How I spent my summer vacation, by Leah Hamilton

To think, I actually wondered how we were going to fill all those hours before Extended School Year starts in July. I should have realized my daughter would take initiative:

Here is what greeted me Thursday morning (along with a pile of hair on the floor, which I wasn't in the mood to photograph before I made Leah sweep it up -- later I regretted not documenting that particular sight):


(Note that she looks quite pleased with herself.)

I have no desire to relive (or even look at too many pictures of) my 80s mullet days, much less view one on my daughter's head. Not to mention the fact that her technique needs a little work. To wit:


But maybe I suffer from a lack of vision. Maybe one day the mullet will cross with the choppy/uneven styles that were popular sometime during my 20s, and Leah will style the next Jennifer Aniston and be richer than all of us. At the moment, I'm not ready for Leah's aesthetic, and my guess is the rest of the world isn't there either. So off we went to Pigtails and Crewcuts in Annapolis. Fortunately, they seemed quite unfazed by Leah's, ahem, talents.

(It's also worth noting that Leah looks quite diabolical when she says 'cheese.')

This was our first experience with Pigtails and Crewcuts. They had done a fundraiser for our local early childhood intervention parent group, so I thought they might be receptive to our brand of quirkiness. They were great. And since Maddie has rediscovered her obsession with taking pictures, the visit was well documented.

Maddie managed to include herself in a shot of the stylist fixing Leah's hair:

Lauren and Maddie both liked the colorful array of hair ornaments. We invested in a headband to hide some of the bits that need to grow a little.

And once Lauren and Maddie saw the fire engine, police officer, and airplane chairs, and realized "Bolt" was playing on the flat screens, they decided they needed trims too.

I give Pigtails and Crewcuts full credit: They managed to clean up Leah's hair pretty well without hacking it all off, which I was afraid we were going to have to do.

(Note the diabolical 'cheese' face again. America's Most Wanted would have a field day.)


A close inspection of Leah's hair probably still is not a good idea. But the salvage job was impressive overall. In addition to delivering a 'you do not cut hair' lecture, I tried to explain the concept of 'trained professional' to all three.

Like the eggs before them, the scissors have been stashed in a secret location.

A return to newspapers -- for a day

I actually wished I were a Baltimore Sun subscriber this week, because I would have had a ball explaining to some unfortunate customer service rep exactly why I was cancelling my subscription. The editorial below is what set me off:

A dangerous denial

Our view: Parents who choose not to vaccinate are imperiling public health

June 1, 2009

People believe all kinds of strange things, and most of the time it doesn't matter. Trouble arises, however, when their odd beliefs affect other people's health.

Such, unfortunately, is the case with parents who choose not to immunize their children against diseases that killed and crippled millions before vaccines were developed and made widely available. The anti-vaccine movement is driven largely by parents who believe that certain vaccines can cause autism, a suspicion that has been thoroughly investigated and authoritatively debunked.

A new study in the journal Pediatrics has found that children not vaccinated against pertussis are 23 times more likely to contract the disease, also known as whooping cough. This is hardly a surprise. What may be more alarming is that those who refuse to vaccinate are likely endangering the rest of us. Immunized children who are in contact with unvaccinated peers are at elevated risk of getting sick.

That's why, as Stephanie Desmon reported in The Baltimore Sun last week, at least one local doctor is refusing to treat children who haven't had their shots. Although fewer than 1 percent of children are not immunized, their numbers have doubled in recent years, a trend that worries Dr. Daniel Levy of Owings Mills: "We're going to start seeing the return of diseases we had almost gotten rid of."

Parents of autistic children deserve sympathy and support. There should be adequate services for these families, as well as more research into the steady rise over the last 20 years in diagnoses of "autism spectrum disorders," which describes an array of developmental, language and social difficulties.

But a dangerous ignorance should not be tolerated. As Dr. Timothy F. Doran, chairman of pediatrics at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, pointed out in these pages last year, the original study linking the MMR vaccine with autism was based on a mere 12 patients; the lead author was charged with misconduct, and his co-authors disavowed the work.

Further confusion was sown by the recent case of a Maryland-born girl who developed features of autism after receiving vaccinations, and whose family was compensated by the federal government. As Dr. Doran pointed out, this compensation fund is a "no-fault" program designed to avoid the tort process. The award was in no sense proof of a vaccine-autism link, and it did nothing to disprove the dozens of large-scale studies, from multiple countries, that have failed to demonstrate one.

Maryland law requires vaccinations against a dozen diseases from birth to age 5, but shockingly, any parent can send an unvaccinated child to school by simply signing a statement asserting that the vaccination is a violation of religious beliefs.

That's an unacceptable endangerment of public health. The number of definite pertussis cases in Maryland rose from 43 in 2007 to 64 last year. Before the next 50 percent increase, the state should seriously consider barring unvaccinated children from attending public schools. If parents want to make a risky decision regarding their children's health, perhaps they should have to make other arrangements for their education rather than endanger everyone else.

Since I couldn't stick it to The Man by withdrawing financial support (and let's face it, they're already losing subscribers in large enough numbers that they probably would not have noticed), I had to satisfy myself with a letter to the editor. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they printed it in today's paper. Unsurprisingly, among the edits (presumably for space in the print edition) was the sentence in which I said their language "borders on obnoxious." One can't have everything ...

Here is the full text of my letter (the edited version is here):

Note to editorial staff: Regardless of whether you choose to print this response, I urge journalists at the Sun to visit www.fourteenstudies.org for some excellent analysis of the studies that supposedly exonerate vaccines.

"Your editorial, ‘A Dangerous Denial,’ was objectionable in many ways. Characterizing the vaccine-autism issue as “a suspicion that has been thoroughly investigated and authoritatively debunked” is both wrong and irresponsible. None of the 19 shots most American children receive in their first six months has been studied for its relationship to autism. How is that a thorough investigation? Thimerosal, the preservative still found in the vaccine supply, also has not been proven a safe ingredient. The majority of the studies that have been done – and are used by pundits and public health officials to support their case that vaccines do not cause autism -- are rife with conflicts of interest, including contributing authors who received funding from vaccine manufacturers.

"The language used in the editorial mischaracterizes the parents at the center of this debate, and borders on obnoxious. The ‘odd beliefs’ you describe don’t seem so outlandish to Dr. Bernardine Healy, former director of the NIH, who said the government has been “too quick to dismiss the concerns of these families without studying the population that got sick. I think public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as irrational without sufficient studies of causation.” Worse, you dismiss the parents’ concerns with language like ‘odd,’ and ‘strange,’ treating them more like cult members than people whose concerns are founded on legitimate, painful experience.

"Condescending tone aside, the implication that these parents are anti-vaccine is an over-generalization. Along with many other parents who believe the current vaccine schedule played a role in our children’s regression into autism, I believe that immunizations should be delivered at a pace that makes sense for children’s developing systems, and not at a rate that is merely convenient for health insurers. If the vaccine-autism link had been ‘authoritatively debunked,’ surely there would have been no reason to compensate the family of Hannah Poling, the child referenced in your editorial.

"Dr. Healy is right: This problem demands further study, and not only by the scientific community. There is a story here. It is regrettable that no journalist at the Sun has chosen to apply any reporting skill to this issue. The conflicts of interest alone should have attracted the interest of reporters, who seem to prefer party-line quotes to probing questions. These families deserve better."

Alison Hamilton

Crofton, MD

Co-coordinator, Maryland/DC chapter of Talk About Curing Autism