Archive for the ‘Disability Alert ®’ Category
UN: Replace Rhetoric With Action on Disability Rights
Include Persons With Disabilities in Planning and Implementation
Human Rights Watch – Governments meeting at the United Nations this week to discuss implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) should focus on effective strategies and good practices that benefit persons with disabilities, Human Rights Watch said today. The convention went into effect two years ago.
“If governments are serious about their commitment to people with disabilities, they need to turn the laws and policies on paper into meaningful programs and services on the ground,” said Shantha Rau Barriga, researcher and advocate on disability rights at Human Rights Watch. “Efforts will fall short unless governments include people with disabilities in planning for these programs and monitoring them.” Read the rest of this entry »
Disabled people do have sex lives
We don’t need to exploit prostitutes to have sex – but we do need equality in society for the myths to be debunked
Image KK+
By Naomi Jacobs, The Telegraph.co.uk – The Telegraph picked a particularly shrewd moment to pry into disabled people’s care plans, seeing as we are currently are the disproportionate target of a cost-cutting campaign that has started with the poorest and most disadvantaged people in society. The article, reproduced later in the Mail and Express, claims to have found evidence of “taxpayers’ money” spent on sex services for disabled people. Read the rest of this entry »
PEI’s Premier Ghiz chips away at Senior drug costs but fails to deliver wheelchairs
Effective September 1 – Seniors’ Drug Co-pay Reduced by 25 per cent
Genuflecting for small crumbs - Minister of Health Carolyn Bertram, President of the PEI Seniors’ Federation John Kenny, Executive Director of the PEI Pharmacists Association Erin MacKenzie, and Premier Robert Ghiz (government photo)
Premier Robert Ghiz announced he is cutting the co-pay for the PEI Senior’s Drug Plan by 25% on the 1st of September.
The co-pay is being reduced from $11 to $8.25. The government estimates the savings to PEI’s seniors at $900,000.
Seniors with disabilities would still like their wheelchairs, walkers and hearing aids when the Premier has time away from his golf game and checking his bank accounts in Switzerland and Lichtenstein.
What Ghiz didn’t announce is the promised coverage of 8,900 Island seniors with disabilities in the PEI Disability Support Program. That was his promise in the last election.
Everyone with a disability on Prince Edward Island, other than seniors, qualifies for assistance under the PEI Disability Support Program. Robert Ghiz promised to fix that inequality before he became Premier. Read the rest of this entry »
Do we need $200,000 cocktail parties?
The $200,000 cocktail party was especially galling considering the budget for the Disability Support Program was cut $35,000 while Myrtle Jenkins Smith got another $90,000 contract
Updated – Two years after this story, the Disability Services Review has come and gone without any material improvements in the PEI Disability Support Program.
May 2008 was a firestorm for the Ghiz government. It weathered crisis after crisis generating reams of bad publicity.
The $200,000 cocktail party was especially galling considering the budget for the Disability Support Program was cut $35,000. Yes they had one of those luxury cocktail parties under the Tories and it was just as odious.
If then-Minister Valerie Docherty was in a party mood, maybe she could have one of those cocktail parties in every town in PEI and invite the poor and disabled instead of rich high-class friends.
It appears people get elected on a platform of “change” but once in power become mesmerized by the money. Economists say that most people can’t handle sudden a increase in personal income. It’s like winning the lottery.
For most of our newly elected officials, their incomes have doubled and tripled after the election. Obviously for some ministers the sudden wealth has gone to their head. They want to hobnob with the rich and famous. Read the rest of this entry »
We are not freaks
The Rick Hansen Wheels in Motion at Old Home Week was PEI’s return to disabled as freak show.
Updated - The Old Home Week event venue is inappropriate and insensitive.
For one hundred years from 1840 to 1940 the freak show was a popular form of entertainment. Freak shows displayed people who were for the most part disabled and who looked different from the mainstream of society.
“Today the same shows would be considered unacceptable and cruel, or as one disability rights activist put it, “the pornography of disability.” DisabilityHistory.org
Researchers find link between protein and learning disabilities
A protein called APC may hold a clue to the causes of learning disabilities, a new study suggests
image Tufts University
Science Daily – A clue to the causes of autism and mental retardation lies in the synapse, the tiny intercellular junction that rapidly transfers information from one neuron to the next. According to neuroscientists at Tufts University School of Medicine, with students from the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts, a protein called APC (adenomatous polyposis coli) plays a key role in synapse maturation, and APC dysfunction prevents the synapse function required for typical learning and memory.
Editor – this is a research finding and has not resulted in any practical treatment at this time.
The findings are published in the August 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Read the rest of this entry »
90 Countries Ratify International Disability Rights Treaty
The United Nations (UN) has announced that 90 countries have now ratified the international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
click for larger image
This international disability rights treaty is meant to “promote, protect, and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights by persons with disabilities,” including self-determination, physical and programmatic access, personal mobility, health, education, employment, habilitation and rehabilitation, participation in political life, and equality and non-discrimination. (Source: RatifyNow. The CRPD will become legally binding after 20 countries have ratified it. The optional protocol is a separate document that would allow individuals to seek redress (justice or compensation) for treaty violations internationally after they have exhausted everything that can be done at the national level. The optional protocol will be legally binding after 10 countries have ratified it.
Read the rest of this entry »
700 children born with genetic disabilities due to cousin marriages every year
Intra-family marriage is dangerous as it increases risk if genetic defects
Research shows the number of cousin marriages has risen dramatically in the UK over the last three decades image: ALAMY
By Rebecca Lefort, Telegraph.co.uk
The problem is worst among children born in Britain’s Pakistani community, where more than half of marriages are between first cousins, and children are 10 times more likely than the general population to suffer genetic disorders.
The medical risks of first cousin marriages include higher rates of infant mortality, birth defects, learning difficulties, blindness, hearing problems and metabolic disorders.
As adults, the children born from first cousin marriages are at increased risk of miscarriage or infertility. A third of children affected die before their fifth birthday. Read the rest of this entry »
Disability Community Needs PALS in 2011
Scrapped mandatory census cuts even deeper for disability advocacy group
Laurie Beachell, national co-ordinator of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities
Council of Canadians with Disabilities – Statistics Canada’s Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS) is the most important and comprehensive source of disability statistics in Canada and is seen as a best practice model internationally. CCD is concerned that Human Resources Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) has not yet committed funding for a PALS for the 2011 census.
It is crucial that PALS continue so that governments and community have the information and research needed to develop good policy and programs. It should be noted that upon ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Canada will be obligated to collect data on the socioeconomic status of persons with disabilities.
PALS and its predecessor HALS have been, and remain, extremely valuable survey tools. No other survey provides the range and depth of statistically reliable information about:
Former CNN anchor Frank Sesno finds an even more rewarding role
Renowned political journalist finds happiness in giving back to others
Frank Sesno
By Frank Sesno, Posse Foundation, Washington Post – During my work as a reporter, I went around with cameras and looked at what was wrong. One of the things I’m doing now in life through teaching and philanthropy is trying to fix those problems.
My heart has always been in education.
I have a disabled sister with Down’s syndrome. I saw the fight to get her access to quality education. When she was born in the ’50s, people with developmental disabilities would be warehoused. When the doctor told my mother that her daughter was “mongoloid” and encouraged her to place my sister in an institution, my mother threw him out of the room. She was not going to institutionalize her daughter. She was a crusader. She believed in standing up for what mattered. Now my sister lives semi-independently. Read the rest of this entry »
Waterloo Record: Hidden disability leads to false accusation
Judgmental note, left on car parked in spot for disabled, insults driver
By Nicole O’Reilly, Waterloo Record
Updated, first published Jul 4, 2007
Sue Foxton doesn’t wear her disability on her sleeve. She doesn’t want special treatment, or to be judged. But a few weeks ago while shopping in the region she returned to her car — legally parked in a spot for the disabled, with a visible permit — and was horrified to find a nasty note. “I came out to my car and it had a note on the windshield that was really, really insulting,” said the North Dumfries councillor. Read the rest of this entry »
You are one paycheck away from poverty
Being on social assistance is often the result of mid-life disability over which people have no control
A recent Guardian Commentary resurrected some of the negative stereotypes of the past, quoting,
“Social Services, on the other hand, deals with the failures and fall-outs from all other social systems, beginning with dysfunctional families and going on to where health, education, attorney general (corrections), and community services have failed.”
In one sentence, the writer characterized those on social services as “failures”. “fall-outs”, “dysfunctional”, and rejects from prison. What is he thinking?
This is so far from the truth it is an affront to people who need social assistance to survive. For PEI’s disability community, social assistance is often the only way they survive from month to month. The problem exists across Canada and only varies in severity by Province.
Dyslexic Cisco CEO prefers voice mail
John Chambers, CEO of CISCO the giant communications company, admitted to a learning disability yet runs a company worth $200 billion.
John Chambers CEO Cisco
By James Bagnall, CanWest News Service. (updated from October 20, 2007)
Chambers suffers from dyslexia — a reading disorder in which people mix up letters in words.
While dyslexic children often are teased mercilessly about their low scores on conventional tests, the condition has nothing to do with intelligence.
Chambers was very adept at hiding his dyslexia. It wasn’t until the late 1990s — several years after he had been appointed CEO — that he came clean. The occasion was a company “take your child to work” day. Before a crowd of hundreds of parents and children, Chambers had called on a young girl to answer a question. But the girl struggled, saying that she had a learning disability.
Chambers came to her rescue by acknowledging — for the first time in public — that he, too, had a learning disability.
The native of West Virginia spoke for nearly an hour Friday morning before an audience of more than 500 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. He had no notes and scarcely glanced at the slides that lit up the giant screen behind him. Read the rest of this entry »
