I love this!

Which is a strange thing to say, since under Kanner’s criteria regressive autism could never have been thought of as “autism”. Quoting from Kanner (1943):

“The outstanding, “pathognomonic,” fundamental disorder is the children’s inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations from the begining of life. Their parents referred to them as having always been “sel-sufficient”; “like in a shell”; “happiest when left alone”; “acting as if people weren’t there”; “perfectly oblivious to everything about him”; “giving the impression of silent wisdom”; “failing to develop the usual amount of social awareness”;“acting almost as hypnotized.” This is not, as in schizophrenic children or adults, a departure from an initially present relationship; it is not a “withdrawal” from formerly existing participation.”

(Emphasis mine)

He claims that people couldn’t have overlooked “hundreds and hundreds” or regressive cases in the last 20 years.

Hundreds?

He says that there is no change in the criteria for ‘regressive’ autism.

Now, one of the real strange things, he claims that the regressive cases have stayed at the same percentage of the total number of the autism count.

If the number of regressive autism is too small to see in an epidemiological study, how can you say that the fraction of the total has stayed the same.

This leaves the HUGE question—what has caused the total to increase? Why would it change at the exact same rate as the ‘clearly regressive’ type? This makes no sense. Let’s say that improved detection is behind the non regressive type and TCV’s are behind the regressive type. Why would they increase at the same rate?

Of course, another big question—why would the ‘clearly regressive’ increase at all? Shouldn’t it have jumped and dropped with each change in the thimerosal load from the vaccine schedule?

The logic is not working.

There’s no real evidence of a true increase, is the key part. If Harold or someone else feel there is evidence of a true increase, please post it so we can discuss it.(Harold specifically seems to believe that if the increase in diagnoses is big enough, there just needs to be a real increase somewhere in there – maybe he can explain the reasoning that leads to that conclusion).

That’s what all the skeptics been saying for a few years now.

The thing is, if the “view” of a thing is so fuzzy that you can’t tell if it’s growing or shrinking, then it generally tends to mean that it’s not growing or shrinking very much. In other words, if you could see a normal sized person a mile away, you probably couldn’t tell if he or she suddenly grew an inch taller. But you could see if he or she suddenly doubled in size or grew 10 or 1,000 times larger.

The real numbers of autism are so close to what they have always been that the experts can’t tell if they really have increased.

The numbers used to make it look like there’s an “epidemic” are badly and very obviously twisted. A child can understand the problems with the IDEA data and the CDDS data and why we know that they show no “epidemic”.

For instance that the “epidemic” is mostly found in southern California in the DDS data, and is strongly correlated with the wealthy sections of SoCal.

For instance, as the numbers of “autism” have risen in the IDEA data, the numbers of “MR” and “SLD” have dropped to more than cover the increase in “autism”.

People don’t have a leg to stand on if they insist on the “epidemic”. Even ASA president Lee Grossman couldn’t defend it when put on spot. He knows, it seems, that there hasn’t been an epidemic.

He also says he wants to see autism accepted and cherished as a normal part of humanity.

Why? The burden of proof is not on me. It’s on whoever proposes a potential cause.

Can I definitely say there’s no such thing as an autism epidemic? Yes. I’ve discussed the reasons at length. They are complicated, but they are there. If you don’t like it, prove me wrong, Harold.

Has there been a corresponding drop in the money spent on kids with “MR” as we see the increase in money spent on “autism”? (I’d think so.)

There are something like 10 or 20 old and current psychiatric labels that have been applied to people with traits that seem also to be part of autism. Why aren’t we discussing all of them now? What happened to “mental retardation with autistic features”? How close is “schizoid” personality disorder to autism and how likely would it be for someone to confuse them if they weren’t well trained in identifying autism?

How many people were well trained in identifying autism 20 years ago? How many are now? Is this number leading the “autism epidemic”? If you introduce a diagnostician to a small town, if they start practicing in a town where there was no one diagnosing autism previously, is it followed by an “outbreak of autism diagnoses” in all age groups?

If you add an ABA or Floortime therapist to a town, will there be a sudden outbreak of autistic children?

“Woo” as you like to call it comes in many varieties. If you are seriously suggesting that you can definitively say there are no environmental contributors to the startling increases in autism diagnoses then you are simply spreading your own variety of woo.