Lies, Damned Lies and CDC Autism Statistics

It’s official now, real autism rates have exploded to 1 in 100 American children. We’re facing a national public health emergency of historic proportions. Bigger than swine flu. Bigger than polio. Bigger than almost anything one can imagine except AIDS. No matter how hard some may try, it’s impossible to escape the inexorable upward march of the numbers. Even Tom Insel, head of autism research at NIH and not exactly the autism world’s greatest forward thinker, has conceded the obvious: “There is no question that there has got to be an environmental component here.”

http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/12/mark-blaxill-lies-damned-lies-and-cdc-auti...


1. Start the history of autism in 1992

CDC surely understands that a huge part of the controversy over rising autism rates is defining when the increases started so we can better locate the environmental roots behind autism’s recent rise. They also understand that the criticism over CDC’s own role in this controversy begins with the escalation in the childhood immunization program that started with the introduction of new vaccines for Haemophilus influenza B (Hib) and hepatitis B in 1990 and 91, respectively. And they certainly understand that an honest investigation of the effect of their own policies must include a comparison of autism rates for children born in 1989 or earlier with those born in 1991 or later.

So what has the CDC done with ADDM? They left the investigation of children born in the 1980s out of the ADDM entirely! According to ADDM, the history of autism surveillance starts with children born in 1992. Anything before that becomes ancient history as far as CDC is concerned.

But what makes this omission even more dishonest is that the CDC began its own autism survey work with data that did include children born in the 1980s. In fact, they led one of the more thorough autism survey analyses ever conducted, one in which CDC-paid clinicians personally conducted diagnostic interviews for every suspected case of autism in a target population in Brick Township, New Jersey born between 1988 and 1995. They can even compare this NJ data with their own data from four NJ counties in ADDM (which included Ocean County and Brick Township).

And what did CDC find when they did this thorough analysis?

• That among children born 1988 or 1989, there were exactly ZERO cases of full syndrome autism; yet by the 1993 birth year the full syndrome rate had soared to 1 in 128.

• That cases of all autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) went from a rate of 1 in 225 among children born between 1988 and 1991 (the most precise data breakdown received from CDC) to over 1 in 80 for children born in 1992.

• And that the rates of ASD found in its ADDM analysis of children born in NJ in 1992 and 1994, far away the highest rates in the ADDM network, may have actually understated the autism rates in some parts of NJ.

We know all this not because the CDC actually published these numbers honestly on its own (their published report on the Brick Township survey actually denied that there was an upward trend!), but because SafeMinds founder Sallie Bernard had questions about the findings, asked CDC employees for unpublished data and received some partial responses. Left to its own devices, however, the CDC chose to launch its official history of autism rates starting with children born in 1992. The only conclusion one can draw is that they don’t really want the world to know what autism rates were before 1990. Tweet