[Slate.com] Why there’s no epidemic
The popular press pendulum swings back a bit back towards reality with a rather reasonable, non-technical piece from Slate.com entitled Why there’s no epidemic about the book Unstrange Minds; Remapping the World of Autism.
The Autism Numbers: Why there’s no epidemic. [Slate.com]
(…) But is there, in fact, an autism epidemic? Most of the scientists who study the disease—though not all—believe that any increase in recent decades in autism incidence, as opposed to diagnosis, has been modest. In his new book Unstrange Minds; Remapping the World of Autism, George Washington University anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker, who has an autistic 15-year-old daughter, makes the case that the rise in autism diagnosis is nothing more than an epidemic of discovery.
(…) A good side of the refined techniques of autism diagnosis is that many children get earlier treatment, in the form of behavioral therapies that enable them to reduce their symptoms, and sometimes shed their diagnoses by adulthood. Hundreds of thousands of adult autistics, by contrast, struggle with some degree of disability without ever having been diagnosed. (The same is true, Grinker points out, of the estimated one in 500 children born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, many of whom were never diagnosed at birth, and may not get the help they need for learning disabilities and problems with impulse control.)
“I am not sure why people are so resistant to the idea that true autism rates may have remained stable,” Grinker writes. “Perhaps they don’t want to give up on the hope that, if only we could find the cause of the ‘epidemic’ we could help these children. We could eliminate the toxins, hold big corporations accountable, do something to reverse the trend. If there is no real epidemic, we might just have to admit that no one is to blame.” There’s one more thing to be said for the cries of “epidemic”—they get the research money flowing. [more]
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