This podcast, intended for parents, discusses high-risk medical conditions that put children at risk for flu complications and how to protect children from the flu. Created: 11/25/2009 by National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD). Date Released: 11/25/2009. Series Name: CDC Featured Podcasts.

http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/player.asp?f=393367

By ERIC ADLER

The Kansas City Star

Each year, tens of thousands of children diagnosed with autism, from mild to severe, enter adulthood and leave the safe confines of schools and their services behind.Every day, their parents, such as Jennifer Smith-Currier of Gardner, worry what will become of them.

http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/1569350.html

A Powerful Identity, a Vanishing Diagnosis

Much of the growing prevalence of autism, which now affects about 1 percent of American children, according to federal data, can be attributed to Asperger’s and other mild forms of the disorder. And Asperger’s has exploded into popular culture through books and films depicting it as the realm of brilliant nerds and savantlike geniuses.

But no sooner has Asperger consciousness awakened than the disorder seems headed for psychiatric obsolescence. Though it became an official part of the medical lexicon only in 1994, the experts who are revising psychiatry’s diagnostic manual have proposed to eliminate it from the new edition, due out in 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/03asperger.html?_r=1

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

Children with autism have mercury levels similar to those of other kids, suggesting the mysterious disorder is caused by a range of factors rather than “a single smoking gun,” researchers said on Monday. The researchers at the University of California, Davis, initially found that children aged 2 to 5 with autism had mercury levels lower than other children because the autistic kids ate less fish, the biggest source of mercury that shows up in the blood.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE59I4W020091019