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Children with autism caged and abused at school

By bobb |

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CBR: Police search for missing autistic man

By bobb |

Police are looking for a 32-year-old autistic man who went missing in Gungahlin on Friday.

Zac De Jonge from Kaleen is highly autistic and has limited speech.

Mr De Jong has been missing since noon and was last spotted at the Gungahlin bus interchange.

He is described as tall with blonde hair.

Police are asking anyone who has seen him to call 131 444.Police said he was wearing a red Levi-brand T-shirt.

Zac turned up later that day, safe and well.

Four people attack autistic man in Chisholm shops car park

By bobb |

Two men and two women have allegedly attacked and robbed an autistic man after luring him to the Chisholm shops car park on Monday.

ACT Policing is seeking witnesses to the robbery, and believe the attack occured between 3.30am and 4.10am.

Police say the autistic man was lured to the Chisholm shops car park, after receiving a phone call from an unknown person asking him to meet them there.

When he arrived two men and two women approached him and verbally abused him.

ACT Parent warns private providers not ready for National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)

By bobb |

autism ... jumping hurdlesA Canberra carer says private providers are not prepared enough to take over the ACT government's early intervention programs for children with disabilities in January.

In April, the ACT government announced it would be withdrawing from early intervention programs in Canberra at the end of 2014 as part of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, leaving some parents concerned that children with disabilities could be left in limbo.

Canberra mother Tracey Trewhella, whose three-year-old daughter, Hailey, suffered from global development delay, said she didn't believe there would be enough private providers to cover the ACT government's withdrawal from the sector.

At the Early Intervention and Therapy Services Expo on September 13, Ms Trewhella said out of the 50 staff holders who attended, only five intended to run an early intervention program in the ACT, two of whom didn't currently have a presence in the territory.

Searching for honest answers

By bobb |

Jack Sullivan

September 15, 2012 Opinion Sue O'Reilly

Why did government agencies allow Jack Sullivan to be placed in a respite facility - where he later died - which they knew had a questionable history?

Sue O'Reilly reports In early 2008, when Esther Woodbury waved goodbye to her disabled teenage son as he was driven from their Ainslie home for one of his occasional weekends of government-funded respite care in Queanbeyan, she had no idea childcare and disability agencies in NSW and the ACT had recorded numerous allegations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse against the respite facility.

If anyone in authority had bothered to alert her, Woodbury says, she would immediately have withdrawn her 18-year-old son, Jack Sullivan, who as a result of severe autism and epilepsy was particularly vulnerable. But nobody in authority did bother to alert her - and that weekend, in respite care funded by the ACT government agency Disability ACT, Jack Sullivan drowned while having a bath.

 

DPP drops Sullivan probe

By bobb |

THE NSW Director of Public Prosecutions has dropped investigations into the death of profoundly autistic Canberra teenager Jack Sullivan more than four years ago.

Almost two years since the case was passed to the DPP, the public prosecutor says it does not have enough evidence to press manslaughter charges against a person whose name has been suppressed.

Since Jack's death, his mother, Esther Woodbury, had assumed her son drowned in a bath after an epileptic seizure while in outside care.

Heartless theft leaves disabled woman speechless

By bobb |

BY STEPHANIE ANDERSON
05 Dec, 2011 04:00 AM

A severely disabled Canberra woman has been left without any means of communicating after thieves stole specialised equipment worth thousands of dollars last month.

Twenty-one-year-old Perrin Tucker was at a medical appointment with her mother Katrina when thieves broke into their Flynn home, causing thousands of dollars' worth of damage and taking everything electronic in sight.

"The laptop is gone, all our computing equipment is gone," Mrs Tucker said. "They even opened Christmas cards looking for money."

From Scepticism About Autism to Capital-S Skepticism

By bobb |

Eran Segev

On Thursday, 13 May 2010

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Place: Lecture theatre, Innovations Building, Eggleston Rd, ANU

Free admission

No need to book but note that the theatre seats 106.

Various groups with a variety of agendas have all kinds of ideas about autism. Looking at their claims can be one step towards active skepticism.

Eran Segev is a father of 3 boys, an IT consultant, and the President of Australian Skeptics Inc (Sydney Skeptics).

About the Sydney Skeptics

Anti-vaccination 'diatribe' ill-informed and factually wrong

By bobb |

9/03/2009 12:00:00 AM

I am not anti-vaccination but I am in favour of parents being given factual information regarding vaccinations so they can make informed decisions as to what they have their children vaccinated against and when they do it.

Jack Waterford's diatribe in Times 2 (March 5, p2) against people who decide not to vaccinate their children is both ill-informed and, in some cases, factually wrong.

I will restrict my response to just one area the link between autism and certain vaccines.