I agree with Lenny

The experts are desperate to make it seem that autism is not on the rise, especially not in the meteoric fashion that it would seem, because if it is, then they have to identify the trigger. (Substitute leukemia for autism and ten look at the numbers again... People would be up in arms were that true.)

The experts are also desperate for any potential trigger to not be vaccines as well. Couple of good reasons for this...

First, vaccines are given to perfectly healthy babies (remember that illness is a contra-indicator to nearly all jabs). That means if they damage the child, that is considerably more troubling than using a procedure or medication on a sick child and have it go wrong. If someone has cancer for instance, and is going to die, there is a chance the chemo may save them. Should it kill them, well they were going to die already, so the risk of treatment is offset by the known risk of dieing in the absense of treatment.

Damaging a healthy person however becomes a direct violation of the very creedo that physicians attest to when they become doctors. The basic underlying tennant of the Hyppocratic oath is "first, do no harm". And if vaccines truly do turn out to be the triggering event, then the FDA, CDC, IOM, AAP, NIH, and ama are in direct violation of that which they have sworn to practice their profession by.

Secondly is the very real threat of epidemic disease that we shall face should we abandon vaccines altogether. Polio is nothing to trifle with, and prior to the use of vaccines there were literally hospitol wards full of people breathing via iron lungs and biding their time till their bodies failed. It does not matter that only 10% of the people who contracted polio had this severe reaction. It still amounted to thousands and thousands of people.

Measles too is a very serious disease. It can cause lifelong complications, including brain damage. Whether there would be more people damaged by catching measles than are damaged by vaccinating for them is completely unknown, and anyone who claims otherwise one way or the other is talking out of their ass. But measles is a very serious disease, even in healthy populations.

another consideration is the fact that thanks to the mass innoculation of people, we have destroyed the natural immunity that used to protect the majority of us. Mothers do not pass immunity protection to their babies when nursing when the mother's immunity came from a needle. And so now babies face the risk of disease that before they did not till they were a bit older and better able to survive it. Vaccination to protect infants has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

And the protection that vaccines give is fleeting at best. When you caught and survived chicken pox, or rubella, or the mumps, you were protected for life. but get you protection from the end of a needle, and suddenly you need booster shots, or you run the risk of catching the very diseases you were spared as children when you grow up and become adults. And most of the childhood diseases which a 6 year old would have little trouble with given adequate care become extremely dangerous when you are an adult.

So the experts are very desperate for the triggering event of autism to be anything but vaccinations, and if it can be called genetics, all the better. That would spare big industry unnecessary liability for toxic waste problems as well.

There is only one small problem with the theory that the autism was here all along and we did not recognize it as such. There is no historical autism at all. Autism is a problem of the 20th century with no recorded occurances prior to Kanner's discovery. At that time it was called such by Kanner and others in the field - a new disorder manifesting itself for unknown reasons.

And you cannot even say that 25 years ago there were the undiagnosed hordes of auties that we are only now recognizing. If this is indeed true, where are all the adults? the US DOE currently has reported some 65K children under the age of 21 who are autistic. KLnowing that many children are mislabeled (possibly as many as are labeled) and also that roughly half of autistic children get sent to residential care by the time the reach 14, we can extrapolate that the reported number 65K should be closer to 180K for all people under the age of 21.

So if autism is a constant rate of occurance, there should also be about the same numnber in teh 22-39 age bracket, and again in the 40-60 group. And I am sorry folks, but that just ain't the case.