Most evidence suggests there is a genetic predisposition that increases the likelyhood of being diagnosed. This characteristic is unlikely to have changed over time. Some environmental factors will have changed over time with changes in industry and demographics. If there were greater prevalence in environments that are more common than 50 years ago, it stands to reason that there will be greater prevelance overall. For example, if flat dwellers are more likely to be diagnosed then with more flats there will be more cases.

Prevelence across areas with common food and water sources (eg Sydney, Melbourne etc) is patchwork suggesting that there are envirnomental factors that increase prevelence that are local rather than "global".

If there are such local factors, this suggests a characteristic that can be spread through a local environment but is dispersed over distance. In short, some sort of atmospheric release.

A test of this would be to look for products which are more common now than 50 years ago. Perhaps it is time to examine Volatile Organic Compounds and other odorous releases as potential influences by examining prevelence in areas surrounding such candidates as petrochemical plants, airports and the like.

This whole debate is silly. Autism didn't exist before the pertussis vaccine in the 1940s. It was rare until the MMR in the 1980s suddenly made the numbers jump. They spiked again with the addition of the hep-B at birth in 1991. And again with the Prevnar. My baby was given the hep-B vaccine at birth in the hospital even though I had told her pediatrician I didn't want her to get it, as I had read it often caused autism. He forgot to tell the staff. She reacted with four days and nights of constant, inconsolable screaming. It was vaccine-induced encephalitis, and she was later diagnosed with autism. A congressional sub-committee in May 1999 had found the vaccine was so dangerous that it recommended a moratorium be placed on its use. And then they gave it to my baby without even asking my permission. Countries that give fewer vaccines (like the Scandinavian countries) have much lower rates of autism, and a fraction of the cases of severe autism. It is obvious to any unbiased observer that vaccines are wreaking havoc on the immune and nervous systems of millions of vaccine recipients, not just autism, but epilepsy, asthma, allergies, diabetes, and bowel disease, all autoimmune diseases triggered when the immune system reacts in panic to the foreign microbes and chemicals that bypass the normal means of first defense and suddenly show up in the blood.
Why has a law been passed in Australia cutting off financial aid to needy families if the children are not completely vaccinated? It is immoral to compel a family to damage its children in order to receive help. We need to accept the truth that vaccines often damage or kill, and then make a new assessment about the best way to proceed.

I am a mother of 3 autistic children, all born fullterm with no complications at birth. Our little tribe may come down to genetics. A nuerologists put it o me this way. If I maybe autistic and my husband maybe autistic, then the chances of the autism gene increases tenfold as we got together and started a family. My husband and I grew up during the 1970's and autism was to our knowledge not heard. I remember going to school with a girl who had down syndrome and a profoundly deaf boy but we were never pointed out a child with autism and looking back those kids who were a bit odd were the ones that were teased and bully. Since hving my own children, I have come to the conclusion that it not the childern who need assessing but the parents. My husband and I both have autistic behavioural traits that explain why we react the way we do. We have parents in our support group who them, themselves have been diagnosed with Asperbergers and Autism as adults. So maybe its not ths generation but past generations that obviously slipped under the radar. My brother is a classic example, 43 yo can't socialize, always in fights at school,not real great on the reading or writing but taught himself the guitar by ear and he is brilliant at it. The society back then labelled him as a trouble maker, the education system back then promoted him to the next grade to be someone elses problem. He left school at 15 and could never hold down a job and underneath his tough exterior he is deep and thoughtful soul. Now as a society we are saying Autism has risen and just maybe it was there all the time, we just didn't know at the time what to look for in the signs

Leo Kanner particpated with several of his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in writing a compendium of every neurological disease know to man in the mid-1930s. Nothing even closely resembling autism was included in this compendium. Kanner said in 1943 when he described the first cases that nothing like that syndrome had ever been seen or described ever before, that it was a new syndrome. The pertussis vaccine did not come into widespead use before the 1940s, but several pertussis vaccines were developed much earlier, and were used in some groups in some countries. Grendels is not as well informed as he pretends to be.

It may be that being born very prematurely may cause autism It cannot be said that vaccines have nothing to do with autism. There are too many cases (hundreds of thousands) of children developing entirely normally walking, talkiing, socializing, until they got the MMR, and suddenly regressed into autism. Many, like my daughter, develop encephalitis after a vaccine, display the high-pitched inconsolable crying for days on end, and develop brain damage from the encephalitis. It cannot be denied that autism was never seen by most people until rates started to soar with the MMR, then again with the hep-B vaccine at birth.

Further evidence that it is the vaccines that are causing most of the rise in cases of autism is that the Merck Manual defines encephalitis as a brain inflammation caused by either a disease or vaccines. The package inserts of most vaccines list autism as one of the documented side effects (the result of the encephalitic brain damage). The Amish in the U.S., most of whom maintain a traditional way of life which doesn't include vaccination, have an extremely low rate of autism, and it is found only in their few vaccinated children or those who live close to a mercury-producing electrical plant. The medical practice Home First in Chicago has had a patient base of many thousands since 1980, and among the thousands of children whose parents chose not to vaccinate them, not a single case of autism has occurred. In Scandinavia, where the vaccine schedule includes only about half the vaccines as in the U.S., the incidence of autism is much lower, and the cases that are found there tend not to be as severe as in the U.S.

To Lucy and David Howard:
It is good to think about all possible factors that could affect the spiraling rates of autism, like air pollutants and even noise, but it's important to consider that in the U.S. autism rates are very high even in unpolluted areas, and are low even in large, noisy cities in Scandinavia. There is no autism among unvaccinated Amish (the majority), only one case in an Amish boy who lives near a coal-burning electrical plant that emits mercury into the air. The Merck Manual admits that vaccines can cause encephalitis, and the package inserts of most vaccines list autism as a possible side effect.The vaccines alarm the immune system and often cause it to react with extreme and/or chronic inflammation beyond the level that was desired. The extreme inflammation in the brain causes encephalitis, chronic inflammation in the lymph tissue in the GI tract causes bowel disease, chronic inflammation in the lungs from the pertussis vaccine causes asthma. Chemicals like mercury (now only in the flu vaccine in more than trace amounts), aluminum, formaldehyde, protein fragments, fragments of live weakened or killed microbes can all provoke an untoward reaction from the immune system, which is designed to produce a reaction and antibodies to any foreign substance that it encounters. Strange chemicals are ubiquitous in our environment now, and may sometimes cause autism in formats different from vaccines, but the surge in cases of autism immediately after the introduction of several of the vaccines (MMR, hepatitis B, Prevnar) would suggest that this is the most prevalent cause of autism today. The reaction in thousands of children to the vaccines, within a few weeks of vaccination, the encephalitic screaming, diarrhea, seizures, etc., all would seem to indicate that vaccination is such a major cause of autism and autoimmune disease that parents would be extremely well-advised to consider not letting their children be vaccinated. Yes, some of the vaccine-preventable diseases can kill or cripple, but so can the vaccines. Vaccine profits (in the billiions) are behind this current systematic denial of the obvious.

Grendels,
Dr. Robert Sears in The Vaccine Guide said that there are a lot of credible studies implicating vaccines in causing the many auto-immune diseases we have mentioned, including autism. He said if it turns out that they are correct, then the damage caused by vaccines will be much greater than the harm that would have been caused by the vaccine-preventable diseases. Dr. Mayer Eisenstein says that none of the thousands of unvaccinated children in his practice has autism, and that vaccine damage is very common, far more common than medical professionals are admitting. If the vaccines are causing autism at the current rate of one in 88 children, then I assume you would have to admit that that lifelong crippling for thousands a year is more significant than ten deaths a year from pertussis and twenty from meningitis C. Even if you didn't, it's certainly something parents have a right to weigh for themselves.

The package insert of the DTaP vaccine Tripedia (Sanofi Pasteur) says on page 11 that some of the reported adverse events are: ideopathic thrombocytopenia purpurs, SIDS, anaphalactic reaction, cellulitis, AUTISM, convulsions, grand mal convulsions, encephalopathy, hypotoria, neuropathy, somnolence, and apnea.

How can you assert that autism following encephalitis was clearly not caused by it? Why is it clear? Could it not be that the medical industry is saying this so as not to lose their grip on their cash cow, vaccines?

Wasn't Grendel the monster in Beowulf? Forgive me if it's your surname, but I was wondering if there were some reason you had chosen it as your nom de plume.

Grendels,
I actually don't care for Dr. Sears, he's made his name from his alternative vaccine schedule, and he does his best to skate between suggesting vaccines can damage and recommending that children get most of them. He's raised a lot of alarm about the danger aluminum in vaccines presents, and I agree with him, but I don't think he acts on deeply-held beliefs, I think he's fundamentally self-promoting.
I think your statistics on the Amish come from the blog LeftBrainRightBrain, they found an autism rate among the Amish of one in several hundred. I don't think their figure is correct, but assuming that it is, as you seem to do, wouldn't that make you wonder why their rate of one in several hundred is about one-fourth of the rate in non-Amish society?. Dr. Eisenstein's practice treats a lot of Amish, and he insists that among his Amish and non-Amish unvaccinated patient base of 35,000 over forty years, there has not been a single patient with autism. The LBRB figures on autistic Amish are also based on a large number of autists who do not meet the standard definition: Dr. Kevin Strauss, of the pediatric clinic for Special Children in Lancaster County, said that while he sees many Amish children with autistic features, they tend to be short, mentally retarded, and with distinctive facial features, with syndromic autism caused by genetic factors, rather than the type described by Kanner, of normal or above-normal intelligence, with normal facial features, what is called ideopathic autism, of whom there are none in the unvaccinated Amish population (except for the boy who breathed mercury from the coal plant).
Dr. Sears said that encephalitis was quite common after vaccination, but that it usually did not cause death or permanent damage. Other sources have said that somnolence, twitching, staring episodes, as well as the well-known high-pitched inconsolable screaming for three hours or more (le cri encéphalique), are symptoms of encephalitis. This would mean that most parents don't even realize when their baby or child is suffering from encephalitis, and usually don't make the connection when he displays autism, any kind of seizure disorder, ADHD, or a learning disorder years later.
Dr. Sears couldn't possibly give up the niche he's carved for himself, which renders not very important his opinion on the dangers of individual vaccines. 'When he makes a factual statement, I take it under advisement. He said the flu vaccine was the most reactive, and though my mind then flips through possible competitors like hep-B, MMR, DTaP, I believe the flu vaccine is right up there. I've read enough about people who were killed or paralyzed by the flu vaccine to realize that it's dangerous. I read today about someone who works in a nursing home who said that the day they give the flu vaccine to everyone there is called the culling day, because so many patients there die within a few days of getting the flu vaccine. My father was paralyzed by it, I believe my mother has Alzheimer's because of it. I would actually rather die of the flu or of pneumonia than of paralysis or Alzheimer's, but I would be lying if I said that that had helped me make the choice not to take a flu shot, I just never had the slightest inclination to do so.
I was not being coy when I asked about Grendels, I thought it was an interesting allusion and was curious about it.

Grendels,
How old is your son now? My daughter will be twelve on May 5, so her experience of hep-B, encephalitic reaction, and subsequent autism was nearly twelve years ago.
The Prevnar vaccine itself has caused a lot of death and disability, but if it would have saved your son, I certainly wish that it had been available then for you,
I wish now that I had rushed my daughter to the ER after rocking her for several hours that first night of May 9, 2000, when the screaming went on and on endlessly. I couldn't understand it, she had nursed before the screaming started, she was dry, I was holding her in my arms singing to her, I had prepared myself for her long-awaited birth to be the perfect, most loving, attentive mother in the world, and I couldn't understand why she didn't eventually drift off to sleep. I told myself that many babies kept their parents up at night with their crying, and that now was the time to call upon my patience and commitment. And I did. I asked myself if it were colic, but I knew from my extensive reading in my quest for perfection that colic didn't start before three weeks old. And so I pondered while I rocked my baby if her due date could have been mistaken, and she was really 42 weeks from conception when she was born, which would make her closer to three weeks old. There was no reason to believe that apart from the screaming, she weighed 7 pounds 6.6 ounces at birth two days after her due date.
I told the pediatrician about the constant screaming, she only fell asleep at dawn, and only slept for two hours before waking to immediately start screaming again. He asked if it were for at least three hours, as colic was the only thing that occurred to him. My mother said, "It's for much, much longer than that," but his ideas were exhausted at that point. He had apologized on Saturday for having forgotten to tell the nurses that I had said I didn't want her to get the hep-B vaccine, and neither he nor the nurses had told me nor given me a sheet with the warning signs of a vaccine reaction. I think he had been so imbued with the mistaken idea that vaccine reactions are one in a million, that it didn't occur to him, either, or his fear of consequences if she were diagnosed with vaccine-induced encephalitis was such that he pushed the possibility to the back of his mind.
I cannot tell if pediatricians now are more on the lookout for encephalitis than they were twelve years ago. Since the medical propaganda still promotes vaccines as safe and effective, I doubt that they are, at least most of them. When I read Judy Converse's book about her baby being given the hep-B vaccine at the hospital without having asked permission, suffering a horrible encephalitic reaction, including severe bowel symptoms, a nurse saying that it was too early for it to be colic, and his subsequent developmental delays and autism, I recognized my own situation. She testified before a sub-congressional committee in May 1999, along with the school nurse Patti White, and many others, on both sides, and the committee found that the vaccine was so dangerous that a moratorium should be put on its use. But for whatever reason, my daughter was given the vaccine a year later, in May 2000, without my permission. Why? I had tested negative for hep B, there was no reason in the world to give it to my baby, who was at no risk of contracting it. It would wear off long before she was grown. The only reason to give it on masse to every newborn in the U.S. was profit. All the medical industry has to do in the wake of thousands of vaccine-damaged children is say: "Nonsense. We deny that what happened to your child was caused by vaccines. It's very perplexing, we don't know what caused it, but we know it wasn't because of vaccines."
My baby screamed day and night from Tuesday night to Saturday afternoon. The pediatrician was baffled because she lost one pound two ounces between Tuesday and Thursday, beyond the normal weight loss in newborns. Why was he baffled if he were as prepared for vaccine reaction as you say? Babies with colic continue to eat, babies with encephalitis stop eating.
I misguidedly let them give her the DTaP at 2, 4, and 6 months. She got pertussis anyway at a La Leche League meeting in January, and coughed up vast sheets of slippery mucus which covered the cloth diaper I wiped her face with after the ten coughs on one breath. She coughed for over a month. The vaccine is only 30-70% effective, and is becoming ever less effective, while remaining very dangerous. When she got the booster at 18 months, it made her lose the only two words she had acquired, uh for up at the playground, and uff for dog. After the shot, she never said them again, nor anything else for another year and a half.
I take what everyone says with a grain of salt (except for Offit, who is beneath contempt, and speaks from his niche of millions from the rotavirus vaccine). But when Eisenstein says there is not one child with autism among his 35,000 unvaccinated patients, that is a factual statement that I respect him enough to take at face value. Were you not impressed by the pages of VAERS reports at the end of every chapter on a particular vaccine? For every one, I had an image in my mind of the families involved, baby got DTaP at two in the afternoon, found dead in his crib eight hours later, and I imagined the panic, the disbelief, the ambulance called, the frantic attempts to revive him. And then the next one: 18 month old gets DTaP at ten in the morning, at supper gives shrill cry and convulses, becoming permanently paralyzed three days later. And on and on, many listed for every vaccine, and those only a selected few from the many thousands in the VAERS database. Most reactions are not reported. I reported my daughter's reaction after I read the Judy Converse book, and the employee there called the hospital to ask the brand and lot number of the vaccine they had used, and they said they no longer knew.
My father said during the endless screaming that I had screamed endlessly after the DTP when I was an infant, and that he had taken me to the pediatrician and said he wouldn't leave until the doctor stopped the suffering of his precious little girl. I later realized that I had had an encephalitic reaction, and that that was why I had Asperger's and was very awkward in my social interactions. My brother beat his head on the sides of the crib after his DTP (another symptom of encephalitis, an attempt to stop the pain), and is nerdish and cold-hearted. His oldest son has autism, as well as asthma and many allergies (more symptoms of vaccine reaction). My cousin's daughter is institutionalized with autism. An old friend's first grandson had a seizure at nine months old, on Easter, and was diagnosed with demyelinating epilepsy, another vaccine reaction.
I'm sure you can see from what I have told you why I believe that vaccine reactions are much more common than we have been told. As a high-functioning autist, I have been obsessed for years with reading about vaccine reactions. I'm sure I've read more than Dr. Sears, but less than Dr. Eisenstein, Randall Neustaedter, Wendy Lydall, Hilary Butler, or Jamie Murphy. It's like in the Snow Queen, it's as though my daughter had been shattered into a million pieces by her vaccine reaction, and in every book I read I pick up a few of the shards of glass, and attempt laboriously to put them back together. It's all I can do besides loving her, and she is a very lovable girl, despite her disability. She drooled for many years (a symptom of brain damage, a shard I picked up two years ago), does math entirely normally for her age (the school autism resource specialist said retarded children are deficient in all academic skills, so that showed she wasn't retarded). I surmise that the encephalitis only damaged the verbal, conceptual, and social areas of her brain, leaving the math area intact. I don't think she'll ever be independent, go to the university, hold a job, marry, or have chldren of her own, and all I can do is pick up more shards and work on my homeschooling her three days a week.
I would just like others to learn from my experience, and at least research every vaccine very carefully before allowing their child to get it. There are dangers on either side, but you should be aware that your doctor is not going to tell you everything you should know before consenting. Your experience has influenced your views to being pro-vaccine, and I respect that. Based on my experience and reading, I wish to God that I had not let my baby out of my sight, and that I had never allowed her to get any vaccine.

Grendels,
I appreciate your thoughtful letter. I forget whether I told you that the same day I got a tetanus booster before I went to Mexico for the first time when I was nineteen, both my arms were paralyzed for two days. My dorm roommate had to carry my tray in the cafeteria and help me dress, because both arms were very painful and I couldn't move them. I learned not long ago that it must have been brachial neuropathy, seen usually in someone who has gotten a lot of tetanus vaccines. I later developed multiple sclerosis, and I understand that there is no direct proof, but MS was new in the early nineteenth century, after the smallpox vaccine, so I think it may well have been caused by vaccine damage. I think there is a genetic tendency in our family to react to vaccines.

While I know that any of the vaccine-preventable diseases can occasionally kill or disable, since the vaccines can too, you ultimately have to be willing to play the odds one way or the other. I've had measles, chicken pox, and whooping cough, Cecily has had the last two, and I would never take the considerable risk of letting her get the MMR. She has had so many colds, coughs, and flus as well, and sailed through them, that I just have no fear of mumps, measles, or rubella, I'm certain she would be in the majority that gets them, gets well, and strengthens her immune system in the process. When I think of the many different types of immune or nervous system damage it would be possible for vaccines to cause in us, for me it is no choice at all. Most adults are immune to the meningococcal virus, usually through subclinical exposure. I am confident that Cecily will be one of the majority that becomes immune without resorting to a vaccine and probably without a severe case of the disease.

It has done me good to correspond with you. I will from now on think of you and your son when I read about Prevnar and the pneumococcal virus, and I will remember the other side, that the diseases can kill or cause permanent disability, just as the vaccines have done in our family. I wish you and your family well.