Posted By Dan Swearingen on June 5, 2009

I don’t know whether vaccines are related to any increase in cases of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) seen in recent years. I agree there are very probably genetic factors but I feel there must also be some sort of environmental trigger at play as well.

Is there really an increase in ASD? There is definitely an increase in ASD diagnoses (see Epidemiology of autism at Wikipedia). What I have seen in my lifetime in the SF Bay Area is that when I was a kid you saw mainly Down Syndrome and children with birth defects in Special Education classrooms — no autistics.

Autism was rare.

Here in Marin today we easily fill classrooms with autistic kids and I do not mean edge cases but full blown autistic kids.

Many believe that the way vaccines are administered, and how that has changed over the years, could be one of the environmental factors affecting the rate.

David Kirby’s article at Huffington Post today Top US Panel: Some Vaccine-Autism Research is “Appropriate,” “Worthwhile” and “Warranted” is an excellent and relatively even tempered discussion of the current thinking and research directions into the possible Vaccine-Autism link.

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This entry was posted by Dan Swearingen on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:49 pm and is filed under ASD Research, Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.