The following video, prepared with the help of Mr. Taylor Toce of Provation Techniologies, tells what SERTOMA CLUB OF LAFAYETTE does.

I WANT TO SAY THANKS TO THE CLUB, TO ASAC, SERTOMA INTERNATIONAL, AND ALL OF OUR FRIENDS AND SUPPORTERS. (Also see the article, "Sertomans Work to Unlock the Mysteries of Autism," in the Spring 2010 issue of the Sertoman magazine, which is linked here. Just click the title and the article will open in a separate window.)

In an email to the members of the Sertoma Club of Lafayette , Karl Naumann, then our Sponsorship Vice President, commented that Sertoma had played a part in the publication of the following books---two of them with 2010 copyright dates. The first two are co-authored with my son, Dr. Stephen D. Oller, and Dr. Linda C. Badon. The third co-authored with Stephen includes a Foreword written by the world-renowned gastroenterologist and medical researcher, Dr. Andrew J. Wakefield. Sertoma members who have been around for the last decade and a half will recall that after the ALSS PhD Program was approved by the Louisiana Board of Regents in June of 2001, I dropped out of Sertoma for a couple of years to work with PhD students at UL and did not come back as an active member until 2003. About that time I was elected Secretary to the Sertoma Club---a position I held until last year, 2010, when I became President.

If you click on the link to my homepage at the bottom of this email you can read an abstract of each of the books and also there is a link for each one to what students are saying about that book. The books shown at the top of this page are a unique series, because they were inspired by the support and involvement of Sertoma and Sertoma's partnership with the Autism Society of Acadiana (ASAC).


A New Beginning
As many Sertomans will remember, early in 2003 (under the leadership of Jimmy Thomas) Sertoma was looking for a worthy cause to justify sponsorships for the Cajun Air Festival of 2004. On January 12, 2003, at a regular lunch meeting I informally proposed the idea to a small group of Sertomans, of holding an international conference to address the growing autism epidemic. Jimmy Thomas embraced the idea and asked me to do a presentation to the Sertoma Board out at the Acadian Village later that month. The evening of that presentation, January 19, 2003, was a kind of new beginning for the club. Ron Chauffe commented that night that the autism epidemic not only provided a worthy cause for Sertoma but also a basis for rejuvenating Sertoma itself at the national and international levels. Ron Chauffe stepped up with a donation to support Sertoma Awards for a different pcoming international conference (the International Phonetics and Linguistics meeting of 2004 where the autism theme for the Air Show of 2004 was announced.

Under the leadership of Jimmy Thomas, we started planning for the Sertoma International Conference on Autism Spectrum Disorders. A year and 10 months later, on October 6, 2004, I was invited to write a book for Plural Publishing, Inc. I offered to write two books for that publisher, one to explain how normal (non-disordered) development occurs (a research area I had specialized in since graduate school) and another to reclassify communication disorders across the board on the basis of a more advanced theoretical perspective and with a better and more current grounding in ongoing scientific research. My son Stephen, then a PhD candidate at UL Lafayette, and Dr. Linda Badon, a long time collaborator with and friend of Sertoma (associated with the Sertoma summer literacy camps in which Sertoma had invested about $100,000 over a period of ten years), both agreed to join with me as co-authors of the two projects. The publisher, Plural, Inc., promised to give me  and my co-authors a carte blanche to develop our books exactly as I had proposed to do them. At that time, the Sertoma International Conference on Autism Spectrum Disorders was still three years from becoming a reality.

The fruits of work on the UL ALSS PhD program and a grant from the Louisiana Regents that has netted my department $800,000 and continues to grow at $80,000 per year, together with the later partnerships with Sertoma and the Autism Society of Acadiana (ASAC), provided a foundation and context for the three books shown above. (The third book in the series, the one on autism, should be off the press by the time of the October 2009 Sertoma Board meeting.) The royalties earned on that book are being donated to the treatment of children with autism. Dr. Wakefield has described the autism book as "grounded in analysis, reanalysis, empiricism, and logic. And one which should be required reading by the Health Agencies."  


Key Sertoma Milestones
To finish the story of Sertoma's part in all of the foregoing, let me back up and fill in some details of what occurred prior to the Sertoma conference. By mid February 2005 we had landed two contracts with Plural Publishing. In a recent memo to the Sertoma Club of Lafayette, Karl Naumann was correct in supposing that Sertoma was helpful in our getting those two contracts, and also, a third that would follow. In fact the entire trilogy of books (and about 50 other publications from my PhD students and collaborators) followed in part from the collaboration between Sertoma, the Lafayette community, and the University.

The three books in question show how successful (ordinary) communications for the basis for health and well-being from genetics to metabolism, to normal growth and development, and to the highest levels of social organization and human experience. The involvement of Sertoma in helping to sponsor and produce the International Conference on Autism was instrumental especially in the developments leading to the third book in the series. You can read the reactions of participants (doctors, nurses, speech-language pathologists, and educators) to that conference at http://www.autism07.com/. Amber King, a registered nurse from Coldwater, Mississippi, wrote that the Sertoma Autism Conference was the best conference she had ever attended over her 17 year career. Tamara Upchurch McKinley, a speech-language pathologist from Texas wrote: "It was the BEST conference I have ever attended in my 32 years of my professional  career." Dr. Danielle Parsley, M.D., intervewed on Channel 10 by local celebrity Maria Placer said, "Rarely have I heard a speaker so amazingly eloquent. I hope that I will model myself as a doctor after Dr. Wakefield. He is one of a kind!"

The first of the three books pictured just above was published in the spring of 2006. That book was both a product in part, and itself played an essential role, in the planning of the Sertoma International Conference on Autism Spectrum Disorders that actually took place at the Cajundome Convention Center, April 12-14, 2007.


A Proposal on Autism
In the fall semester of 2006, prior to the staging of the Sertoma International Conference on Autism, I was invited by Allied Health (a subsidiary of Jones & Bartlett one of the largest and most prestigious academic medical publishers in the country), to write another book. Partly because of the Sertoma International conference already slated to occur in the coming spring (and on the basis of work done in preparing for it), I wrote a very straightforward book proposal saying I would investigate the issue of toxins and vaccines as causative agents in the autism epidemic. I had already done much of the necessary reading and research before the Sertoma International Autism Conference ever took place. I participated in the International Geneva Symposium on Autism in November 2004, and for the next three years I searched out, found, and invited world class researchers, ones I believed to be the best in the world, to be participants at the Sertoma International Conference that would take place in Lafayette in 2007. With what I had learned as background, I proposed to write a book about the diagnosis, treatment, and most importantly the causation of the autism epidemic. My objective was to get to the jugular vein of the monster (the epidemic) and cut it. If we could be certain about the causes of the autism epidemic it might be possible to stop it and even turn it around and reverse it.

In the exchange with the second publisher, the proposal was to investigate the research in toxicology showing the role of dental mercury, thimerosal in vaccines, disease agents, and their interactions as being among the causative factors in the autism epidemic. Within a couple of days of submitting my proposal I had a contract for the third book (the one on autism). At almost the very same time, as I learned later, Dr. Stephen D. Oller, also responded to a similar invitation from Allied Health and submitted a proposal to the same company for a book on childhood disorders. Both of us got contracts within short order. What is more, the Editor-in-Chief for Allied Health, the publisher for the autism book, himself attended the Sertoma International Conference in the spring of 2007. At that time, the three key co-authors of the books listed above, and a very select group of researchers were meeting each other for the first time. That meeting was in large part made possible by funding from Sertoma Club of Lafayette, the University of Louisiana (especially, Dr. Ray Authement), and various donors including Joey LeRouge, the Lafayette Tourist Bureau, and others.


More to Come
Of course, the academic work that we brought to the table, in addition to the research platform provided by the University of Louisiana, the acceptance of the ALSS PhD Program in which Stephen, Linda, and I were all involved at the time, as well as the named Hawthorne Regents (BoRSF) Professorship IV which was awarded to the senior author in the summer of 2004, were all factors in getting the several book contracts nailed down. In all of this, however, Sertoma played a catalytic role in enabling critical networking. More recently, while finishing the Cases and the Autism book, some of the hardware from the Matching Grant from the Sertoma Club of Lafayette and Sertoma International (for documenting recoveries from and treatment protocols for autism) was also helpful. All of this is acknowledged in both of the latter books and more is yet to come as we continue to work within the network of collaborators already established. (Of course, it should be noted that any errors and the views expressed in the foregoing books belong to their authors rather than to our collaborators.)

Many thanks to all of our Sertoma and ASAC colleagues and friends! Also, thanks are owed to all the persons named in the Acknowledgments written in each of the three books mentioned above. Hopefully, those books, grounded as they are in research involving a vast team of researchers, signal the beginning of the end of the autism epidemic.

Sincerely,
John Oller