whines, as it decimates buglike creatures. The patient flicks the spaceship back and forth by imagining that he is moving his tongue. This creates a pulse in his brain that travels through the wires into a computer. Thus, a thought becomes a software command.

On the day I stopped by his office, Schalk hit a button on his computer, and Pink Floyd blasted from his speakers. He was running an experiment to see what happens to people’s brains when they listen to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” (a question that has occurred to any stoner who ever contemplated human consciousness in the glow of stereo lights). Weeks before, Schalk played the Pink Floyd song for some of his epileptic volunteers and recorded the activity in the parts of the brain that process sound. Schalk showed me a volume meter on his computer screen — this was a brain, tracking the roar of a guitar solo. It worked just like any other volume meter, but in one experiment, Schalk found that the brain did something unexpected. When he interrupted the Pink Floyd song with moments of silence, the brain’s volume meter continued to tremble up and down, as if the song were still playing. This, Schalk said, showed that the brain creates a model of what it expects to hear — a shadow song that plunks out its tune in the player piano of our auditory system.

“Isn’t this crazy?” he shouted over the thunder of the bass. “We’re close to being able to reconstruct the actual music heard in the brain and play it. If we had several times more electrodes, I bet we could do it.”

But for Schalk — and many others in the field — the ultimate goal is not music. It’s language. Schalk dreams of letting people speak with their neurons, issuing silent commands to their machines. You could imagine the word “cat,” say, and it would pop up on your computer screen. The areas involved with imagined speech take up just a few centimeters in the brain. With better implants, Schalk said, he might be able to pick up a word that his volunteer beams at the computer. Even with today’s implants, he and his colleagues are getting closer. One epilepsy patient moved a ball across a computer screen simply by imagining either an “ooh” sound or an “aah” sound. It marked one more step toward telepathy with machines.

For years, computers have been creeping ever nearer to our neurons. Thousands of people have become cyborgs, of a sort, for medical reasons: cochlear implants augment hearing and deep-brain stimulators treat Parkinson’s. But within the next decade, we are likely to see a new kind of implant, designed for healthy people who want to merge with machines. With several competing technologies in development, scientists squabble over which device works best; no one wants theirs to end up looking like the Betamax of brain wear. Schalk is a champion of the ECoG implant because, unlike other devices, it does not pierce brain tissue; instead it can ride on top of the brain-blood barrier, sensing the activity of populations of neurons and passing their chatter to the outside world, like a radio signal. Schalk says this is the brain implant most likely to evolve into a consumer product that could send signals to a prosthetic hand, an iPhone, a computer or a car.

“The burr hole in the skull will be small,” Schalk told me enthusiastically, as if urging me to get one of the plugs. The first dedicated trials in human beings, he says, are only a few years away.

Schalk first began working with the ECoG implant in 2003, when a surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis invited him to visit the epilepsy ward; four patients had been taken off their medication and had portions of their skulls removed so they could be implanted with ECoG devices.

The implants — usually worn for about a week — allow surgeons to study the aberrant brain patterns of patients as they go into seizure and then cut out the damaged brain tissue. Schalk camped out in the Missouri hospital to wait for the periods when patients were between seizures, at which point he would try to transform the brain signals emitted by their thoughts into software commands. He was, in effect, designing a button that the mind could push.

“We had no clue what we were doing,” Schalk says.

On the first day of the experiments, he sat beside a young man who gamely waited to follow instructions. As researchers rolled a monitor up to the bed, Schalk told the patient, “Now you’re going to move this cursor by thinking.” For a few minutes, the guy floundered. And then, Schalk says: “Boom, the cursor hit the target. Everyone was ecstatic.”

Now Schalk can get all the human brains he wants within walking distance of his office. In 2007, he discovered that the Albany Medical Center houses an epilepsy center, and he set up shop in his hometown, working closely with Anthony Ritaccio, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Albany Medical College.

When I met Ritaccio in front of the hospital, he also talked about the problems with fingers. “We’re always interested in doing things faster,” he said. “I remember the transition to an electric typewriter. We’re addicted to speed. But obviously the way we communicate with computers is rather comical. The way we interact with this blazing fast machine is to poke at it with a finger.”

Schalk and Ritaccio’s research has been underwritten by a $2.2 million Department of Defense grant. The project is part of a $6.3 million Army initiative to invent devices for telepathic communication — for instance, a “telepathy helmet” that would allow soldiers to beam thoughts to one another. Schalk seemed untroubled by the military applications. He said the grant allows him to do research that could, one day, let us all — civilians included — merge with our machines.

Justin Williams, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin, has already transformed the ECoG implant into a microdevice that can be installed with a minimum of fuss. It has been tested in animals for long periods of time — the micro ECoG stays in place and doesn’t seem to negatively affect the immune system. Williams said he hopes to try it in humans soon. “Our goal is to make devices that would require only an outpatient procedure,” he says. “Even if we could make it an overnight stay in the hospital, that would be good.” The implant, in humans, would be about the size of a quarter and sit like a plug in the skull, with a tiny antenna for wireless hookup between machine and brain.

The first to receive the implants would most likely be patients with serious illnesses or disabilities. “We’re targeting neuroprosthetics, spinal-cord injury, A.L.S., motor disorders,” Williams said. “And there’s a lot of interest in epileptic patients.” Williams said he hopes that the tiny implants might afford surgeons more ways to monitor what happens inside the skull. “There are a lot of brain injuries where we don’t understand what’s going on,” he said. But Schalk anticipates a much larger audience for the implants. In fact, he believes that the tiny implant will be a kind of gateway drug for people who choose to become, essentially, cyborgs.

I told Schalk that I was dubious: it was hard to imagine anyone opting for an enhancement that could become a spy-cam in the skull. He exploded with impatience at my lack of imagination, hands cutting the air, as he leaned forward from his perch on a desk. “A small opening in the skull, you plop a device in, wireless transmission and you’re done,” he said. “It sounds crazy. But if you have something that works, people will do it in a nanosecond. Breast augmentation is totally invasive compared to this — and how many people do that every year?”

Dean Pomerleau, an engineer based at Carnegie Mellon University who leads Intel’s brain-computer initiative, might be one of the first to volunteer for a brain implant. (Intel, he stressed, is investing in research but is not developing any kind of “thought chip.”) Pomerleau, speaking as a representative of himself rather than his company, said he was so excited about the cyborging of the human brain that he has taken radical steps to live longer to see it happen. He follows a strict diet, limiting himself to two vegan meals a day; he has eaten the same superfood salad at every meal for the last 10 years. He said that the miracle he is most eager to witness is a kind of mind-meld with other people: a “two-way direct-brain interface” that would “revolutionize human experience.”

Pomerleau and his colleagues are already using machines to let people transmit their silent thoughts — but in an extremely rudimentary fashion. In order to send a telepathic thought in their lab, you have to climb into an fMRI machine, a multimillion-dollar scanning device that delivers detailed maps of the mind in action. How does it work? Try this: Tomato. Tomato. Tomato. Each time you read that word, a specific pattern of neurons fires in several different neighborhoods of your brain. You’re doing more than just passing your eyes over a bunch of letters; you’re also remembering the tomato’s ruby flesh and the way fingers dimple the skin and the earthy smell of its stem.

Tom Mitchell, a brain scientist and Pomerleau’s colleague at Carnegie Mellon, said it was possible to use this kind of activity to send a telepathic message. First, you lie in the scanner, thinking about the words you see on a screen — “airplane,” “truck,” “hammer,” “apple.” As you do this, a software program studies the patterns in your neurons. “I can give you different nouns, like hammer, screwdriver and tomato, and then use our software program to distinguish which of those nouns you are thinking about,” Mitchell said. Most intriguing: the pattern of “tomato” in your brain is similar to the tomato in my brain — and even to the tomate in the brain of a Portuguese speaker.

“Can our program distinguish if you are thinking about three tomatoes or eight tomatoes?” Mitchell asked. “The answer is, yes it can.”

Mitchell is the first to admit that the fMRI will never evolve into a wearable device or a reasonable brain-­computer interface. Nonetheless, the machine is helping to push the technology forward. “If you want to build a good device,” one that is noninvasive and portable, “it’d be really helpful for you to know what is the real neural activity going on,” he said.

Pomerleau said they are “trying to show the world what amazing things you can do if you could get good brain signals out” of the skull.

Schalk is grappling with his own version of this question. In 2008, he published a paper in The Journal of Neural Engineering, which proposed a kind of Esperanto for man to converse with machine. Human beings could learn to think in patterns easily recognized by computers, to create bursts of thought that acted as software code. “This paper is not science fiction,” he insisted.

At Dartmouth College, the future seems to have already arrived. Researchers there are in the process of creating an iPhone connected to an EEG (electroencephalography) headset. The beauty of an EEG is that no skull drilling is required. Sensors glued to the scalp record the patterns of neurons. The drawback is that the human skull blocks most brain waves before they rise to the scalp, so the EEG signal tends to be weak and muddy.

I encountered what they call a NeuralPhone in a basement lab littered with Doritos bags. Matt Mukerjee, the grad student who put it together as part of his senior thesis, stood to shake my hand. He was wearing what appeared to be an octopus on his head — an EEG headset made by Emotiv Systems. Its black plastic tentacles curved above his forehead and disappeared into his mop of hair.

“I’m going to call Einstein,” he said. In its demo mode, the phone gave you a choice of six people — including President Obama, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein — and let you pick one, telepathically. The NeuralPhone was meant to demonstrate that one day we might mind-control the contact lists on our phones. In a preliminary study, Mukerjee’s iPhone responded to the user’s thoughts with an accuracy rate that approached 90 percent — but only under ideal conditions.

Mukerjee hunkered down in his chair and meditated, as he glared at the phone. After a long pause, a photo of Einstein expanded to fill the screen on his iPhone.

Now it was my turn. Mukerjee removed the headset and moistened the tips of its electrodes with contact-lens fluid, then arranged the EEG device on top of my hair. The electrodes poked into my scalp like wet fingers. I held the iPhone in front of me and beamed a blast of willpower at it. “Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs,” I shouted inside my mind. The phone picked George Bush.

“You have a small head,” Mukerjee said accusingly. He slid the headset around, trying to force the electrodes to grasp my scalp more tightly, which didn’t work. He decided to cheat a little. He rearranged the electrodes so that they detected the movement of muscles on my forehead.

This time, the results were magical. As soon as I chose Bill Gates, a photo of Gates splashed onto the phone’s screen. I was not aware of blinking or moving the muscles of my face. The phone seemed to have merged with my body, to be as much a part of me as a finger or toe. I found myself laughing. I couldn’t stop saying, “This is freaky.” And it was.

One Reno air crash victim was young man with muscular dystrophy

From Fox News:

Another one of the victims of the Reno air show crash was wheelchair bound and had muscular dystrophy.

Despite the disability he had his entire life, Michael Wogan, 22, (pictured) graduated Magna Cum Laude from Arizona State University and the young man from Scottsdale, Arizona had even started his own web company.

"Michael was put on this Earth to do his mission," said Kathy Donaldson, one of Michael’s friends. "And he did his mission, and he did it with a wonderful fighting spirit."

Michael was attending the races with his dad, who lost his right eye and some fingers on his right hand.

The father and son were seated in VIP boxes up front where the wheelchairs are allowed.

Research shows patients in ‘vegetative state’ can communicate with brain waves

From The Ottawa Citizen in Canada. In the picture, Belgian man Rom Houben and his mother Josephine Nicolaas Houben (R) and his speech therapist Linda Wouters (L) are pictured at the hospital in Heusden-Zolder, on November 25, 2009. Rom Houben, who is thought to have been in a coma for 23 years, has told of his "second birth" after doctors realised he was in fact conscious, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported on November 23.

A man in Belgium survived a car accident and was presumed for five years to be brain-dead — until he communicated with doctors through a scan that mapped his thoughts.

A woman in Britain caught a viral infection that left her mute and immobile — until brain-imaging tests showed she was aware of herself and her surroundings.

Both patients, whose eyes could open yet whose brains appeared to be shut down, lay beneath a diagnosis of “vegetative state” that all but ruled out the possibility of thought, much less recovery.

In recent years, however, neuroscientist Adrian Owen has discovered that some people who have been written off can actually understand and communicate. Owen asked one such man to imagine playing tennis when he wanted to answer “Yes” to a question, and to think of his home for “No.”

The man’s face never flickered in response to commands. Yet under a scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, different areas of his brain flared with activity, lighting the same language and movement-planning regions that are active when healthy people hear those commands.

The discovery of an “inner voice” in patients who are effectively buried alive has far-reaching consequences for how doctors diagnose and treat unconscious patients with traumatic brain injuries or cardiac arrest. Ethicists say Owen’s discovery raises highly charged questions about what society deems is appropriate life support and whether to consult severely disabled patients on their care.

Owen’s brain scans have been credited with saving the life of Kate Bainbridge, a British woman who caught an infection in 1997, but regained full consciousness after lying in a vegetative state for six months.

“Not being able to communicate was awful. I felt trapped inside my body,” Bainbridge, now 40, told BBC News.

Similarly, the Belgian man, now 30, has begun to respond to simple questions and show distinct traces of brain activity under a functional MRI scanner, which allows doctors to map blood flow, or oxygen use, in different parts of the organ.

The two cases remain rare and do not mean that all unresponsive, brain-damaged people are likely to recover, Owen cautioned.

Nonetheless, his pioneering research shows scientists are still struggling to understand what it means to have a consciousness — an idea that was given a pop-culture twist last summer by Inception, the dream-weaving Hollywood blockbuster.

The notion also taps into a primal fear.

“The very thought that you could be locked inside your body really terrifies all of us at different levels,” Owen, a University of Western Ontario researcher, told federal officials on a recent visit to Ottawa.

To date, Owen and his research team have studied 24 vegetative or minimally conscious patients — too small a sample for scientists to make general observations about why some people are able to communicate.

One theory is that some types of traumatic injuries, often from car accidents, sever the connections among brain cells, but leave the neurons themselves intact. With time, the broken connections can be re-established. By contrast, brains starved of oxygen from cardiac arrest often do mass damage to neurons, leaving virtually no part of the brain unscathed. Under such circumstances, even partial recovery is next to impossible.

By Owen’s calculations, fewer that one in five patients, of the estimated 45,000 to 250,000 a year in North America who are diagnosed with consciousness disorders, is likely to have a measure of brain response.

His research holds the promise of new ways to identify which patients are most likely to regain consciousness. It also exposes the limitations of existing ways to diagnose the vegetative state. Doctors currently use what is known as the Glasgow Coma Scale to measure a patient’s neurological condition at the time of a serious illness or injury.

A 2010 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that functional MRI be added to traditional methods of diagnosing patients with consciousness disorders.

Yet because not all hospitals have expensive fMRI scanners, Owen and his collaborators are trying to develop a cheaper, more portable way to find out if someone is actually aware, and to communicate with them if they are.

Owen’s research team has shown that a similar response can be achieved using an Electroencephalography (EEG) machine that measures electrical activity in the brain. However, adapting the technology for the bedside is still at least a decade away.

“This is not something that you’re going to be purchasing at Best Buy next year,” Owen said in an interview.

At 45, the British native is one of 19 high-powered scientists lured to Canadian universities as part of a $200-million federal program known as the Canada Excellence Research Chairs. Under the program, Owen is receiving $10 million over seven years, which will allow him to develop his EEG tool and do more tests on larger numbers of unconscious people.

However, opening a two-way channel of communication with an immobilized, brain-damaged person raises a number of ethical challenges. For example, should doctors ask patients if they are feeling pain? Are patients with detectable brain activity capable of making their own care decisions? Should they be asked if they want to live or die?

Those are some of the questions that ethicist Judy Illes wants to explore. Illes, who holds the Canada Research Chair in neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, is among a team of experts working alongside Owen.

“Imagine that we could, with enormous accuracy, predict who will emerge from a disordered state of consciousness. That would be very powerful,” said Illes.

Yet such a technology could unleash powerful debates about how long life support should be given to a brain-damaged person and whether society can afford the high cost of keeping someone alive artificially for years, or possibly decades.

“These issues have to do with justice and allocation of resources and cultural appropriateness,” said Illes. “We have a responsibility to Canadian society to understand what disorders of consciousness mean across the different cultures that we embrace.”

In New Jersey, autistic man finds his way in the world through his art

The intro to a story The NY Times. His artwork is pictured.

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — For weeks, Justin Canha, a high school student with autism, a love of cartoons and a gift for drawing, had rehearsed for the job interview at a local animation studio.

As planned, he arrived that morning with a portfolio of his comic strips and charcoal sketches, some of which were sold through a Chelsea gallery. Kate Stanton-Paule, the teacher who had set up the meeting, accompanied him. But his first words upon entering the office were, like most things involving Justin, not in the script.

“Hello, everybody,” he announced, loud enough to be heard behind the company president’s door. “This is going to be my new job, and you are going to be my new friends.”

As the employees exchanged nervous glances that morning in January 2010, Ms. Stanton-Paule, the coordinator of a new kind of “transition to adulthood” program for special education students at Montclair High School, wondered if they were all in over their heads.

Justin, who barely spoke until he was 10, falls roughly in the middle of the spectrum of social impairments that characterize autism, which affects nearly one in 100 American children. He talks to himself in public, has had occasional angry outbursts, avoids eye contact and rarely deviates from his favorite subject, animation. His unabashed expression of emotion and quirky sense of humor endear him to teachers, therapists and relatives. Yet at 20, he had never made a true friend.

People with autism, whose unusual behaviors are believed to stem from variations in early brain development, typically disappear from public view after they leave school. As few as one in 10 hold even part-time jobs. Some live in state-supported group homes; even those who attend college often end up unemployed and isolated, living with parents.

But Justin is among the first generation of autistic youths who have benefited throughout childhood from more effective therapies and hard-won educational opportunities. And Ms. Stanton-Paule’s program here is based on the somewhat radical premise that with intensive coaching in the workplace and community — and some stretching by others to include them — students like Justin can achieve a level of lifelong independence that has eluded their predecessors.

“There’s a prevailing philosophy that certain people can never function in the community,” Ms. Stanton-Paule told skeptics. “I just don’t think that’s true.”

With some 200,000 autistic teenagers set to come of age in the United States over the next five years alone, little is known about their ability to participate fully in public life, or what it would take to accommodate them. Across the country, neighbors, employers, colleagues and strangers are warily interacting with young adults whose neurological condition many associate only with children.

Some advocates of “neurodiversity” call this the next civil rights frontier: society, they say, stands to benefit from accepting people whose brains work differently. Opening the workplace to people with autism could harness their sometimes-unusual talents, advocates say, while decreasing costs to families and taxpayers for daytime aides and health care and housing subsidies, estimated at more than $1 million over an adult lifetime.

But such efforts carry their own costs. In this New York City suburb, the school district considered scrapping Ms. Stanton-Paule’s program almost as soon as it began, to save money on the extra teaching assistants who accompanied students to internships, the bank, the gym, the grocery store. Businesses weighed the risks of hiring autistic students who might not automatically grasp standard rules of workplace behavior.

Oblivious to such debates, many autistic high school students are facing the adult world with elevated expectations of their own. Justin, who relied on a one-on-one aide in school, had by age 17 declared his intention to be a “famous animator-illustrator.” He also dreamed of living in his own apartment, a goal he seemed especially devoted to when, say, his mother asked him to walk the dog.

“I prefer I move to the apartment,” he would say, reluctantly setting aside the notebook he spent hours filling with tiny, precise replicas of every known animated character.

“I prefer I move to the apartment, too,” his father, Briant, a pharmaceutical company executive, replied on hard days.

Over the year that a New York Times reporter observed it, the transition program at Montclair High served as a kind of boot camp in community integration that might also be, for Justin, a last chance. Few such services are available after high school. And Justin was entitled to public education programs, by federal law, until only age 21.

Ms. Stanton-Paule had vowed to secure him a paid job before he left school — the best gauge, experts say, of whether a special needs student will maintain some autonomy later in life. She also hoped to help him forge the relationships, at work and beyond it, that form the basis of a full life.

But more prosaic lessons arose at every turn: when he should present money at the pizza place (not until after he ordered), how close to stand to the person using the weight machine he wanted at the gym (not so close), what to say when he saw a co-worker drinking a Coke (probably not “Coca-Cola is bad for your bones”). Often, Ms. Stanton-Paule and her staff seemed to spend as much time teaching the residents of Montclair about Justin as teaching him the tasks at hand.

“Don’t tell me, tell him,” they directed cashiers. “We need your help to make this work,” they pleaded with potential employers. “Justin has autism,” Ms. Stanton-Paule explained to librarians, the manager at the animal shelter, students at the local college. “How he communicates might be different from what you’re used to.”

For his part, Justin sometimes flagged in his pursuit of autonomy. “When do I retire from this?” he asked of drills in phone etiquette. But he never stopped trying, sometimes warbling the theme song to his favorite movie, “Pinocchio,” as a means of soothing himself.

“When you wish upon a star,” he sang, “makes no difference who you are.”

“Pinocchio,” he informed anyone who asked, “is about a wooden puppet who was brought to life by a blue fairy and goes through mischief and mayhem so he can be approved to be a real boy.”

If he recognized himself in Pinocchio’s classic quest for acceptance, Justin did not say it in so many words.

In Japan, more help could have saved lives of disabled people from disasters, says former head of school for disabled kids

From The Mainichi Daily News in Japan:

FUKUSHIMA, Japan -- A former headmaster of a school for the disabled has examined conditions in which physically-impaired people survived or lost their lives when the March 11 earthquake and tsunami struck the region.

Masahiko Nakamura, 65, (pictured) who had served as head of Taira Yogo Gakko (Taira School for Handicapped Children) in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, from 2000 to 2003, interviewed 31 disabled people and their families in areas mainly along the Pacific coast hit hard by the tsunami in a bid to come to grips with the actual situations surrounding disabled people in times of calamities.

Of the people interviewed, there were those who had to rely on artificial respirators or wheelchairs. According to a survey conducted by the local municipalities, disabled people had a 30 percent higher rate of death than ordinary persons. "If only there was a little more help ... We want to put the lessons to good use for the future," said Nakamura, who currently heads a Braille library in Fukushima.

While trying to confirm the whereabouts of his former students, he started to think "why did those people who were happy with their humble way of living have to lose their lives." After starting his research, apart from his former students, he visited social workers to check on the situations surrounding a total of 31 disabled people in their teens to their 80s -- eight people with impaired vision, five people with impaired hearing, nine people with mental illnesses, three people with autism and six people in wheelchairs. Of those, three people with mental illnesses and two people in wheelchairs lost their lives. After hearing from their families, Nakamura said, "The tsunami was the cause of their deaths."

A man in his 30s in a wheelchair was swallowed by the tsunami while his relatives were on their way to rescue him. The man was carrying an artificial respirator weighing about 4.5 kilograms, but people in the neighborhood were not aware of the difficulty he always had, and therefore he apparently had a hard time trying to escape from the tsunami. A woman in her 60s in a wheelchair, who lived in Namie, lost her life to the tsunami at home while her husband was away. "There was no ramp for her to come down from the entrance about 40 centimeters high, and therefore she apparently was hit by the tsunami while she was at a loss," her husband said in tears.

A man in his teens with a mental illness, who lived in Soma, lost his life to the tsunami. According to his mother, he continued to stay in his room at home because his grandmother was removing roof tiles scattered on the road. Nakamura said, "People with mild mental illnesses can go shopping by themselves, but I painfully learned how difficult it is for them to make their own decisions to escape in times of disasters."

In collaboration with the prefectural social welfare council, Nakamura checked the number of disabled people killed in the disasters in 10 municipalities along the Pacific coast in Fukushima Prefecture as of the end of June. He also checked the kinds of disabilities they had.

As of last October, there were a total of 527,639 people in the 10 municipalities, and 1,673 people died in the disasters. There were 25,577 holders of physical disability certificates as of April 2010, and 102 of them lost their lives to the disasters. The death rate for the disabled is 0.40 percent, 1.3 times the rate for non-holders of the certificates which stood at 0.31 percent. Of the 102 people killed, 60 were physically disabled, 26 had internal impediments such as heart, kidney, or respiratory ailments, 10 had impaired vision, and six had impaired hearing. In addition, nine people with mental illnesses and seven people with psychiatric disabilities lost their lives to the disasters.

Nakamura is continuing with his research. "We urgently need to have a support system that includes keeping in touch with families that have disabled people," he said. "We have to repeatedly tell disabled people even from their childhood that 'If an earthquake hits while you are near the ocean, tsunami will come. You must flee to higher ground,'" he added. Nakamura said he would compile the research results and share them with local governments and schools.

British man becomes 'first blind rugby league coach'

From BBC News:

A Sheffield man has become England's first qualified blind rugby league coach, according to the Rugby Football League.

Ben Noble, from Shiregreen, has been working with Sheffield Eagles to complete level one of his coaching qualification.

The RFL said Mr Noble was the first blind person to pass the coaching certificate in its history.

Mr Noble said: "It's been a lot of hard work but it's been worth it."

As part of his training to become a coach, Mr Noble has been training with the Sheffield Eagles youth team.

Dean Thomas, head of youth at the club, said Mr Noble's desire to learn had inspired some of the young people he had worked with.

"When these 15 and 17-year-olds feel they are going through adversity and training is tough, we get them to work with Ben," he said.

"He brings realism to what we do. His character and determination is what we look for in our players."

As Mr Noble can only distinguish the difference between light and dark he relies on assistance from his support worker Stacey Darby.

Ms Darby acts as "Ben's eyes" and works alongside him, including describing what is happening on the pitch.

Sheffield Eagles said last year it had worked with 10,000 people in the community and was now looking to involve Ben with further outreach work.

"It gives people a great opportunity to think 'you can do this, you can overcome these barriers'," Mr Thomas said.

"Over the next 12 months, we'll be going to schools more and working with people with disadvantages and disabilities. Hopefully we can do more in the community, as well as mentor our elite young athletes."

Despite not being able to see, Mr Noble said the youths he mentors "don't get away with anything".

Now the 25-year-old coach is looking to complete his level two coaching certificate, which is a recognised national qualification through the Rugby Football League.

At Tennessee School for the Blind, students discover art as path to self-expression

From The Tennessean. In the picture, Sara Grannenann puts the finishing touches on a drawing at Tennessee School for the Blind.

Ashley Jackson is completely blind and almost totally deaf, but her world is not dark and silent.

Light, color, textures, shapes — all things she’s never seen — flow into the clay sculptures she creates.

“I didn’t choose to be blind and deaf, but I accept it,” Jackson said. “With sculptures I feel stronger.”

Jackson, a 19-year-old boarding student from Chattanooga, attends the Tennessee School for the Blind in Donelson. Her work is among 20 to 30 pieces of artwork from the school on display through Sept. 30 at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

“Without art, I’d feel isolated, apart from the world,” said Jackson, who speaks clearly after receiving a sign language question through touch on her lower arm.

“I don’t want to hide in the world of a deaf and blind person. I like to express myself.”

More than half of the School for the Blind’s 149 students are enrolled in art classes, directed by Monica Leister, who is not visually impaired.

She was teaching other subjects, including daily life skills at the state school for all grade levels, when asked to jump-start the art program about 13 years ago.

“Art is almost a therapeutic way for our students to express themselves, but we correlate projects with what they are learning in the classroom,” Leister said. “It has structure and it’s a form of self-expression. I think it is a great tool for building self-esteem.”

Low-vision student Emily Green, a sophomore, created a Pittsburgh Steelers pottery bowl for the exhibition, a prelude to Art Beyond Sight Awareness Month in October.

“I have a lot of outlets, but art is my favorite,” Green said. “I tend to be very perceptive because I don’t see as well, and that makes me look harder. It makes me pay attention more to texture (and) the atmosphere around it.”

Blind since birth, Jackson began sculpting as a ninth-grader, giving it a try out of a fondness for playing with Play-Doh as a young girl.

Some of Jackson’s sculptures show relationships, including the bond between a mother and child, as well as other life experiences. A sculpture of a mother who finds an abandoned baby sold for $250 at the school’s annual auction. The sculpture at the library is of a mother holding a baby, and Jackson says she hopes her relationship with her own mother will continue to improve.

“It’s a tool for her to express her thoughts and feelings,” Leister said of Jackson’s work. “It’s really unique. She can’t see a face, she has to feel a face. I’m amazed at the details she has. Her sculptures are very stylized. And she’s discovered pottery.”

Jackson will travel to Louisville, Ky., to receive an award for a self-portrait sculpture from the American Printing House for the Blind. The portrait will be on display at the organization’s national exhibit. Another School for the Blind art student, Alexandria Williams, will be honored for painting in an elementary school division.

Art will always be part of Jackson’s life, she said, but motivational speaking interests her. She’s been out front as a speaker at several area schools. She’s planning for college in her future, possibly to study child psychology or sociology.

Now in its second year, the School for the Blind’s display at the state library was organized with assistance from the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, which is part of the state library.

The library provides audio, braille and large print books along with other services for residents unable to read standard print because of visual or physical disabilities.

The centerpiece of the school’s display is the school’s mascot named Dot — a paper mache tiger made from scraps of braille paper created by a past class. Dot is now a permanent display at the state library.

“It’s an opportunity not many high-vision students have,” Green said of the display. “It almost makes it seem like an appreciation.”

Mentally ill people in Indonesia still live in chains

From NPR:

The harsh, tropical sunlight that dapples Bali's tourist-thronged beaches streams through the fingers of a palm leaf and lands on the shoulders of Nengah, who slumps like a rag doll amid a pile of tattered pillows in the island's far eastern reaches.

The poor village of Abang is remote, and Nengah (pictured) spends her days in a heap, staring at hands that lie in her lap like dry leaves.

Today, Nengah is not alone. Neighbors have gathered in the mid-July heat to watch as her brother uses a stone to break a chain that has bound her to a concrete pit — her home — for nearly a decade.

Nengah, whose full name is confidential, suffers from schizophrenia. After the 35-year-old violently attacked her stepmother in a blind rage nine years ago, her family decided they had to restrain her.

Her situation improved after local psychiatrist Luh Ketut Suryani arrived in the village in June to find Nengah naked, caged and filthy. The doctor consulted the family and prescribed medication. Later, Suryani helped get Nengah's family to free her from bondage.

Nengah's situation is not unique in Indonesia, where the mentally ill are often locked in chicken coops or chained up in family yards to prevent them from disturbing the community.

A shortage of psychiatrists, limited mental health services, stigma and misinformation about mental illness are some of the reasons people here go without treatment. In a country of 240 million people, there are less than 600 psychiatrists, many of them based in urban centers.

Dr. Irmansyah, the director of mental health at Indonesia's Health Ministry, estimates that around 30,000 people are living in restraints, but gathering accurate information about them is difficult.

Last year the department of mental health announced "Meuju Bebas Pasung," a roadmap to free people in chains.

Officials say they are relying on community members to report cases like Nengah's. Then it will be up to local health officials to negotiate with the families for their release.

Since taking his position in April 2010, Irmansyah, who goes by one name, has worked hard to reach out to rural communities and create awareness about mental illness.

But he says mental health remains low on the government's priority list, particularly as it works toward meeting its Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, by 2015.

The United Nations-designated targets for development fall under eight categories, including reducing child mortality, fighting disease epidemics such as malaria and AIDS and improving maternal health.

The MDGs have become the universal gauge for development, and countries are judged by their ability to meet them. "But improving mental health services is not part of those goals," said Irmansyah, "so there is little incentive to spend on them."

The former Harvard University fellow knits his fingers over his government-issued khaki uniform and sighs through his stiff grey moustache when explaining the uphill battle to improve mental health care here.

"Awareness is rising that restraints are against human rights," said Irmansyah, but he worries that increasing depression among the elderly, behavioral disorders among teenagers and side effects of drug use will only increase the need for better care. "We need to be ready for these problems," he said.

For now, community outreach is limited, confined to a smattering of volunteers and concerned psychiatrists like Luh Ketut Suryani.

In 2005, she founded the Suryani Institute in Bali, which uses a combination of psychiatry, anti-psychotic medication and spiritualism to treat mental illness.

Many Indonesians still regard mental illness as a curse caused by black magic and best treated by a spiritualist rather than a medical doctor. Suryani believes doctors should draw on local beliefs and religious figures to instill trust, a key to helping mentally ill patients recover.

In 2009 the governor of Bali committed $115 million to a program led by her institute to identify and treat people with mental illness in Karangasem, one of Bali's poorest districts.

Suryani estimates that as many as 2,000 people in the district suffer from chronic mental illness.

With the government's support she was able to reach out to more than 320 patients, but a year later her funding was cut. She now works to raise her own funds, but it's slow going.

Indonesia's Health Minister, Dr. Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih, says she understands the need for more resources, but her ministry has a limited amount of money to put toward tackling Indonesia's raft of health issues.

Still, while only 2.3 percent of the total national budget goes toward health care, less than 1 percent of that amount is put toward mental health.

More people came forward to request help for mental illness when Suryani first began seeing patients under the government-funded program. And despite budget cuts, she still sees as many patients as she can. She currently sees around 450 patients, but her limited time and resources make repeat visits difficult.

During a recent visit she checked on Made, a schizophrenic she has been treating since 2009.

Made's older brother and caretaker fielded the doctor's questions: How many hours a night does Made sleep, and where? What does he eat?

Made stood in the yard nearby, tugging at his shirt and looking down in what seemed a bashful pose.

Suryani, whose long silver hair gives her a warm, grandmotherly look, asked him how he was responding to the medication. He held out his arms to show they were steady — a side effect of anti-psychotic drugs is often tremors.

It took Suryani making visits to Nengah's family every week for a month before they agreed to negotiate her release. But in the future they will handle the majority of her treatment.

Komang Gede, one of Suryani's assistants, worries they may not be ready. "The family has suffered a trauma," he said.

Relapses are common in remote areas where people are unable to return to mental hospitals for regular treatment. "When families spend lots of money on assistance and people continue to relapse they give up and turn to restraints," said Irmansyah.

The lack of follow-up only entrenches the problem.

"If we stop treatment and people have not recovered then we must start again from the beginning, and that is not as effective," said Suryani, who tells patients that recovering from mental illness is a lifelong process.

Increasing access to services is essential, but so too is improving the quality of Indonesia's mental health hospitals, says Irmansyah, who tells stories of overcrowding and abusive staff.

Until the country gets serious about treating mental illness humanely, Irmansyah says freedom like Nengah's will only be symbolic.

Michelle Bachmann's use of 'retardation' irks disability community

From MSNBC:

Presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) is catching flak from the disabilities community for using the word "retardation" just after upsetting medical experts with her comments about a childhood vaccine in Monday's debate.

In a follow-up interview Sept. 13 on TODAY, she told Matt Lauer that a mother came up to her in tears following the debate and told Bachmann that her daughter suffered from "mental retardation" after getting the HPV vaccine.

The controversy first brewed during the Republican Presidential debate when she said Texas Governor Rick Perry’s 2007 order mandating the human papillomavirus vaccine for school girls “through an executive order is just flat-out wrong.”

Just as much as they are concerned that Bachmann made factually incorrect statements about the virus causing “mental retardation,” experts in the intellectual and developmental disabilities community are concerned that Bachmann also used inappropriate language to describe the issue.

“The term mentally retarded or the term mental retardation are totally unacceptable,” Peter Berns, chief executive officer of The Arc, a national disabilities group based in Washington, D.C., told msnbc.com.

“It’s language was first rejected in the 1990s by individuals with disabilities and their families, and they don’t like to be labeled in that way. It’s extraordinarily offensive to them.”

Berns said that over the years, the word “retarded” has become an insult.

“Folks with developmental disabilities and intellectual disability have been ridiculed, are called names and are made fun of everywhere they go. That language is part of an insult. That offensive language reminds them of all the insult and injury they have experienced."

He further explains the incident is especially unfortunate because Bachmann was a member of Congress last year when Rosa’s law removed the use “mental retardation” in federal health, social security and labor legislation.

So what should everyone be using instead? The phrase that should be used in federal and social matters, Bern says, is “intellectual disability” or “intellectual developmental disabilities.”

“She made a mistake in using that language,” he says. “Any politician and any presidential candidate ought to know this is unacceptable language. The best thing for anyone who has used that language inappropriately would be to make an apology.”

Margaret Nygren, executive director of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in Washington, D.C., says she also was extremely concerned about Bachmann’s statements about the vaccine.

“There is absolutely no credible scientific evidence linking vaccines with autism, intellectual disabilities or developmental disabilities ... and certainly none for HPV,” she says.

“The important issue here is the misrepresentation of the science, but I would very much prefer that she use the term intellectual disability because it is the better and more accurate term,” she says. “There was some confusion all around.”

The issue is not about political correctness, it is more about advocacy for people who have disabilities, says Debbi Harris of Eagan, Minn., the parent of an 18-year-old with physical and developmental disabilities and medical complexities. She frequently advocates and volunteers on behalf of children with special health care needs and developmental disabilities, and believes members of Congress “have a responsibility to know what’s appropriate.”

“It just leans more toward the marginalization of people with disabilities and thinking about people as people before they think about their labels and diagnoses,” says Harris, also board chair of The Arc Greater Twin Cities. “A situation like this is an opportunity to be brought to light so it doesn’t happen again.”

"Leone Stars," documentary following Sierra Leone Single-Leg Amputee Sports Club's pursuit of world championship, wins Toronto International Film Festival's Pitch This! competition, $10,000 in development funding

From The National Post:

Allan Tong and Ngardy Conteh's Leone Stars, a documentary following the Sierra Leone Single-Leg Amputee Sports Club's pursuit of a world championship, has won the Toronto International Film Festival's Pitch This! competition and with it $10,000 in development funding.

The duo took the prize at the industry competition Tuesday, with Leone Stars topping five other films vying for the title. Each team was allowed six minutes to pitch their idea and two minutes to answer questions about it from the audience of more than 200 after which each film was evaluated by a six-person jury.

Leone Stars chronicles the Sports Club's pursuit of a place in the 2012 World Amputee Football world championships. Tong was inspired to make the film after seeing photos of the team members, many of whom lost limbs in Sierra Leone's brutal civil war.

"This is amazing," Tong said in a statement. "Thanks to Telefilm and TIFF we now can go back to Africa to film the team as they compete at the All-African Cup in Ghana."

Work on the doc was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, which helped the team raise more than $20,000 for filming and production. The film was produced by Walter Forsyth of Gorgeous Mistake Productions and executive produced by Jerry McIntosh.

Leone Stars was up against Breaking the Band, The Lost Woods, Pinweight, The Multiple Selves of Hannah Maynard and The Marksman.

Actor Henry Winkler gets honorary OBE for helping dyslexic children in UK

From The Guardian in the UK:

Happy Days star Henry Winkler has been made an honorary OBE for his work on dyslexia in the UK.

The actor and director, who played the Fonz in the classic US sitcom, said it was "humbling" to receive the honour, awarded at the British embassy in Washington DC.

Having been diagnosed with dyslexia as an adult, Winkler has toured schools in the UK over the last two years to talk about the learning difficulty.

He has also written books for children about Hank Zipzer, a boy with dyslexia, whose experiences are based on the actor's own childhood struggles.

In a statement on the embassy's website, Winkler said: "Receiving this honour is a very humbling experience.

"My goal when I started working with children was never to bring accolades on myself, but instead to change how people think about those around them for whom learning is a struggle.

"I am flattered to have had my work recognised in this manner, and hope to continue showing kids that their learning difficulty isn't a disability."

The British ambassador to the US, Nigel Sheinwald, presented the OBE during a ceremony at the embassy.

Sheinwald said: "Through [Winkler], thousands of young people have seen a role model and an inspiration for overcoming their learning challenges."

The honour was presented in recognition of the star's services to children with dyslexia and special educational needs.

Non-British nationals can receive honorary awards for their contribution to British interests. Honorary awards are conferred by the Queen on the advice of the Foreign Office.

Winkler's portrayal of Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli in Happy Days won him two Golden Globes and three Primetime Emmy nominations.

"We do have very normal lives,” says one of Schappell conjoined twins, who are celebrating their 50th birthday

From FOX News:

The world's oldest living conjoined twins have defied doctors' predictions and reached their 50th birthday.

George and Lori Schappell, who are joined at the head, celebrate their special day Sunday.

And the pair is marking the landmark birthday with a trip to London.

Remarkably, the twins are able to live very different and separate lives, with Lori having had relationships and George, who was born Dori and later changed her name to Reba — deciding to live life as a man.

"When we were born, the doctors didn't think we'd make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said. "We have learned so much in the last 50 years and will continue living life to the full."

While Lori, who is 5 feet, 1 inch, was born able-bodied, 4-foot-4-inch George suffers from spina bifida, which has caused severe mobility problems.

As George cannot walk, he sits in a wheelchair-type stool which Lori pushes so the two can move together.

"Most people don't believe us but we do have very normal lives,” George said.

The twins, from Pennsylvania, were born sharing 30 percent of their frontal lobe brain tissue and critical blood vessels, meaning they cannot be separated.

"I have known from a very young age that I should have been a boy,” George said, who began living as a man four years ago. "It was so tough, but I was getting older and I simply didn't want to live a lie. I knew I had to live my life the way I wanted."

Although the pair are both single, Lori has dated men.

Throughout the 1990s, George had a successful music career as singer Reba Schappell and won an LA Music Award for Best New Country Artist.

The famous pair have been the subject of television documentaries, appeared on talk shows and even made a cameo appearance on the TV drama series “Nip/Tuck.”

New model NYC yellow cabs built for wheelchair users can be purchased, Taxi & Limo Commission expected to say

From the NY Daily News:

Another new model of yellow cabs could hit city streets before the much ballyhooed "Taxi of the Future" arrives.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission is expected Sept. 15 to approve rule modifications paving the way for cabbies to buy the MV-1 (pictured), an American-made vehicle designed and being built with wheelchair users in mind.

The MV-1, which looks similar to the Chevy Tahoe, has extra-wide doors, a built-in ramp that extends to the sidewalk and space for a wheelchair to the right of the driver. In addition to a wheelchair user, the MV-1 can seat five other passengers.

"We're very excited about having another wheelchair-accessible option for taxi owners," TLC Chairman David Yassky said.

Only 230 of the city's fleet of more than 13,000 yellow cabs are wheelchair accessible. The majority are Toyota Sienna minivans. The rest are Dodge Caravans.

The city plans on boosting the number of accessible taxicabs to 800.

Overall, there currently are 19 different automobile models being used as yellow cabs. The dominant cab is the Crown Victoria, which Ford no longer producing.

The TLC last year picked Nissan to be exclusive manufacturer of all yellow cabs, beating out two competitors.

Nissan's NV200 cabs are expected to begin replacing other cab models when they are retired in 2013, a process that could take about five years. The NV200 is not wheelchair accessible.

The only models other than the NV200 that will be permitted for a decade will be handicapped accessible vehicles like the Sienna or MV-1.

The Vehicle Production Group's MV-1 is being manufactured in Michigan and assembled in Indiana.

Punky, animated TV character with Down syndrome in Ireland, to go global

Press Release from Target Entertainment. Pictured is Aimee Richardson, 29, who has Down syndrome and voices Punky.

LONDON, UK -- Leading rights management company Target Entertainment has won the global distribution rights to Monster Animation’s ground-breaking new 2D animation Punky and will be launching the property at MIPCOM Junior this October.

Created by Lindsay J. Sedgwick and produced by Monster Animation’s Gerard O’ Rourke, Punky (20 x 7’) is the world’s first ever animated cartoon featuring a lead character with Down Syndrome. It is written by Andrew Brenner, creator and writer of Humf.

The series is already gaining rave reviews from its RTE airing and winning plaudits with children and parents globally for its inclusive, progressive and upbeat take on the life of a regular little girl... who just happens to have Down Syndrome.

Like any other six year old Punky is just a fun-loving little girl who lives with her mum, big brother Con, Cranky, her grandmother and her pet dog Rufus and makes sense of the world in her own way.

Reviews to date predict that Punky is certain to win an army of international fans... not because of her super cute hairstyle or her mischeviousness, but because of her lionhearted humanity to all regardless of age or ability.

Gerard O’ Rourke, Punky’s producer talks about his passion for the project and why he chose Target as global distributor: “We wanted this series to sit in the middle of any pre-school block anywhere in the world and let viewers discover that Punky is a great child but also happens to have a disability, they see the character not the disability. Punky is not a Down Syndrome person, but a person with Down Syndrome. If we can pass this message to our next generation through Punky then we have created a very worthwile TV series.

“Target Entertainment and in particular Alison Rayson fully understand how important a series like this can be and we know they will communicate this message to all broadcast mediums worldwide.”

Alison Rayson, Target’s CEO reveals why the series is so special to her: “When I first saw Punky I felt an immediate connection to her because of my own son Jack who also has Down Syndrome and is 3 and a half. I have been thinking for some time about how Target could become involved in an animated show with a lead character that had Down Syndrome and it seems like fate that a colleague one day last year asked me if I had heard about Monster’s new show Punky.

“Down Syndrome is a much misunderstood genetic condition that affects around 5.8 million people worldwide today. It is not an illness nor is it something that one suffers with... like anyone without the condition children with Down Syndrome have more in common with their parents than they do with other children with Down Syndrome. Children with Down Syndrome globally now have healthy fulfilling lives in most countries integrated in mainstream schools and achieving incredible results. There are still countries however where a child with Down Syndrome or any disability is marginalized and mistreated and that’s just not acceptable. Our imperative with Punky then is not just a commercial one for Target, but also a Charitable one. We will be donating half of our sales commissions to Down Syndrome Education International which pioneer inclusion at schools for all children with Down Syndrome. We want Punky to become a global ambassador for Down Syndrome and for all children with learning difficulties worldwide, breaking down old fashioned and negative stereotypes and championing the joy of individuality.”

Since its inception in 1998 as an independent distributor, Target Entertainment has grown into one of Europe’s most successful rights management businesses. Target’s enviable catalogue of rights features approximately 4,000 hours of vibrant, quality programming across drama, comedy, entertainment, factual and kids programming.

Campaign in China to help disabled people become teachers

From China Daily:

BEIJING - A letter urging the authorities to eliminate discrimination preventing disabled people becoming teachers was submitted to the Ministry of Education on Sept. 9, the day before the country's 27th annual celebration for teachers.

"I always dreamed of being a teacher, but the current rules in many provinces have shut the door on the career," said Yang Renliang, one of the initiators of the campaign.

The 24-year-old student graduated from Guizhou University last year with a bachelor degree in English, but was refused a teaching position by many schools because of his vision impairment.

Wang Jiang, a high school substitute teacher from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, said he has suffered discrimination throughout his career for more than ten years because of physical disabilities caused by infantile paralysis.

"I have less chances than my peers to win professional titles or to get promotion. And even though I have worked hard for years, I still have no official employment letter," said Wang, one of 588 disabled people who made the appeal.

Wang said when he first became a teacher in 1996 there were few obstacles to candidates with physical disabilities. But things changed after the Ministry of Education implemented a new regulation in 2000 allowing local authorities to establish rules for teachers' qualifications based on a person's physical condition.

According to research conducted by Yang Renliang and his supporters, more than 20 provinces or municipalities, including Beijing, Anhui and Fujian, have similar regulations concerning physical appearance, sight, hearing and mental health that discriminate against people with disabilities.

Huang Zhen, a law professor at Central University of Finance and Economics, said some local education authorities or institutions might be breaking, or at least going against the spirit of, the Law on the Protection of Disabled Persons.

"Teaching requires mental ability and devotion. Although some people might be physically challenged, they can still be good teachers," Huang said.

"Some of them may even have an edge because they are usually caring for others and have a passion for the career."

Discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS is another issue pointed out in the letter.

In the past two years, China has seen three legal cases that involved discrimination in employment, all related to the recruitment of teachers.

The letter said that the country should set up a national standard for teachers' qualifications that conforms to the current laws guaranteeing the rights of disabled people.

The campaign's initiators have received much support from the public, but they are still waiting for an official response from the ministry, a source close to them said.