One child in 91 diagnosed with autism; two child schizophrenics
Posted By Phyllis on October 7, 2009
The news recently has had two disturbing items in it relating to the health of our children.
One was the results of a phone survey of families of 78,000 children. The surveyors asked how many children aged 3-17 in the household had ever been diagnosed with autism. The answer: 1 in 91. This is a marked increase from the previously accepted level of 1 in 150, which was a huge increase from the level of one in thousands, 50 years ago when my autistic brother was born. Something is very wrong and getting worse, and it started in the early 1990s.
The second disturbing item was a clip of an Oprah Winfrey show describing the life of a 7-year-old schizophrenic. Lo and behold, she has a little friend who is also a very young schizophrenic. There are two of them. Generally, schizophrenia comes on in late teens or early adulthood. Childhood schizophrenics are one in 10,000 or one in 40,000, depending on which Web page you are quoting. So is this becoming more common?
Yes, there is a link between autism and schizophrenia. Autistics are about twice as likely to become schizophrenic as normal people are. No one knows why, of course.
Amy Yasko, a pioneer in applying genetics research to autism treatment, has called the children of the autism epidemic “the canaries in the coal mine.” She contends that we are living in a soup of toxins, and that the children are most susceptible and affected first.
I certainly hope that someone does major research soon examining the possible environmental triggers of autism, including exposure to so many vaccines. (The research that has been going on is underfunded and focusing on genetics rather than environment.)
We need to know what is causing this. It is a disaster.
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Vaccines have been around a lot longer than this epidemic. Did something change in the vaccines? I’m not completely convinced on the vaccine idea especially when there are so many other toxins surrounding us such as the new findings about vinyl flooring.
The epidemic started ramping up in the late 1980’s, also the time that the number of vaccines began to increase (from 10 shots of 7 diseases in 1983 to 36 shots of 15 diseases recently).
http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/10/safeminds-asks-what-causes-autism-has-science-really-ruled-out-vaccines.html#more
You’re right, there are so many other toxins out there, including plastics, that we probably won’t be blaming all autism on vaccines when more facts are known. Researchers are agreeing that autism is caused by genetic factors augmented by environmental triggers. Clearly there are plenty of triggers in our world.
Do you know how these statistics are arrived at? The CDC gathers them from what school districts have in their files!!!! If you have any experience at all with school districts you know these nubers are not accurate. They are either under reported orover reported to fit a various school financial agendas. We don’t know what the statistics numbers. Furthermore, if these numbers are based on DMS-IV which is a very unscientific method of assesment of nuerological problems we are in trouble indeed.