Please Save The Silent Children

Canaries In The Coal Mine
By Lisa Geng 9/11/03

Almost 15 years ago now I was first concerned with environmental links to the rise we are seeing in autism and apraxia and wrote this

Speech disorders and learning disabilities did not run in either my mom or dad’s family. Genius runs in my mom’s side of the family. Most people assume if you grew up across the street from factories you are in low-income housing not -in NJ.

In the picture, I am with my little niece Chelsea whose speech impairment is mild in comparison to her brother’s -and her cousins’ (including Tanner and Dakota who inspired the book The Late Talker )

My brother, sister and I were all born in Newark, NJ and after a year we moved to a middle-class town in NJ where we grew up across the street from factories.

My brother and I were both diagnosed with celiac disease as infants and spent much of our childhood in hospitals -me especially. Both my brother and I are also nearsighted and we need to wear either glasses or contacts to see clearly.

My mom’s family is from Germany and Austria, my Dad’s family is from Spain and Portugal. Everyone in both my mom and dad’s family has excellent vision, even to this day. None wear glasses except some of my older relatives who now occasionally wear reading glasses. My older brother was diagnosed very early as a “hyperactivity child” (ADHD) by pediatric neurologist Arnold P. Gold, MD, who is today a Professor of Pediatric Neurology at Columbia University Department of Neurology. My younger sister was diagnosed as having dyslexia.

My brother, sister and I all got married and two of us moved away. My brother moved to a “nice” area of NJ not far from where we grew up and my sister and her family stayed in the same house that we grew up in, across the street from those same factories.

My husband and I moved first to Long Island NY and then to a “nice” NJ town that is considered an upper middle-class neighborhood. Soon after our second son was born, about ten minutes from our house, black ooze started rising up out of the ground. It ranged from a foot to a couple of feet deep with had dead birds in it surrounded by “chunks of exposed asbestos” so town officials closed the park. The ooze was found by scientists from Rutgers and UMDNJ to be “concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, phenol, cadmium, chromium, and lead”

My brother, sister and I each had two children. Out of the six children, 5 have speech impairments. If my children or nieces and nephews stay in the same area -what would happen with their children, and others like them?

One of the two of my nieces in the photo is in speech theray (the one holding the “rolly bug”) as does her brother and other three cousins. The one with the ring pop does not have a speech impairment.

There has been a dramatic rise in communication impairments in the past ten years -yet most people, even doctors, don’t know about this epidemic-like increase.

” the 2001 U.S. Department of Education statistics showed that in children born in 1983 there were a total of 7,801 cases of speech or language impairment. Among children born in 1994, this number had risen to 211,984 cases ( an approximately 30-fold increase ). In children born in 1983, there were a total of 2,100 cases of autism. Among children born in 1994, this number had risen to 8,325 cases (an approximately 4-fold increase )”
Journal Of American Physicians and Surgeons AAPS Spring 2003 Volume 8 Number 1

The rise in communication impairments is not evenly distributed. The more industrial areas have higher numbers of speech and language impaired children. For example, there are more children with apraxia in certain areas. Apraxia is a severe speech impairment that used to be considered rare. Before 9/11/2001, Manhattan had very low numbers of apraxic children in comparison to NJ although in some instances the families were only fifteen minutes away from each other.

One of the members of Cherab – Marcy Philips had been trying to start a support group in NYC (Manhattan) for the past 3 years for apraxic children, and up till recently, there had only been a handful of others that have called for support from Manhattan. NJ has support groups or contacts all over the state -and there still aren’t enough support groups.

There were children in NYC with apraxia -but in most cases, they were from Long Island, Westchester and the boroughs, they were not in Manhattan before. They are now.

Two years after the World Trade Center tragedy, and the downplayed toxic cloud that followed, Cherab now has many new families of parents of two-year-old children diagnosed with apraxia living in Manhattan. Is it possible that one or all of the carcinogens including asbestos, PCBs, benzene, lead and mercury released into the environment (water?, soil?, air?) of Manhattan two years ago somehow passed the placenta to the developing children and is the cause of the apraxia? Are young children with communication impairments similar to the canaries in the coal mine of the old days, sending a strong warning of danger to those that will listen? What will it mean if society continues to overlook and ignore this growing warning?

The children with apraxia today are presenting with a multi-faceted grouping of symptoms which could include hypotonia, sensory integration dysfunction, motor planning problems of the body, and/or digestive problems including constipation etc.

If you live in NJ -you know how it’s “normal” today for children to go to speech therapy…yet that should not be normal. Children are our future -and silence is not golden.

As serious a problem why is there so much silence about silent children? Speech and language impairments often go undiagnosed and untreated early on, and they often go undiagnosed and untreated in other disorders as well. Speech and language disorders, including underlying speech and language disorders in conditions from ADHD and autism to dyslexia and SPD need to be addressed.

There is little compassion for those with speech impairments -unlike the much loved, popular speech-impaired canine Scooby Doo and the storybook nonverbal Little Mermaid who chose to give up her voice to become a human, most children with speech impairments are teased when they try to talk. The world is far more compassionate to those children with hearing, visual, or mobility impairments than those with impairments of communication.

Even though a small percentage of communication impaired children includes autistic children where 75-80% are mentally retarded, the majority of speech and language impaired children are presenting with normal to above average intelligence. Unfortunately, most are not aware of this fact. Speech-impaired children are frequently misdiagnosed, misjudged, and misclassified as mentally retarded or autistic. As they grow older, even those with minor impairments of speech are poorly viewed cognitively by others due to ignorance.

If you don’t live in NJ or a state that is high in numbers of these children like NJ such as Ohio, Texas, the Carolina’s, California etc. you still should care as to what is causing this rise in speech and language disorders. NJ is the extreme real-life experiment of what happens when you take a large number of people and toxins put them all together in a small place. If we don’t find out what is causing the rise and stop it, it could be playing soon at a town near you -and is probably starting already. As we are now seeing in Manhattan, apraxia and all the rest of these conditions are not just on the rise in NJ.

One approach that appears that what is helping the children from NJ, also seems to be helping the children all over. What first worked for my son Tanner around 4 years ago -an Omega 3/6 fish oil (also known as essential fatty acids or EFAs, Omega 3 with a small amount of Omega 6, polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs, long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids -LCPs) first helped those from the NJ/NY area with apraxia, autism and other communication impairments. Through the Cherab online group spreading the word about this treatment helped children from all over, with disorders and impairments ranging from apraxia, autism, CP, all types of syndromes even rare genetic ones, myelin disordered children -to those children with simple delays in speech – “just” late talkers.

A professional anecdotal report overseen by leading medical doctors and scientists was done to validate that this rising group of communication impaired children appears to need essential fatty acids. In almost all cases the results of EFA supplementation are witnessed by both skeptics, professionals, and parents alike within one day to three weeks -and the success rate is close to 95% in toxic areas like NJ -lower in areas that are not toxic. The results are typically moderate to dramatic -and in most cases when taken off, the child either stops progressing or regresses. When put back on -the child surges once again. Perhaps the children that don’t respond to EFAs are the rare percentage who would have had the communication impairment anyway -back when these conditions were rare. EFAs have strong remyelinating properties. Are some of the toxins causing delays to the myelin that the EFAs are helping with? Talk to your child’s MD (and yours) about whether starting supplementation of EFAs if you live in a high toxin area might be a possibility. The formula you are looking for to start is about 100 DHA, 150-250 plus of EPA, and 30-50 GLA from either borage seed or primrose oil.

Nobody has the answer yet as to what is causing the rise in communication impairments in the world, NJ -or in my own family for that matter. Out of the six children, my brother, sister and I had, again only one doesn’t have a speech impairment. No one else in our family or our in-laws family have speech impairments.

We moved to Florida last year. Now when people ask me why I’ll have them read this page. My heart breaks when we fly back to visit family in NJ to hear my nephews and nieces that (almost) all have problems when they speak.

Much of the recent press on autism and other communication impairments is focused on how much more prevalent these types of conditions are in males. This may be true with a telescopic view. I believe that if we analyze the whole picture as well we’ll find that not only are females affected but that in areas that are high in numbers of communication impaired children, adults are affected too, perhaps with conditions we believe unrelated. Again our silent young children may be canaries in the coal mine.

At a diner in New Jersey September 2003

Please save all the children from New Jersey …and the world, who are canaries in the coal mine.

Children’s Environmental Health Related Resources

• Children’s Environmental Health
  Overview
• Birth defects and environmental pollutants:
  What You Should Know
• Children’s Health Network and the Environment multi-disciplinary                              Help protect your child
• The World Health Organization (WHO)
  Children’s environmental health
• Research Updates: Children’s Environmental Health
  Educational resources and publications.
• Discovery Of An Apraxia Protocol
• Food Changes Gut Bacteria In As Quick As A Day
• Therapeutic Use Of Fish Oil For Apraxia