The 134th Annual Meeting and Exposition of the American Public Health Association was held in Boston, Massachusetts on November 4-8, 2006. View the poster presented by CADDE.
The 2005 International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) was held May 5-7, 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts. Four posters were presented by CADDE. This article, appearing online at NewScientist.com, summarizes a number of the findings presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research's (IMFAR) conference in Boston, MA, on May 5-7, 2005. This remarkable story of a couple with Asperger's Syndrome aired on 60 Minutes on September 29, 2004. Read the transcript and view the video at CBSnews.com. This stage play on the life experiences of a young man with autism, written and performed by his sister, Autumn Terrill, was performed in Baltimore, MD, on April 10, 2005. View the flyer or visit the website for more information. The Fall 2004 issue of Johns Hopkins Public Health, the magazine of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, features an article about autism and the Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Epidemiology. Read the article, Brainstorm, online. Visit the Autism Netverse web site to view art work and read poetry created by individuals with autism. The mission of the Autism Netverse is "to provide an opportunity for individuals with autism to be heard." Archived video of the 2004 conference of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) can be viewed online. The conference was held July 26-28, 2004 in Washington, DC. The Institute of Medicine's Immunization Safety Review Committee has published its eighth and final report on the association of vaccines and autism. The report concludes that there is no causal relationship between vaccines (both MMR and thimerosal-containing) and autism. The 2004 International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) was held May 7-8, 2004 in Sacramento, California. Three posters were presented by the Johns Hopkins Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Epidemiology. A 3-day course was led by Dr. Craig Newschaffer as part of the Mental Health Summer Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
On June 8-9, 2004, the Kennedy Krieger Institute's Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) sponsored a conference on Autism: Early Detection and Intervention in Infants and Young Children with a focus on From Neuroscience to Intervention: The Role of the Motor System in Learning in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
More information available online.
Dr. Craig Newschaffer, director of CADDE, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been awarded a Fogarty International planning grant from the National Institutes of Health to study autism in China. The project funded by this award will foster a research partnership with Peking University to screen and diagnose young children, and to estimate the prevalence of autism in China.
The Autism Summit Conference, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Institute of Mental Health, was organized in response to growing concerns about the rise is autism rates. The conference was held in Washington, D.C., November 19-20, 2003. The live webcast can be viewed in archive from TVWorldwide.com. Public officials, including HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), addressed such issues as early screening and diagnosis, early intervention, and research.
Two recently published reports have conflicting findings about change in autism prevalence over time. An update of the California Department of Developmental Services report (2003) indicates a rise in autism prevalence between 1998-2002. In contrast, Lingam, et al. (2003) found that autism prevalence leveled off in the U.K. between 1991-1998. For more on this controversy, see Dr. Craig Newschaffer's commentary on these two reports.
Sponsored by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the program features public health officials including Dr. Jose Cordero, director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Craig Newschaffer, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Epidemiology. The national satellite broadcast and webcast, which aired on June 20, 2003, can be viewed in archive from the Public Health Grand Rounds website. | 
