But why, if vaccines are the cause, is the rate of autism going up if fewer people are vaccinating? (and no, we now know that the increase in autism is not due to an increase in diagnoses. It’s really happening.)
Type 1 diabetes is increasing at a rate of 3% a year, which simply cannot be as a result of diagnoses. You either have T1D or you don’t. You can’t fool the meter.
I specifically bring up T1D because anti-vaxers say that there is a link between vaccines and autoimmune disease, including T1D.
So why are we are seeing an increase in autism and childhood autoimmune disease, although the vaccination rate is falling?
I absolutely believe that *something* in our environment is making our kids sick. The numbers don’t lie. But if it were vaccinations, we’d be seeing these rates drop as more parents opted out and that’s just not what’s happening.
We need to put more resources into the search for the real culprit.
Actually vax rates are higher than they were in the 80’s and 90’s. And to be ‘unvaccinated’ a child only has to miss one shot of any of the many shot series now on the schedule.
The schedule in 1983 had fewer than half the shots on the 2014 schedule.
Some more information on ASIA:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=20708902
On autism, because it’s a spectrum disorder (large range of variability and severity), I think it has both a genetic component and an environmental component. My current self educated guess is that it’s a combination of increased parent age (of both mothers and fathers), genetic susceptibility and a component of stress during pregnancy and possibly also fetal distress during delivery. I’ve been following the research on oxytocin research and therapy and think it looks very promising. I also think that it is very politically incorrect to point out that the feminist ideals of career first, children last may be a contributor to epidemic.
As for T1D, I haven’t studied that one much yet, but I would like to see demographic studies. Is it a general population wide increase or is concentrated more in some populations than others. I would expect diet and lifestyle plays a very strong role in this disease.