Cerebral Palsy

It's a beautiful late fall morning in Santa Ana, the air so crisp and dry the San Gabriel Mountains look like sugar mounds on the horizon. Inside United Cerebral Palsy Assn. of Orange County, a stately two-story house that could have been lifted from a Midwestern farm, five children sit around the curl of a horseshoe-shaped table, gluing little red bits next to their pictures on cards that can double as Christmas tree ornaments. It should be a festive time.

"Walk on." With those two words, Courtney Marshall enters another world -- a world in which she is able to move freely. "Walk on," she tells her horse, Chico, who slowly carries her forward, bringing a grin to her face. Like many 10-year-olds, she doesn't say much to those she doesn't know, especially when she's on her horse. She smiles bashfully and tucks her chin to her chest when addressing someone for the first time.

A single mother supporting three children, Garthea Clayton always dreamed of becoming an attorney. This fall, she was taking a major step toward making her dream a reality by completing her second year at Western State University of Law. "She just struggled and used that as a steppingstone to put herself together and motivate herself," said her mother, Judy Carter. "She saw that there was a bigger world out there for her and that she could have an impact."

William H. Macy describes his latest project, "Door to Door," which premieres Sunday on TNT, as a "gentle tale of a gentle man." That man is Bill Porter, a door-to-door salesman for the Watkins Co. in Portland, Ore. Born with cerebral palsy, he was unemployable for many years. But thanks to his mother's determination and love and his own unflagging spirit, Porter found work as a salesman and has been at it for more than 40 years.

The body of a girl who had cerebral palsy was found decomposing in her bed weeks after a state agency stopped visits to the family because it considered her safe from harm and neglect. An initial investigation indicated Shanecia McClellan, 9, died of natural causes, the medical examiner's office said. Her body was found Thursday, two or three days after she died. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services said it will investigate its handling of the family's case.

Dr. Margaret Holden Jones, a retired UCLA pediatrician and pioneer in the treatment of cerebral palsy, has died. She was 97. Jones, who died Sunday at her home in Pacific Palisades, had continued to see patients during occasional rounds at the Center for Cerebral Palsy at UCLA-Orthopaedic Hospital until about a year ago. She died in her sleep of congestive heart failure, said her longtime friend Carol Hurley.

A botulism toxin treatment sometimes used to smooth wrinkles also can improve tiptoe-walking common in children with cerebral palsy, new research shows. Injections of the food-poisoning toxin cause muscle weakness and are becoming an increasingly popular but little publicized treatment for stiff muscles in cerebral palsy. The study, involving 155 children treated for at least a year at nine centers, is one of the largest and longest-running to examine the treatment's effectiveness.

I am appalled by your Aug. 2 editorial blaming scientists for their "own hubris" in having "brashly dismissed legitimate public concerns" as a cause for the outrageous House ban on human cloning. This is a classic case of blaming the victim for the acts of the perpetrator. Science should reject religious concerns when such concerns are anti-reason, and science should reject ethical concerns when such concerns are contrary to that which promotes what is healthy and beneficial to human life.

The story sounds familiar: Two teenagers are accused of plotting fatal revenge against classmates who teased them. Authorities say it could have become another in a series of schoolyard killings by outcast students. But the case of two young men jailed on charges of conspiring to detonate a bomb at Burbank High School comes with a twist: One of them suffers from cerebral palsy and a learning disability. That has some advocates for the disabled questioning the young man's prosecution.

The story sounds familiar: Two teenagers are accused of plotting fatal revenge against classmates who teased them. Authorities say it could have become another in a series of schoolyard killings by outcast students. But the case of two young men jailed on charges of conspiring to detonate a bomb at Burbank High School comes with a twist: One of them suffers from cerebral palsy and a learning disability. That has some advocates for the disabled questioning the young man's prosecution.