Murder trial to start in Pennsylvania over morphine death of boy with CP

From FOX News:

LANCASTER, Pa. — A homicide trial is set to begin for a former visiting nurse accused in the morphine death of an 11-year-old central Pennsylvania boy with cerebral palsy.

Fifty-year-old Joy O'Shea Woomer is scheduled for trial Jan. 4 in Lancaster County Court.

She's charged in the September 2002 death of 11-year-old Brent Weaver.

Prosecutors say the 50-year-old woman injected the East Hempfield Township boy with a lethal dose of morphine.

The boy's parents have told investigators that their son was in good condition when they left him in Woomer's care. But they say she awoke them the next morning and said he was unresponsive.

Woomer's attorney has argued that there isn't any evidence linking her to the death.

As "reading" evolves, Braille is pushed aside for audio books

From Rachel Aviv, who is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with the Carter Center, for The NY Times.

At 4 o’clock each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial Times to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine. The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring over the news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my finger to my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She doesn’t think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the blind. “Literacy evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time, blindness was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says she thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished,” she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there’s a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and computer-screen-reading software.

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight” for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators.

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many Braille readers, Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants.”

Until the 19th century, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the code so that it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three rows and two columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of written communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator and spiritual savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933 book, “The Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input.

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading — whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I. scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing, and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and the study suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them — transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

Oour definition of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would no longer be “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of being poor.”

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from their faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy” repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don’t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily ever after” is made up of three separate words.

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of reading skills. “I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to lower something,” he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit it.”

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A. Paterson, who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every morning. (He calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m not really supposed to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were sometimes made to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using text-to-speech software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world, then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

When deaf people began getting cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as an identity and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is physically natural, because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you are viewed as ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

PBS show exploring happiness includes several people with disabilities

An overview from the "This Emotional Life" Web site:

The Emmy Award-winning team of Vulcan Productions and the producers of NOVA have created a three-part series that explores improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals.The series was produced by Kunhardt McGee Productions.

Harvard psychologist and best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, Professor Daniel Gilbert, talks with experts about the latest science on what makes us “tick” and how we can find support for the emotional issues we all face.

Each episode weaves together the compelling personal stories of ordinary people and the latest scientific research along with revealing comments from celebrities like Chevy Chase, Larry David, Alanis Morissette, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Richard Gere.

Episode 1:

The first episode, Family, Friends & Lovers, looks at the importance of relationships and why they are central to our emotional well-being.

We meet a young boy adopted from a Russian orphanage, whose story illustrates how a lack of attachment in infancy fundamentally shapes his ability to build relationships for years to come. We meet the young parents of newborn twins, a couple in therapy for a troubled marriage, a teenager who was bullied with tragic consequences, two women grappling with the stress of workplace conflicts and other characters. Through their stories we achieve a better understanding of the importance of social connections and relationships.

Episode 2:

In the second episode, Facing Our Fears, we look at emotions that are commonly regarded as obstacles to happiness — such as anger, fear, anxiety, and despair.

Our brains are designed for survival, and the negative emotions they create are vital to that mission. But those negative emotions can spiral out of control with debilitating effects. We meet a woman whose inability to control her temper is jeopardizing her relationships, a college student whose fear of flying is limiting her life and a teenager who is struggling to overcome clinical depression on the eve of attending college. We also meet veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and follow their journeys to find effective treatment.

Across the episode, science reminds us that we are of two minds — a rational brain that’s relatively new and an emotional brain that’s older than time. Sometimes emotion overwhelms reason, sometimes reason outwits emotion, and it is the endless struggle that makes our lives so painful, so joyous and so interesting.

Episode 3:

The last episode, Rethinking Happiness, explores happiness. It is so critical to our well-being, and, yet, it remains such an elusive goal for many of us.

We meet individuals facing major turning points in their lives — a job loss, a cancer diagnosis, the death of a child, an accident — as well as those facing more common struggles. We learn from the latest research that we often incorrectly predict what will bring us greater happiness, leading us to look for it in the wrong places.

As the study of behavior turns more toward positive emotions, we explore the latest research on the activities and qualities that foster them, such as meditation, compassion, forgiveness and altruism. We also share the remarkable stories of resilient individuals that scientists are studying to learn more about us all, including a man who overcame an abusive childhood to become a renowned surgeon and a Vietnam veteran who survived torture, solitary confinement and seven years as a POW, yet emerged emotionally unscathed. Understanding why some people have the ability to bounce back after disaster strikes, while others do not, sheds light on how all of us can lead happier, more fulfilling lives.

The film ends by coming full circle to the understanding that it is the quality of our relationships — with friends, family and the larger community — that ultimately defines our happiness.

"Children of a Lesser God" playwright may team with deaf actress Phyllis Frelich for 2010 play project

From the Las Cruces Sun-News in N.M.:

LAS CRUCES, N.M. -- Tony Award-winning playwright Mark Medoff, whose first major film, "Children of a Lesser God," garnered Academy Award nominations (Marlee Matlin won an Oscar for her role about a deaf woman in crisis), is a longtime New Mexico State University professor and a founder of NMSU's Creative Media Institute who has since written and directed many award-winning films and has twice taken plays to Broadway that premiered in Las Cruces.

His screenplay credits include "City of Joy," "Clara's Heart," "Off Beat," "Good Guys Wear Black," "Homage," "Santa Fe," "100MPG" and "When You Coming Back, Red Ryder?"

Medoff, 69, has several major projects in the works for 2010.

He's now finishing editing with professionals and NMSU students for "REFUGE," a road picture starring Linda Hamilton, filmed here in 2009.

The University of Houston has commissioned a new Medoff play, "The Changing Women," involving his "Children of a Lesser God" muse Phyllis Frelich (pictured in the original production) and "a well-known actor I can't mention at this point," Medoff said.

Plans are in the works to shoot "Alien FM," a comedy by a former student, David Spence, in Las Cruces.

He is working on an opera company production of a reworked version of "Sara McKinnon," an opera set in Las Cruces, which he co-wrote with Randall Shinn. (Celine Dion recorded a song he wrote for the opera.) He's also working on a novel, two other plays and several movie scripts.

Obituary: Engineer who empowered people with disabilities with his technology dies

From The Tulsa World. In the picture, Chuck Laenger holds an alphabet message scanner in May 1981 for a patient who, using just teeth, manipulates an electrical switch. The switch turns on a light in each box.

PLANO, Texas — A gifted gardener who kept a vineyard in his backyard, Chuck Laenger had a green thumb that was just as good with uprooted lives.

The longtime Tulsa resident was director of rehabilitation engineering for many years at Hillcrest Medical Center, where he dedicated his career to helping quadriplegics regain some of their independence.

A biomedical engineer who believed everyone should have a chance at a fruitful life, Laenger custom-designed tools to help quadriplegics and other severely disabled people with home- and work-related tasks.

Charles Julius "Chuck" Laenger died Saturday at the age of 81. A memorial service is set for 11 a.m. Jan. 16 at the Community Unitarian Universalist Church in Plano, Texas.

One of Laenger's success stories involved ex-Oklahoma State University All-American wrestler Ray Murphy, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a wrestling accident.

Laenger equipped Murphy with a wheelchair, a portable respirator and a computer he could operate by mouth. The former athlete went on to become a computer programmer.

Five of Laenger's inventions were patented, including an exercise device that electrically stimulates paralyzed legs.

His work didn't stop when he left Hillcrest's Kaiser Rehabilitation Center, however.

The engineer's wife, Lolisa Laenger, recalled a visit to their home by a man who had been injured in a bicycle accident. The man had lost much of the grip in his left hand, she said.

"He mentioned how frustrating it was that he couldn't trim his own fingernails anymore," Lolisa said. "Well, Chuck got to thinking and that very afternoon came up with a device that allowed him to do that. He told Chuck years later that he was still using it."

Laenger's stepson, Phil Haney of Tulsa, remembers thinking that his stepfather, who was always tinkering with homemade gizmos, was a little eccentric.

"One time he showed me this bizarre tree-trimming device that he had rigged up to operate from a remote distance," Haney said. "It all struck me as odd and goofy."

But Haney now sees Laenger's quirks as evidence of a passionate and innovative spirit.

"He was a person who was always alive to possibilities, which is where all good ideas begin," Haney said. "And he devoted his great mind to helping those people who can't enjoy the basic pleasures in life."

Even when Laenger was dying with cancer, he never talked about himself, Haney said.

Born in Shreveport, La., Laenger grew up in east Texas and never lost his native drawl, family members said.

In addition to gardening, Laenger enjoyed writing poetry and essays.

Survivors include his wife, Lolisa; sons Charles Laenger Jr. and Terry Laenger; stepchildren Caren Haney Haeusser, Phil Haney, Barbara Haney and Greg Moores; three grandchildren; seven step-grandchildren; a great-granddaughter; and two brothers, Richard and Kenneth Laenger.

Budget cuts lead Louisiana to close group home

From The Shreveport Times:

Louisiana officials plan to close a group home for mentally and physically challenged adults in Sibley as part of budget-cutting measures.

Five people living at the group home operated through Northwest Developmental Supports and Services Center will be moved to privately run group homes in May or June. The home's 10 employees will be given the option of transferring to other jobs through the state civil service system. And the state leased the property in Sibley, so it will revert to the property owner, said Sean Smith, a spokesman with the Louisiana Health and Hospitals Department.

The Sibley facility is among 31 state-run group homes the Health and Hospitals will eliminate. About 157 residents will be affected statewide.

Health and Hospitals projects a annual savings of $60,000 per person with the change because it costs $366 a day to care for a state-run group home resident versus the top state reimbursement of $208 per day paid to privately run group homes.

The privatization of group homes is part of $108 million cost-cutting plans state health officials announced Wednesday.

The Northwest Center itself will remain open. It serves a variety of people with mental and physical challenges. Some require little help with everyday activities, while others have complex medical needs or suffer from emotional and behavioral problems that make them dangerous to themselves and others.

"I'm glad they didn't shut down the center itself," said Paul Procell, president of the Northwest Supports and Services Center Parent Association.

Procell said he's concerned about how the state will find appropriate placement for group home residents. "If you privatize it, (privately run homes) are not going to take people who require the high level of care."

Duane Ebarb, of Shreveport, said there also is a lack of appropriate housing for disabled adults who can live independently.

"There are five residents who want to transition out of the (Northwest) center now, but they have to wait," said Ebarb, regional representative of Louisiana Citizens for Action Now (LaCAN), a disability advocacy organization. The group encourages independent living for disabled people who require lower levels of help with everyday activities.

"There's insufficient housing right now in the cities of Shreveport and Bossier."

Wheelchair-using characters, those with Asperger's become archetypes on TV shows

From Whitney Friedlander at the Los Angeles Times:

For loyal viewers, popular television characters can sometimes seem like a mash-up of Final Draft and Mad Libs. Enter the curly-haired hipster here, exit the effeminate male assistant there. Of course, recycling in Hollywood did not begin with recent strivings to go green. Characters who dress, sound and talk alike are safe, ratings-friendly choices.

“Archetypes are that for a reason — they’ve stood the test of time,” said Josh Schwartz, executive producer for fan favorites “Chuck,” “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.” “The key is in how you update these characters, modernize them, give voice to them, and most importantly, cast them.”

Here’s the latest list of the small screen’s usual suspects:

The geek as romantic lead.

As recently seen on: “Chuck,” “Melrose Place,” “The Big Bang Theory.”

“Seth Cohen of ‘The O.C.’ was the first prominent one of that ilk and now we see it everywhere,” said Daniel Manu, site director for the we-snark-because- we-care Web site TelevisionWithoutPity.com.

“It’s the geek who doesn’t resemble the stereotypical geek, but is a geek because of what he’s into — as opposed to the glasses and bad hair and bad social skills.”

The Asperger’s syndrome character. As recently seen on: “House,” “Bones,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Community,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” “Criminal Minds,” “Grey’s Anatomy.” ("Bones" lead actress Emily Deschanel is pictured.)

It seems like no show is green-lighted these days without a watered-down “Rain Man” on board, although most of the sufferers appear to be undiagnosed. “Now you sort of expect to see an Asperger’s guy on TV,” TWOP’s Manu said of the apparent malady-of-the-moment. “This specific form of autism is fair game mainly because I suspect there are folks in Hollywood who suffer from it and mainly because it doesn’t seem as bad as full-on autism.”

The gay assistant. As recently seen on: “Ugly Betty,” “Chef Academy,” “Entourage.”

They’re smart, feisty and, above all, well-dressed! You can largely thank Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” series and its ratings success for this now reoccurring character in both scripted and reality series, according to TV historian Tim Brooks. Though they’re known for coming into a room and lighting it up with laughter (Lloyd from “Entourage”), it may be sometime before the major networks build a scripted show around an openly gay character.

The wheelchair-bound character. As recently seen on: “Brothers” and “Glee.”

Though not exactly a cliché, characters in wheelchairs suddenly popped back onto television screens this year — and one is a main character, Chill played by Daryl “Chill” Mitchell from “Brothers.” (Neither character has come close to reaching the fame of Raymond Burr’s “Ironside,” though.) “A lot of these things come out of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and cartoons and things kids grow up with, which are among the leading channels introducing handicapped kids,” Brooks said.

The South Asian character.

As recently seen on: “The Big Bang Theory,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Community,” “The Office,” “Heroes,” “30 Rock.”

As the economic power of South Asia has grown, so has its representation in television. Though welcoming the extra work for minorities, the casting has its drawbacks, argues Manu. There aren’t any lead roles. “It’s the faux diversity you see on TV. It’s like checking off a box and it’s diversity for diversity’s sake,” he said.

The soccer mom. As recently seen on: “Desperate Housewives,” “Weeds,” “Cougar Town” “The Real Housewives” series.

They look normal, but underneath you can’t trust ’em as far as you can kick ’em. Conniving, over-competitive and ready to pounce so their spawn can score a goal, they are not to be crossed.

In America, 98,000 disabled workers earn less than $1 an hour

From AllGov.com:

Federal law permits businesses to pay employees who are mentally retarded pennies an hour, a reality that has sparked a new debate at care homes in Iowa. An investigation by the Des Moines Register discovered that more than 300 mentally disabled people have been paid less than minimum wage—about 60 cents an hour—to work at state-run homes for the disabled. One worker made as little as 11 cents an hour working for a company, Oriental Trading Co., owned by The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s richest private equity firms.

Companies that pay less than federal minimum wage must apply for certification status with the U.S. Department of Labor, which maintains a public list on its website. Nationwide there are about 425,000 disabled Americans working for non-profits, government agencies and for-profit companies for less than the minimum wage. More than half are paid less than $2.50 an hour and about 98,000 are paid less than a dollar an hour.

Advocates for the disabled argue it’s time to eliminate the special exemption for mentally diabled workers, claiming the low wages amount to exploitation. But one head of an Iowa-based care home says without the exemption, the workers wouldn’t have jobs.

“It is part of a person’s self-esteem,” said Woodward Superintendent Jim Finch. “Oftentimes, I’ll go down to the payroll office when our clients come in and start picking up their checks on payday, on Friday. And, you know, whether it’s 50 cents or $300, they are just so excited. They want to show you their checks and show you that they get paid for doing work. It’s a big morale booster.”

At $60,000 a year, Ohio school serves students with disabilities

From The Cincinnati Enquirer:

MADISONVILLE, Ohio - In many ways, the Bobbie B. Fairfax School is just like other public schools.

Students' artwork is taped to walls and doors. The faces of graduates smile from framed photos in a hallway. The smells of school lunch wafts from the kitchen.

But then there's this: Hallways are lined with wheelchairs and modified walkers. Adults sometimes outnumber the students in the classroom. Many students need help performing basic tasks like walking, talking and eating.

The Fairfax school and its counterpart, the Margaret B. Rost school in Green Township, are run by Hamilton County Developmental Disabilities Services (formerly the Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities). An education at one of these special schools costs about $59,898 per year per student -much of which is paid by taxpayers through the agency and school districts, both of which are funded by tax levies.

Starting with the 2010 school year, the public school districts in Hamilton County will have to pay nearly twice as much to send students to agency schools next year.

DDS, which currently pays about 75 percent of the costs, says its recent tax levy isn't big enough so it can no longer afford to contribute as much. Although the amount of the levy jumped 12 percent, agency officials say it will not generate quite enough to keep up with the expected skyrocketing demand for service, particularly for infants and their families. County commissioners reduced the agency's original levy request because of the economy. Legally the agency isn't required to provide any financial help to school districts at all.

The schools and several satellite classrooms serve an average of 218 students ages 5 to 22 with severe disabilities. The agency has offered special schooling since at least the 1960s. Fairfax school opened in 1980, Rost in 1981. A third school closed in 2006 as the agency sought to cut costs.

The funding change means average annual fees that the districts pay for the schooling will increase next year from $19,346 per student to around $32,340 for students who require both schooling and transportation. The increase is smaller for students who don't require transportation or who go to satellite classrooms instead of the Rost or Fairfax schools.

The cost per student varies depending on whether extra services are included like aides to assist the students.

It is unclear what the fee changes will mean for school districts or for students.

Cincinnati Public Schools paid $1.2 million to send 74 students to special schools or satellite classrooms during the 2008-2009 school year, the most of any school district. District officials weren't available this week to talk about the impact because of the holiday break. Deer Park sends the second-most students to special schools or classrooms, 13 students, and Finneytown sends 10. Neither of those districts responded to calls this week.

Most districts send students with severe disabilities to the special schools because they aren't equipped to handle the students in their own classrooms. So if a district can no longer afford to send as many students to agency schools, the students might not be able to go to school at all.

"Each (student) has very, very specific needs; intense needs," said Fairfax Principal Cindy Meinking. "If we weren't here, they'd be at home."

The money -a total of about $13 million this school year - pays for staff, transportation, equipment and general operations at agency schools and classrooms.

For example, on a recent Tuesday morning at Fairfax, one classroom held seven students and six adults - the teacher, a speech language pathologist, a physical therapist, two teaching assistants and a one-on-one aid for a student who needs extra help with certain tasks.

With great animation and enthusiasm, Speech Language Pathologist Karen Ross engaged the students, ages 8-11. She showed off a book about a gingerbread man. When Troy Melnyk (pictured), 11, pressed the proper button the speech device in front of him, a pre-recorded voice called out "Can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread man."

Everyone praised Troy.

Almost all of the students in this school are non-verbal, meaning they rely on computerized communication devices to help them relay their thoughts. They often need help with physical tasks as well such as getting into or out of a wheelchair or getting a drink of water. In Troy's case, he needs to go on a walk every 10 minutes or so in order to stay calm and focused.

In other classrooms, "medically fragile" children need help with feeding tubes or other medical issues. Some of the older children are outnumbered almost two to one by adults because their disabilities lead to behavioral issues like throwing things. One classroom is dedicated solely to "sensory" devices like sounds, lights or music to stimulate a student's senses. Another holds all kinds of equipment from lifts to swings to bicycles with three wheels and hand pedals -one of which can cost $5,000. "We try to make them last," said Meinking.

Schools like Fairfax - heavily staffed with lots of special equipment - are expensive. But the cost of not having them would be greater, officials and parents said.

"Really if we don't offer these kids every opportunity to succeed ...then these individuals won't work up to their potential in society which will result in a huge financial drain on society," said Troy Melnyk's mother, Cassandra Clement, of Clifton. "Why did we send Troy? It's because we want him to do his very best in the future and if we don't do it, more people are going to have to swoop in later to help him. That costs a lot."

Troy was diagnosed with Angelman Syndrome, a genetic disorder that can result in developmental delays, speech problems, and walking and balance disorders. His brain functions at about the level of a 2-year-old, said his mother. He needs help from a speech therapist and a physical therapist. He just started walking at age 7 and requires a special vest that helps keep him calm and focused.

The Fairfax staff knows how to handle Troy, said Clement.

"We chose (agency) schools because we felt like everyone who worked there had a complete understanding of children with disabilities," she said. "Unless you have a child with special needs you have no idea the impact that child has on your family," she said. "He's never going to drive a car. He is going to be with us until we can no longer take care of him. That's something that a parent never really expects. You need people to help you do what your child needs."

NJ community comes together to create accessible home for teen with CP

From The Press of Atlantic City:

Seventeen-year-old Joseph Annarumma (pictured), who has cerebral palsy, will soon sleep in his own bedroom without his mother for the first time.

For the past 15 years, Dawn Annarumma (pictured) said, they have shared a non-wheelchair-accessible bedroom in their Stafford Township home. It has been her life and she knows nothing else, she said.

"For him to have his own bedroom after sleeping in a room with me for 15 years, it's such an awesome thing," Dawn Annarumma said.

Members of the community and local groups are coming together to renovate the Annarummas' home and give them what they need as Joey prepares for his 23rd surgery next month.

Dawn Annarumma is a single mother who works two jobs to care for her three children. Her husband died 15 years ago, just months before her youngest son, Salvatore, was born. Joey also has a 17-year-old twin, Christopher, who was born without complications.

"It was either I would find a way to take care of these three kids or I wouldn't. And not taking care of them wasn't an option. I don't talk about my trials and tribulations. I never walked around with my head down feeling bad for our situation," she said.

She added that she and her sons never focused on Joey's disability.

"I think that is why he has the good nature he has," she said.

Although Joey cannot speak, he wrote a few paragraphs in school about how the community coming together to renovate his home made him feel. Joey wrote that it will be easier for him to take a bath and that he is going to have his own room. He called the project "very cool."

The Access for Joey project is being coordinated by the Exchange Club of Beach Haven. The plan is to convert the garage into two handicapped-accessible bedrooms.

The present kitchen will be removed for the installation of a wheelchair-accessible bathroom. The existing dining room will become a large eat-in kitchen. Local contractors will donate their time to complete the job, and the project is expected to cost at about $35,000 in materials. The Annarummas are staying in a friend's home in Ship Bottom while renovations are done.

Southern Regional High School students and staff opened their hearts and wallets this fall. A week of fundraising by high school students and staff brought in more than $11,000 for the project. School organizations, including the Michael Lorenzi Philanthropic Fund, also donated to the cause.

"It's the most amazing thing. I would have never ever imagined it. I guess it started out as just a few people knowing and sympathizing with what my life is and it's just taken off from there. I never imagined something so little could turn into something so big," Dawn Annarumma said.

South Carolina Supreme Court won't suspend cuts to care for people with disabilities while lawsuit is considered

From The AP:

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- The South Carolina Supreme Court refused Dec. 31 to suspend cuts in care for residents with disabilities while it considers a lawsuit that alleges officials illegally diverted money meant for services.

Writing for the court, Judge Costa Pleicones denied a request from advocates for the disabled to prohibit reductions to in-home services from taking effect Friday.

"I'm devastated for the families. This is going to be a disaster," said attorney Patricia Harrison, an advocate for the disabled. "I'm hoping that when we have a hearing on the merits, and an opportunity to respond to the claims made by the defendants, the court will restore the services."

The decision came shortly after the state responded to a lawsuit by Harrison and two other attorneys accusing the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs of illegally diverting federal stimulus money meant for services into a savings account.

The lawsuit filed Dec. 23 against Gov. Mark Sanford, the agency and the state's budget oversight board asked the state's high court to immediately suspend the cuts and restore the more than $30 million transferred to savings for later health care spending.

Attorneys for the state contend that while the advocates may disagree with lawmakers' decisions, they did nothing illegal.

They said South Carolina hasn't reduced the number of residents served through the Medicaid programs, and that any money put into a savings account came from state revenue, not the federal stimulus. They also dispute that limitations on in-home care will force people into institutions.

The "claim that many persons stand in danger of being institutionalized is grossly overstated," wrote attorney William Davidson. The agency "is not aware of any person who is likely to be institutionalized as a result of the changes."

The changes, approved by the federal government Nov. 9, include capping the hours of some personal care and companionship that people with mental disabilities receive to 28 hours weekly, and capping their at-home nursing to 56 hours weekly. Previously, there were no limits on the services. The service hours for each person depend on the severity of his or her disability.

More than half of states have such limits, David Goodell, the agency's operations director, said in an affidavit.

He said the changes applied to 10 percent of those served in the programs. Families could apply to the agency for a waiver if they meet certain conditions, such as a severe disability that requires constant attention. Goodell said 77 of 85 applications for exceptions were approved, so those patients are exempt from the cuts.

Goodell said the agency remains "committed to avoiding" institutionalization, noting that between 1994 and 2008, the state reduced the number of people in institutions by 53 percent, despite a 485 percent increase in the number served.

Officials have said the service reductions stem from a series of state budget cuts since October 2008.

The state argues the nine adult plaintiffs, identified by first name and a last initial, will see minimal changes: one has had a one-hour-per-day reduction in care, while another's nutritional supplement has been reduced from 2 1/2 to two cases monthly - the new maximum. Another plaintiff has successfully applied for an exception, so there will be no reduction, while another has appealed.

The rest aren't affected by the Jan. 1 changes, according to the state. But Harrison said they're hurt by the elimination of physical and speech therapy programs, which can prevent disabled adults from choking.

"All you have to do is talk to some of these families who have been informed their services will be cut Jan. 1 to know whether there's a threat of immediate harm," Harrison said.

She argues Congress meant for states to maintain the level of service, not just the number of people served.

University of Iowa researchers discover chemical changes in muscle protein that have implications for treating MD, cancer

The University of Iowa press release:

With the discovery of a new type of chemical modification on an important muscle protein, a University of Iowa study improves understanding of certain muscular dystrophies and could potentially lead to new treatments for the conditions.

The findings, which appear in the Jan. 1, 2010, issue of the journal Science, may also have implications for detecting metastasizing cancer cells.

After they are initially made, most proteins are modified through the addition of sugar chains, fats or other chemical groups. These modifications can completely change how a protein works and where it is located in the body. Disruption of these modifications can alter protein function, too, and can lead to disease.

The UI study focused on dystroglycan, a cell membrane protein that is disrupted in many forms of muscular dystrophy. Normal dystroglycan is modified with a unique sugar chain that allows the protein to "glue" muscle membranes to the basal lamina -- a tough layer of extracellular proteins. This arrangement reinforces the fragile muscle membrane and prevents small tears that occur naturally from expanding and damaging the membrane.

Recent work, including studies by the UI team, show that disrupting dystroglycan's ability to attach to the basal lamina causes congenital muscular dystrophies and also leads to cancer progression in epithelial cell cancer. In these conditions, the dystroglycan sugar chain is incompletely or incorrectly assembled and the dystroglycan cannot bind tightly to laminin.

"Dystroglycan is a complex and unusual glycoprotein. It is heavily covered with many types of sugars. We wanted to know the shape and make up of the unique sugar chain that allows dystroglycan to bind to laminin," said study leader Kevin Campbell, Ph.D., professor and head of molecular physiology and biophysics at the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Lead study author Takako Yoshida-Moriguchi, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Campbell's lab, used a combination of biochemical methods and chemical and structure analysis to determine that a critical link within the sugar chain involves a phosphate group. This type of link is found in yeast and fungi but has not previously been found in higher organisms like mammals.

"This phosphate link is very unusual, which may explain why the actual structure of dystroglycan's laminin-binding sugar chain has been a mystery for many years despite the efforts of numerous research teams," said Campbell, who also holds the Roy J. Carver Chair of Physiology and Biophysics. "The findings help explain what is happening in congenital muscular dystrophies where the dystroglycan sugar chain is truncated and ends at the phosphate. The bare phosphate does not bind laminin; it has to be further modified."

Several enzymes are involved in building the sugar chain beyond the phosphate, and mutations in these enzymes are the cause of congenital muscular dystrophies.

"If we can discover the entire structure and make up of the sugar chain beyond the phosphate link, we might be able to target some of the enzymes involved in building the sugar chain, and thus, develop therapies to treat congenital muscular dystrophies," Campbell said.

In certain cancer cells, one of these enzymes, known as LARGE, also is suppressed. Campbell speculated that loss of LARGE activity produces dystroglycan that is unable to interact with the basal lamina, which makes the cancer cells more mobile and allows them to escape into the bloodstream. The study's findings could lead to new methods for tracking metastasizing cancer cells.

Study: Autism associated with large population of highly educated parents

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

The San Diego area is home to one of 10 clusters of autism cases in California that also have a strong association with a large population of highly educated parents, researchers at the University of California Davis reported yesterday.

The findings, which were published online by the journal Autism Research, appeared to reinforce several earlier studies that found autism diagnosis was more common among children of people with higher levels of education.

“There is mounting evidence that at least some of this clustering results from the greater access and utilization of services by those with more years of schooling,” the UC Davis researchers wrote.

The San Diego cluster runs between La Jolla and Del Mar. The other clusters were found in the Los Angeles area, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley.

Georgia mental health program seeks to help those with mental illnesses to stabilize in community

From the Savannah Morning News:

New leadership, a new program and light at the end of the tunnel have Jane Nangle (pictured) excited about the new year for Pine Woods Retreat.

"We have a solid business plan that should lead us to being self-sustaining within a year," said Nangle, a retired health care attorney who is board president.

She has pursued her dream for eight years to provide help for the seriously mentally ill.

"I'm pleased with where we are," she said.

Joining Nangle as executive director in May was C.J. Washington.

New since October is a partial-hospitalization program that provides five hours of treatment efforts five days a week at the Cornell Avenue site.

Washington said it responds to a need in the community.

People suffering from mental illness in a hospital often stabilize, then are sent home without tools to cope with or manage their illness on a day-to-day basis.

"There wasn't anything here to help them learn to live with their illness," Washington said.

There are now three participants in the program, which has a goal of serving 10.

The program helps avoid the cost and unpleasantness of hospitalization for treatment of conditions ranging from major depression to schizophrenia.

And the staff has grown to include two full-time therapists, a registered nurse and psychiatrist Dr. George Negron coming on board.

"We've got a great team," Nangle said.

Twenty-one local participants ranging in age from 14 to 67 receive services such as medication management and individual and family therapy.

The program is designed to assist adults suffering from serious mental illness achieve productive lives.

Chatham County Sheriff Deputy Col. McArthur Holmes calls Nangle's program "a new approach to dealing with mental illness."

He is a member of the advisory board for Pine Woods.

The program emphasizes keeping the person in as close to a home environment as possible through what he calls "individualized treatment."

"We've got a lot more to do," he said.

The program focuses on keeping people out of the hospital by providing effective treatment for serious mental illnesses, Nangle said.

"People who want to get better choose to be here," Nangle said.

The programs are voluntary.

A major challenge continues to be funding. A $1 million gift from the family of Leroy E. Harvey and Gertrude Gray Harvey, co-founders of Hargray Telephone Co., has enabled the nonprofit to hit the ground running since January 2008.

And additional donors have helped.

But still ahead is the challenge of getting Medicare and insurance companies to provide payments for services for patients who cannot pay.

It often takes months before the agency qualifies.

"We'll always be able to use charitable contributions to provides services for people who are uninsured," Nangle said.

Oakland University says it will appeal court decision to let non-degree disabled student live in dorm

From The AP:

ROCHESTER, Mich. — Oakland University says it will appeal a court ruling that forces it to allow a non-degree student to live on campus.

Oakland will let Micah Fialka-Feldman (pictured) move in when classes resume in January. But the suburban Detroit school still will seek to get the ruling overturned.

The 25-year-old Fialka-Feldman is in a non-degree program because he has a disability that affects his reading and writing. The school only allows students pursuing degrees to live on campus.

U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan last week said Oakland's decision denying the housing request was based on "unfounded fear."

In a statement Wednesday, Oakland said the issue is bigger than just one student. It says the judge is granting preferences not covered by federal law.