Incorporating Humor In Ad Campaign To Hire People With Disabilities

A national effort to encourage businesses to employ workers with disabilities is not your father’s hire the handicapped campaign.
A print ad from a new campaign using comical labels, intended to encourage employers to ignore labels when hiring people with disabilities.
One difference is that the new ads are paid rather than pro bono, with an estimated budget of $4 million for the first two quarters of 2010. The ads will appear on television, in print, online and outdoors; there is also a sponsorship deal with NPR.
The ads are being financed largely by agencies in 30 states that provide employment services as well as health and human services to their citizens who are disabled.
Typically, ads that seek to make a case for employing people with disabilities run as public service announcements. That makes them dependent on the kindness of media outlets to place them prominently on television, in print or online.
“We’ll never have enough money to oversaturate the media,” said Barbara Otto, executive director at Health and Disability Advocates in Chicago, which is overseeing the campaign, “but we wanted to do something different, something that didn’t look like a P.S.A.”

Teaching Independence

CHICO, CA -- Nancy Avram has to be creative and helpful, every day. She never imagined it's what she'd be doing for a living.
As recreation specialist at Do-It Leisure in Chico, Avram helps people with developmental disabilities learn to live on their own.
It's everything from learning how to pay bills, to parenting skills, to making friends. It's problem solving, and I totally love it, Avram said. I'm making a difference in their lives, and I'm important to them.

Student With Autism Captures Geography Bee

BEACH PARK, IL. -- Eleven-year-old Aaron Cvengros of Winthrop Harbor is autistic. But that didn't stop the Our Lady of Humility School fifth-grader from becoming the first student there to win an academic competition with the use of a letter board.
Aaron won the National Geographic Geography Bee on Jan. 22, participated in by other fourth- through-eighth-grade OLH students. The contest is designed to help spark interest in the subject.
Denise Lamm, Aaron's assistant who helps him in the classroom, said the boy used the regular letter board for the geography bee, using Rapid Prompting Method by pointing to each stenciled letter with a pencil to spell out his answers. "He used the stencil so the judges could see his choice," said Lamm. In class he sometimes uses a laminated board.

U.K. Panel Makes Right Call

Interesting item from Forbes' health care blog by Dr. Steven Salzberg, Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.

It's about time.
It took nearly three years, but the U.K.'s General Medical Council finally issued a ruling about Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. They ruled that he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his research, and further that he didn't have the qualifications to be carrying out some of the experiments on children that he subjected them to.
He also filed for a patent on a "safer" vaccine that he was hoping to sell after he discredited the MMR vaccine. The GMC found all these behaviors amounted to "serious professional misconduct."
What's so awful about Wakefield's behavior is that it has directly contributed to a decline in vaccination rates, first in the U.K. and then in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Panel Rules Doctor Who Linked MMR and Autism Acted Unethically

LONDON -- The doctor who first suggested a link between MMR vaccinations and autism acted unethically, the official medical regulator has found.
Dr Andrew Wakefield's 1998 Lancet study caused vaccination rates to plummet, resulting in a rise in measles - but the findings were later discredited.
The General Medical Council ruled he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in doing his research.
Afterward, Dr Wakefield said the claims were "unfounded and unjust".

Idaho Parent Fear Proposed Service Hike

SPIRIT LAKE, Idaho — When Gerald Kalar sees his son competing for the Timberlake wrestling team, he knows he has the Katie Beckett program to thank.
The Idaho Medicaid program has helped pay for 11 years of doctors, psychologists and therapists for Dylan, now 15, to cope with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and Static Encephalopathy, a development disability affecting memory and impulse control.
"Right now he's standing better than he ever has, and it's got to be because of the services and the professionals who have always worked with him," Gerald said.
That's why the Spirit Lake father got nervous when he heard the state Legislature is on the brink of requiring cost sharing for the Katie Beckett program.
Last week the Senate Health and Welfare Committee approved a new rule for Medicaid coverage that would require some families to pay a premium for disabled children's services.

Cleveland Clinic Finds Brain Connection To Autism

CLEVELAND -- Science has long known that Autism is some type of developmental disorder in the brain but there's never been a definitive answer for its cause.
Now a Cleveland Clinic researcher released a study that may provide one.