What are they talking about, autism is a 'public health concern'? As if autism is a disease or something!
What ever happened to the idea that this was caused by the shots given to kids? Was this ever proven?
No, nothing to see here, there's no crisis. Move along, move along...
< /sarcasm>
http://www.fda.gov/CBER/vaccine/thimerosal.htm#t1
Most vaccines have no thimerosal.
At least they're up-front about it.
Autism diagnosis - Just another example of unaccountable entities deciding what is normal and what is not. It's the same crap diagnosis as ADHD.
Thomas Edison was autistic using current diagnostic criteria - would you have wanted him treated and medicated ? Same with Bill Gates and most identifiable geniuses in history. We are defining gifted people out of normalcy and medicating them into mediocrity.
Thomas Sowell's son didn't start speaking until age 4 or so - then he was identified as having a genius level IQ. It turns out there are quite a few kids like this; they feel no need to speak until later in life because their brain is too busy with other things.
Yes, there are those individuals who cannot function in society as it is structured and who need help. This does not mean, however, that it is as pervasive as the so-called professionals would like you to believe, nor that drugs and interventionist therapies are needed in every instance.
Follow the money, folks... when a profession sees a way to push the gov't into using tax money to fund this type of care, there is no end to the stream of people who "need" services for conditions that are in part not a problem.
I'm sure autism is a real malady.
And at the same time I'd like to see the a graph of the number of
"austism specialists" (psychologists, etc) and the number of diagnosed cases.