An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism

A subtitle might be -  cleanliness and vaccines increase autoimmune disorders

NYTimes   So here’s the short of it: At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb.[...]

The lesson here isn’t necessarily that viruses and bacteria directly damage the fetus. Rather, the mother’s attempt to repel invaders — her inflammatory response — seems at fault. Research by Paul Patterson, an expert in neuroimmunity at Caltech, demonstrates this important principle. Inflaming pregnant mice artificially — without a living infective agent — prompts behavioral problems in the young. In this model, autism results from collateral damage. It’s an unintended consequence of self-defense during pregnancy. [...]

YET when you consider that, as a whole, diseases of immune dysregulation have increased in the past 60 years — and that these disorders are linked to autism — the question seems a little moot. The better question is: Why are we so prone to inflammatory disorders? What has happened to the modern immune system?

There’s a good evolutionary answer to that query, it turns out. Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do.  [...]

Generally speaking, autism also follows this pattern. It seems to be less prevalent in the developing world. Usually, epidemiologists fault lack of diagnosis for the apparent absence. A dearth of expertise in the disorder, the argument goes, gives a false impression of scarcity. Yet at least one Western doctor who specializes in autism has explicitly noted that, in a Cambodian population rife with parasites and acute infections, autism was nearly nonexistent. [...]

Chareidi solider allegedly kicked out of shul

Jewish Press based on this bhol  Hebrew article

A Haredi IDF soldier was chased out of the Toldos Avraham Yitzchak shul on Monday morning, in the Beit Shemesh neighborhood of Nachala U’menucha, after appearing at Shacharit services in his uniform.

B’Hadrei Haredim reported that the soldier arrived at the shul, located at Hazon Ish Street, at about 10 AM, looking to participate in the morning service there.

Before entering the shul, he sat outside the building. One of the Chassidim passing by requested that the soldier “keep out.”

He explained to the soldier that since he was wearing the uniform of the “Army of the Zionist State,” he was not permitted to enter a shul whose members strongly advocate an anti-Zionist ideology.

Benefits of Circumcision Outweigh Risks, Pediatric Group Says

cbs

The nation's most influential pediatricians group says the health benefits of circumcision in newborn boys outweigh any risks and insurance companies should pay for it.

In its latest policy statement on circumcision, a procedure that has been declining nationwide, the American Academy of Pediatrics moves closer to an endorsement but says the decision should be up to parents.

"It's not a verdict from on high," said policy co-author Dr. Andrew Freedman. "There's not a one-size-fits-all-answer." But from a medical standpoint, circumcision's benefits in reducing risk of disease outweigh its small risks, said Freedman, a pediatric urologist in Los Angeles.

Reasons a wife refuses marital relations & possible solutions

Guest Post: by Bunsa Bayis

Please excuse my nonsequitor, but in connection to a previous post several days ago, the term "force" was debated in respect to compelling a woman to sleep with her husband. The Torah teaches that a woman's desire is for her husband, and the Torah is emes. So I've been mulling it over and, excuse my impertinence, but based on my twenty years plus of marriage and a wide circle of talkative friends, I've come up with a list of reasons why a woman would refuse relations and possible solutions to the problems. 

Note: NONE of the solutions include using force:

1) she feels physical pain before, during, or after intimacy = she should see a doctor
2) she has an aversion/fear of sex = she should see a psychiatrist
3) she is trying to manipulate her husband = he should see a divorce lawyer
4) she is angry with him = if it's a mutual quarrel, then he is forbidden to have relations with her anyway. If she's angry about something - whether its justifiable or not - she's probably not withholding sex as a means of punishment. She probably just can't bear to touch him in that emotional state. Remember, for women, the sex/love relationship is indivisible. First work out your conflicts, then get physical.
5) she feels hurt = if you know she's upset, then say the magic words. Something that seems small to you might loom large in her mind. It's not worth being insensitive. If you don't know that you hurt her feelings then she needs to learn a better way to communicate. But, "having a headache" may be her way of telling you that something is amiss.
6) she is exhausted = whether she works outside or not, the kids, the house, the mother-in-law.... Fatigue is the most common cause of "not tonight, dear", and it's legitimate = Use some sense. If she was up all last night with a colicky baby, don't take it personally if sleep is far more appealing to her than you are. If you can afford to get her cleaning help, then why haven't you yet? If you can, bring home takeout for supper once a week. If your budget can't afford it, then pick up a dishtowel or bathe the kids. I promise it won't emasculate you. Give her a neck-rub. Both of you get to bed earlier.
7) She doesn't feel romantic towards you= If the first quiet moments you spent together are when you get to bed, then you owe it to her to first connect emotionally and talk nicely to her (the gemara's words, not just mine!) and not about the kids or bills. Take her out to dinner once in a while. Flirt with her. Notice how she looks and compliment her. Give her a neckrub, or a spontaneous kiss when you're nowhere near the bedroom.
8) she's no longer attracted to you = well, did you shower and brush your teeth before you climbed into bed? Ask her to buy you a cologne that she likes. Make an effort to look good for her.
You see how many productive steps can be taken in a healthy marriage that don't require force? Just as a man craves respect, a woman wants to feel cherished.
I'll welcome any additions to my list but I'll bet there will be accompanying solutions that don't require force.

Bitul Seruv: Aharon Friedman/ Rav Gestetner

Bitul Seruv Aharon Friedman - R Gestetner

Defining Onas (force) by others

The issue of onas (force) is an important one in a number of halachic areas. I would like to review a number of relevant sources to get a clearer understanding of what onas means. Onas also needs to be distinguished from forcing oneself. This is a critical issue for the case of get me'usa as well as whether  a wife is prohibited to her husband after rape as well as defining rape itself. I will make a separate post of sources where the force is described as forcing oneself.

Kesubos (51b): Shmuel’s father said that the wife of a Jew who has been raped – is forbidden to her husband since we are concerned about the likelihood that even though she was forced to have sexual intercourse but at the end she willing enjoyed it. Rav raised an objection to Shmuel’s father, It says in her kesuba “that if you are captured I will redeem you and take you back as my wife”? Shmuel father was silent…. What could he have replied? That the law was relaxed in the case of a captive since her rape is only suspected. According to Shmuel father, what circumstances would a raped woman be permitted by the Torah to her husband? If there were witnesses that she cried during the rape - from the beginning to the end - she would be permitted to her husband. However this ruling differs from Rava. Rava ruled that even when intercourse began by compulsion but ended with consent and even if she said to not harm her assailant and even if he had not attacked her she would have hired him to do it – she is permitted to her husband. What is the reason? – He aroused in her an uncontrollable passion – which is a form of compulsion. There is a braissa which is in aggreement with Rava. It says in Bamidbar (5:13): That a woman is prohibited to her husband if she had intercouse without being seized. It follows from this that if she was seized than she is permitted to her husband. But there is another case that even though she wasn’t seized she is permitted. What is that? Any woman who began intercouse under compulsion but at the end was willing.

Beis Shaarim(O.H. 283):  The Ra’ah learned this din from the case of the women who was originally raped but at the end she was willing. In that case whether the beginning of the intercouse was forced by rape or by threatening to kill her – she did not get pleasure from the beginning of the intercourse but rather suffered… And at the end of the intercourse in which she has pleasure, that pleasure is itself forced as is stated in Kesubos (51b) because the lust is aroused. Rashi explains that it means that the pleasure is also forced… So that is true here where he is forced to eat i.e., the food is forced down his throat to a point it can’t come back. In such a case even though he gets pleasure from the food – he does not have to say a beracha on this pleasure  since it was forced and he can’t help but having pleasure. Similarly if they say he will be killed if he doesn’t eat so he is obligated to eat because of “Chai bahem” (You shall live by them) he is being forced to have this pleasure and therefore doesn’t have to say a beracha. However if they beat him to force him to eat and he has the ability to withstand the beating and not to eat but he decides he would rather eat then to received the blows – he is not considered as being forced to have the pleasure.

Rambam (Hilchos Sanhedrin 20:2): Whoever is forced to do something which is punishable by the death penalty – the court does not kill him. Even though it is for a matter for which he should rather die rather than transgress and even if his transgression caused a profanation of G‑d’s name but since he was forced he is not killed for it. This is learned from the case of a betrothed woman who is raped the verse says “Do not do anything to the woman.” This is a warning to the beis din not to punish someone who was forced to do the act.

Panim Yofas (Bamidbar 5:19): It says in Shulchan Aruch (E.H. 178:3) that if a woman was secluded with a man who subsequently raped her – she is prohibited to her husband since she caused the rape by being secluded with him. Also look at my comments to Kesubos (51b) where Shmuel’s father said that a married women who is raped is prohibited to her husband because we are concerning that while the beginning of intercourse was with force but she participated willingly at the end. The gemora there concludes however that she is permitted to her husband because uncontrollable lust was aroused by the forced intercourse. We prove there that she has a presumption of innocence. However when she transgresses the prohibition against seclusion with another man she loses that presumption of innocence because of the suspicion that she willing participated at the end…

Orthodox and Anorexic

Tablet Mag  By the time Chaya Faigie Jundef was accepted into an eating-disorder treatment program in 2007, she weighed 52 pounds. Too weak to walk, she was carried in. Her hair and teeth had fallen out, and her pulse was a dangerously low 28, less than half a normal reading. Everything sounded like a shriek or a whisper to her, because the thin membrane of fat around the neurons in her ear had dissolved. Her eyesight faded in and out.   And then her heart stopped.

Jundef, an Orthodox woman whose anorexia had brought her to the brink of death, recovered after her stint in the treatment program—but her harrowing experience was far from over. Her story is not unique: The Orthodox community has begun to grapple openly with eating disorders in recent years. In 2008, the Orthodox Union released a documentary film to be shown in Jewish schools called Hungry To Be Heard, about eating disorders among observant Jews. And treatment programs that cater to Orthodox women have opened.[...]

Chasam Sofer: Why tuma is less for male child

Chasam Sofer (Vayikra 12:2): A woman who produces seed and gives birth to a boy. Rashi explains that if the woman produces seed first then she will have a boy... Also what is the reason that there is less spiritual impurity with the birth of a boy than for a girl? There is a need to examine  this since the impurity of nida and birth resulted from the sin of the Tree of Knowledge which is obviously relevant only for women and not men. So why do males  have the foreskin which is also from the sin of the Tree of Knowledge and not females? A possible answer is that the reason that the woman who gives seed first will give birth to a boy is because material from the woman and the man are intrinsically unique and distinct from each other. The nature of the male child is determined by the mother and that of the female by the father. Therefore when the woman gives seed first it is from the material that the woman received from the spiritual contamination resulting from the sin of the Tree of Knowledge which dominates the woman. It is from this impure material of the mother that the foreskin grows and therefore the male has the foreskin since the male is created from the material of the mother. This contribution of material by the mother has the consequence of reducing somewhat the mother’s spiritual contamination which resulted from the Tree of Knowledge. That is why after the birth of a male child she is spiritually impure for fewer days than after the birth of a female child. In contrast the material of a female child which comes from the father when he produces seed first does not contain any spiritual sickness from the Serpent and therefore the female child has no foreskin and thus the spiritual contamination resulting from the Tree of Knowledge is not reduced for the mother when she gives birth to a female child. That is why she is spiritually impure for twice as many days for giving birth to a girl than she is for a boy.

Prohibiting giving free water - restriction of religion?

ABC15  The City of Phoenix could face a lawsuit if the city doesn’t apologize to a Valley woman for telling her she could not hand out free bottled water to people in the summer heat.

Dana Crow-Smith said a City of Phoenix worker came up to her during the First Friday festival in downtown Phoenix last month and told her she was violating city code by handing out free water because she did not have a permit.

Crow-Smith and a group of others were there exercising their Christian beliefs by engaging people to talk about religion if they wanted.

The group brought several cases of bottled water to give away in the 112-degree heat, but said a Neighborhood Preservation Inspector told the group they had to stop handing out the water or would be cited.

“It was really hot and yeah we wanted to show God's love and a small act of kindness is a great way to do that without shoving it down someone's throat,” said Crow-Smith.

The Rutherford Institute , a non-profit civil liberties organization, stepped in to represent Crow-Smith and calls this is “a violation of Crow-Smith's First Amendment right to freely exercise her religion, her Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, as well as Arizona's Free Exercise of Religion Act.”

"It is a sad day when local government officials prohibit Americans from such charitable acts as giving water to the thirsty in their city," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.

From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader

NY Times  Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”

The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose “none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason and the Secular Student Alliance.

The movement has also begun cultivating a new breed of guru in men like DeWitt and Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals and gay-pride events with signs declaring “God Hates Fags.” Nate Phelps, a big, barrel-chested man who delivers fierce rebuttals of his father’s theology and narrates the agonies of his fundamentalist upbringing, has become a star speaker at atheist rallies and gay-pride events around the country. At the Reason Rally, crowds cheered as he declared that the Sept. 11 attacks played a critical role in blasting away his lingering belief in any sort of deity. [...]

“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,” DeWitt said. “So now how do you reconcile that? How do you make sense of your life? It’s not easy.”

I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on ‘What is God’s plan for me?’ They are still looking for something miraculous to guide them.” 

Should infiltrators' children be kept separate in schools?

Haaretz  Immigrant children should be separated from others in the school system, the Education Ministry believes, according to the State Prosecution’s appeal to the Supreme Court submitted earlier this week. The state appealed against the Be’er Sheva District Court, which had ordered Eilat two weeks ago to admit the children of African asylum-seekers to city schools. [...]

“As we see, the de facto attempt detailed above indicates that integrating infiltrators’ children into the regular education system does not give a proper answer to the infiltrators’ children and harms them,” the state’s appeal says.

“Placing those students in the usual schools, without taking into account relevant considerations, deepens the gaps between them and other students in the school,” the appeal says.

“The overwhelming majority of infiltrators’ children in Tel Aviv studies de facto in two schools − Bialik Rogozin and Hayarden. ... Experience indicates that the said integration is severly damaging, causing harm to the other children studying at the school, and does not enable them and the teaching and administrative staff [to operate] a functioning, advanced educational and learning framework.” 

Dropping circumcision rates will cost billions of dollars

LA Times  Declining rates of circumcision among infants will translate into billions of dollars of unnecessary medical costs in the U.S. as these boys grow up and become sexually active men, researchers at Johns Hopkins University warned.

In a study published Monday in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a team of economists and epidemiologists estimated that every circumcision not performed would lead to significant increases in lifetime medical expenses to treat sexually transmitted diseases and related cancers — increases that far surpass the costs associated with the procedure.

Circumcision is a hotly debated and emotional issue in the U.S., where rates have been falling for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, about 80% of baby boys were routinely circumcised in hospitals or during religious ceremonies; by 2010, that figure had dropped below 55%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [...]

But in the last decade, studies have increasingly shown that removing the foreskin of the penis has significant health benefits, said Dr. Aaron Tobian, senior author of the new study.

Three randomized trials in Africa have demonstrated that circumcision was associated with a reduced risk of contracting HIV, human papillomavirus and herpes simplex in men. One of those studies documented a reduced risk of HPV, bacterial vaginosis and trichomoniasis in the female partners of men who were circumcised. [...]

WPIX fluff piece on alleged abuse at Camp Shalva

 What follows is an embarrassingly poor job of reporting which serves primarily to conveying rumors and hearsay. For example they quote an alleged parent as saying the kids were told not to talk with each other about the incident. Why is that presented as something wrong? If he claimed they were not to speak with anyone - especially the police then that would be significant. In fact in investigation it is helpful if kids were not interviewed by non-professionals even by parents. Such activity makes fact finding very difficult as we saw in the botched Nachliot investigation. In fact the only helpful information presented was the map showing that the delivery area and the bunks are at opposite ends of the camp. There prime informant is Ben Hirsh who has been leading the charge from the beginning But he also did not present any clear evidence that abuse took place or that the police were incompetent or that the Camp officials were covering up the facts.

An online semicha program

http://www.onlinesmicha.com/

 On 8/16/2012 10:12 PM, onlinesmicha wrote:  BS"D

Shalom,  Perhaps you would be interested in covering this on your blog.  Thanks for your consideration.  Kol Tuv,