Collaborative on Health and the Environment Conference Call

Listening in to this call will provide a broad understanding of the bases of the environmental causation or catalyst view of autism.

---

CHE Partnership Call Announcement - December 12

We hope you will join us for the next CHE National Partnership Call -- Rethinking Autism: Towards a Whole Body Paradigm -- scheduled for Tuesday, December 12 @ 9am Pacific /12noon Eastern time.

Autism, first identified in the 1940s, was initially believed to be an entirely psychological problem; then later, a strongly genetic disorder. Now, driven by suggestive evidence that incidence is increasing and that some children are responding to biomedical treatment, a new paradigm of autism as a set of phenotypes involving environmental modulation or triggering of genetic vulnerability is emerging. Environmental contaminants may play a significant role in some of these hypothesized phenotypes, as do gastrointestinal disorders and other conditions.

Harvard neuroscientist Martha Herbert, MD, Ph.D., will discuss the new paradigm with comments from Lee Grossman, President of the Autism Society of America and the proud parent of an autistic child, and from Michael Lerner, Ph.D., President of Commonweal. This call will be moderated by Elise Miller, M.Ed., Executive Director, Institute for Children's Environmental Health, and Coordinator of CHE's Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative Working Group.

Please RSVP to Julia Varshavsky at: Julia@HealthandEnvironment.org to receive call details.