For the many years that I have been involved with autism and now ME/CFS as well, I have seen a rising tide of frustration with the lack of acknowledgement and concern from those in a position of authority about the significant worsening of the health of American children (and adults!). This generation of children is the sickest ever on record. 1 in 6 US children now has a developmental disability, and between 43 and 54% have a chronic health problem depending on how that is defined. During my adulthood, we have watched helplessly as autism has gone from being so rare that people had no reference point aside from the movie Rain Man to something so common that nearly everyone has a relative or friend affected.
It's not just children- the elderly are increasingly developing Alzheimer's Disease, and are being prescribed more and more medications. Adults are increasingly struggling with so many diseases, including diabetes, Lyme Disease, and Fibromyalgia to name just a few. And in children it's not just autism either. Adult-onset diabetes was renamed Type II Diabetes because it now tends to strike children. Asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, even cancer has become much more common in children. When I look around it's amazing how many sick people I see. What's even more amazing is how much no one in a position to figure out why- including the medical establishment and the government- seems to feel any urgency to do exactly that. I recently read an excellent blog post describing how sick is the new normal.
More and more families are going broke under the weight of extreme medical costs as well as the adjustments in family structure that often accompany these medical problems, such as one parent being unable to work due to either his or her own disability or due to the needs of a child with a health condition. We have finally hit a sort of critical mass in numbers of families affected and in the collective frustration level with public apathy and this has resulted in a new political movement called the Canary Party. If you share the concern over the declining health of our children, please consider getting involved. You can read more about the Canary Party on their site, but here is an exerpt from the site for you :
In 2010, a group of parents of children who were suffering from neurological and autoimmune disorders, and who had been active for years in their efforts to get mainstream medicine to address the causes of, and find treatments for, their children's poor health, faced the realization that while they had been earnest in their engagement of both the private medical industry and government public health officials, the medical establishment was not working in good faith with them. They decided that if anything was to be done about the epidemic levels of childhood chronic illness in the US, it would have to be a result of real political pressure to clean up the corruption in the medical establishment that was allowing bad pharmaceuticals, bad medical practices and bad public health policy to assault human health on such a wide scale.
They began talking with those injured by medicine in other ways, those concerned with parental rights, with lack of choices in health care options, with environmental pollution, with nutrition, and with the encroachment of the medical industrial complex on the basic rights of the individual to practice informed consent in medical care.
In the spring of 2011, it became clear that waiting to do something was no longer an option. It was time to launch The Canary Party, because the medical establishment is not paying attention to the sick canaries in our society that are telling us that there are serious problems that need to be addressed, and that if they are not, we must expect that society will begin to suffer greater and greater collapse as more and more people succumb to the diseases and disorders rampant today.
It was time to stop asking the medical establishment to pay attention to the epidemic of illness, and demand that they do, or replace them with better men who would.
