Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland. But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. The few psychologists and pediatricians who’d even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism.īut wait - wasn’t the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? Don’t most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.
One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. “Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who’d been there. TED2015 The forgotten history of autism.Working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society “ “we need every form of human intelligence on the planet Human history is replete with examples of treating human difference as deficiency and disorder – and is, perhaps, one of the greatest disorders afflicting humanity. Why is it that we still insist on regarding those who are different as “not normal”, “deficient” and categorizing them as “mentally ill”.ĭifference is neither illness nor disorder.ĭifference is the space from which we can learn and understand. Through to autistic people reclaiming their power, finding their own voice and coining the term neurodiversity, calling themselves neurodiverse and others neurotypical. Steve Silberman, author of the book Neurotribes, offers a brief history of autism, from Nazi extermination plans and a discredited journal article about vaccinesand how that has shaped our current understanding of autism.
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