Lies, Damn Lies, and Autism

As medical and epidemiological mysteries go, autism is surely among the most shocking and tragic. Autism has been on the rise for decades, but now it's reached unbelievable levels. In 1975, only one in 5000 children in the U.S. was affected by autism. Now it's one child in 88, making it more common than schizophrenia.

I'm old enough to remember a day when autism was so uncommon that most people had barely heard of the word or knew what it meant. When I was growing up, I never saw an autistic child nor knew of anybody who had one. Today, autism is known to every pediatrician and every school system in the U.S., and sad to say, it's no longer unusual to know someone (or be someone) whose family has been touched by it.



The sheer rate of increase in autism's prevalence rules out any kind of purely genetic explanation. The genes for autism existed before 1975. Why are they only being expressed at high rates now?

Autism is better-defined and more diagnosable now than in 1975, but even increased efficiency of diagnosis can't explain the sheer magnitude of the rise in autism.

So if genetics and diagnostic vigilance can't explain the rise, what are we left with? Environment, obviously.

In the 1990s, a theory began to take hold that autism is a rare (but obviously not rare enough) side-effect of the DTP vaccine, which protects children against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The DTP vaccine was developed in 1981 and its introduction coincides with the beginning of the upswing in autism. Mothers of autistic children were, of course, the first to notice what was happening. Predictably, the medical establishment (along with their shills in the FDA, the US Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, CDC, and the Health Resources and Services Administration) dismissed the vaccine theory outright and warned the nation that to avoid vaccinating children against such dreaded widespread killer diseases as tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough would be a calamity of earth-shattering, history-ending proportions.

source @ http://asserttrue.blogspot.ca/2013/02/lies-damn-lies-and-autism.html