Sometimes it is that you started looking for the signal. I have seen kids labeled as “autistic” who were more than likely introverts.
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That may have been true at one time, but the numbers keep going up every year. At this point you would expect to see at least a plateau.
I know everyone has there own opinion what is causing it. They can quote different studies to support their conclusions, but there is one thing that they can’t explain away.
It’s the tens of thousands of parents that say there child was developing normal until they received a certain vaccine. Usually the MMR shot.
I’m sorry, but parents, especially new parents are very aware of every milestone and whether their child is on track.
Most of their stories are pretty much the same.
Many of these children started high pitch screaming, had high fevers, seizures, lost speech, lost balance, lost eye contact, and started the classic head bang.
The doctors will fully admit these can be an adverse reaction to the vaccine.
However, they will also stand there and tell them to their face that it caused no permanent damage, and they just didn’t notice before that their child had autism.
Or better yet, this is age that autism shows up, and it’s just a coincidence that that it happened at the same time as the shot.
There can be adverse reactions to vaccines. A local family had one of their twin girls become paralyzed and catatonic because of a vaccine (they think she had a bladder infection before the shot).
However, I have seen, and dealt with, kids who were labeled autistic who were what I joking call “Young engineers”. Introverts, highly technical, who don’t really care much about social interaction. In other words, 90% of the people I went to college with in engineering. We were just “engineers” then, we would be labeled on the autism spectrum now.
Now, there are kids who do have issues that need addressing, but to label a boy who loves scifi, can rattle off the names of every dinosaur, and is awkward with others “Autistic” is a horrible thing to do. That places the boy in a neat little box, and will hamper their development. A boy who twenty years ago would move to a STEM field is instead pushed to special ed.
It’s called congenital disease that manifests later in life. As redgolum pointed out, more kids are lumped into the same category, since it is a spectrum of diseases. There are millions of autistic people around the world which have never seen a vaccine. Read exDemMom for more actual evidence and clues to the truth. Vaccines are actually far safer now rhan in the past. How many cases of autism do you have in your family? There is a high likelihood, if you have normal children, they may have the same propensity to have autistic offspring.