It is almost official - 1 in 100 Children has Autism...

From the Huffington Post:

A pair of federally funded studies on autism rates is about to make news -- big news -- and it isn't good: It would appear that somewhere around one percent of all US children currently have an autism spectrum disorder. The rate is even higher among six to 11 year olds and among boys, according to data from at least one of the new studies.

If you are an expectant parent, or planning to have a child soon, you might want to sit down before absorbing these staggering statistics, recently released by the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH), which is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

According to data from the 2007 telephone survey of parents of nearly 82,000 US children, the odds of a parent being told that their child has an ASD are one in 63. If it is a boy, the chances climb to a science fiction-like level of one in 38, or 2.6% of all male children in America.

But there was also some surprisingly good news. Enormous numbers of children who were told that they had autism went on to shed the ASD label as they got older, parents reported.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/autism-rate-now-at-one-pe_b_256141.html

The article is very vaccine oriented in causality, but I think the immunological point is a good one. The environmental trigger, on the other hand, could be more or not limited to vaccines. But 1 in 100. Wow. How many more children will it take before the leaders in my state and country take it seriously enough to devoted adequate resources to research into causes and cure or to require complete medical care paid for under insurance?

I think there is good news in that children shed the label of autism, but even that needs to be looked into. I can't imagine that Jimmy will, but of course it would be what I want most in the world.