my4kids said:
Where are our medical DIS'ers? I could swear that some of my kids have had Kawasaki before....I thought it was something like Hand-Foot-and Mouth disease and that it was no big deal at all.
It is similar to hand-foot-and-mouth because it can affect those areas (including peeling off of long sheets of skin on the hands and feet). It also involves a high fever, a body rash and severley chapped mouth and lips. If it's not treated, it can eventually cause heart damage. I don't think they have found a definite cause of it, but it has been linked to small children crawling on recently shampooed carpeting. Here's a
link to more information.
The Travoltas have been on TV and other media, saying that their son has Kawasaki syndrome (here's an
article that talks about it).
The question of autism in their son Jett isn't new, it's just been in the media recently because
John Travolta's brother Joey has recently produced a movie about autism and he has been involved in autism-related organizations for a while. Here's an
article from 2003 that mentions the possibility of autism.
Also, there are few pictures of either of the Travola children, but there are some within the past year when Ella Bleu (their daughter) attended the premier of Sky High. There are even fewer pictures of their son, Jett, one is the one someone posted previously (which is
also in this article from I think 2002). The pictures of him in the article are much older pictures, because he was 10 at the time of the article. And then there is a series of pictures taken at an airport in 2000 (when he would have been 8 if he's 14 now) that show him hiding his face with a coat and working his way up to having his dad carry him (not common behavior for an 8 year old). You can see those pictures by going to
www.gettyimages.com . Click on the link for "editorial" on the left hand side of the page and then when the search box comes up, look for
ella bleu. You will find some of the series of pictures if you search for Jett, but more of them come up with his sister's name.