On Saturday August 5, 2006, the United States Senate passed the Combating Autism Act with a unanimous vote.
This act, sponsored by Senator Rick Santorum, Republican from Pennsylvania makes available $900 million dollars in monies for the diagnosing and treatment of autism in children.
With 141 co-sponsors, Senate Bill 843 had strong bipartisan representation, and is expected to be signed into law by President Bush in the near future
Autism is a condition of the brain, where a person experiences learning difficulties, sometimes coupled with speech problems and poor social behaviors.
For every 250 births, one child will be born with autism. It has been said that autism affects approximately 1.5 million people in the United States alone.
Autism is usually diagnosed in children before they reach the age of three. Common symptoms include
* Children become less responsive to outside stimuli
* Extreme difficulty in potty training and teaching a child to feed themselves.
* As they reach the age of 1 ½ - 2, the child appears to be in a world of their own, and unaffected by events around them.
* Child may resist affection, including holding or hugging.
* From the age of 2 and up, the child does not play with other children.
* Communication skills are determined to be lagging behind their peers.
* Child may become possessive with objects or hyper-routine with behavior, including rocking back and forth or hitting themselves.
Researchers believe the autistic children have difficulty in sifting through massive amounts of stimuli they receive everyday. Unable to block out this stimuli, their brain becomes overwhelmed, causing them to withdraw into their own world. However, even at this point, they continue to try to decipher this stimuli, with may worsen their condition.
This apparent negative has proven to be an unexplained phenomena, in that many autistic children are gifted artist, musicians and 'walking calculators'. The movie 'Rainman' with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise illustrated the giftedness of autism, through memorization.
The federal funds made available should prove beneficial in exploring uncharted territories in autism research, and possibly help find, not only a better explanation, but also quite possibly, a cure!
D. Brownlee is a gifted author of more than 20 years, writing on a host of topics pertaining to family, faith and finances.
