I have spent the last 10 years studying special educational needs, and working with children with special needs (including autism) and disagree with this entirely.
Starbird there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines cause autism. Many children with autism will have a regression in skills which occurs around 3 years of age, and happens to coincide with the MMR vaccine. But it has been proven time and time again that it is not causing the child to develop autism, many unvaccinated children also go through the same regression. The fear of vaccines for this reason that led to many not vaccinating their children did not affect autism rates at all.
More children are being diagnosed these days because we have better, earlier methods of diagnosis. This means support can be put in place for the child at an earlier age and leads to much better outcomes at school. Whereas years ago these children would have struggled academically, they are now leaving school with a good set of GCSEs and able to go onto college. Earlier, and better, methods of identification are why most there appears to be more cases of lots of things now. Take cancer for instance, if you go back 50, 100 years, there were far less cases but there also weren’t the methods for diagnosis that there are now. Many people would have just died of ‘an illness’, just like many non-verbal autistic children were ‘retarded’ and verbal ones were ‘just naughty children’. The same goes for almost any developmental disorder, mental illness, or physical illness. Science is more advanced now, people are more aware and more likely to see a doctor and get an accurate diagnosis. You only have to see the rates of adult diagnosis of autism now to see that there have always been more people with autism, but they simply weren’t diagnosed. There are far more cases of girls diagnosed with autism in the last 10 years or so, because there has been evidence to show that girls with autism present differently, they are better at ‘social masking’ than boys are so they were being missed. But they still had poor communication skills, and in most cases, extremely high anxiety. Now that clinicians are more aware of this, more girls are getting the support they need.
And please don’t suggest it’s parenting, or ‘sticking children in front of the tv’. When autism was first ‘discovered’ in the 1940s the predominant theory was ‘refrigerator mothers’ who were cold and unloving towards their children were causing them to be autistic. We’ve moved on from this now and although we still don’t know the cause, we do know that people with autism have neurological differences to ‘typical’ person. Let’s not go back to parent blaming.