They come at the end of the podcast, which can be found at http://www.mic.mypodcast.com

Non-profits are notorious for playing fast and loose with numbers. This 1.5 million number was likely cooked up in the development office or mandated by the Wrights cuz it sounds like a really big number. The junior epi employee is in a tough spot cuz he can’t defend the number yet can’t undermine mgmt. Ah, fundraising.

Also, the Park Ave. address is the result of free office space from NBC.

Pardon my continued disdain, but in my opinion, anyone who has to have such a showy mailing address is apparently more in it to keep the showy address operating than to really help la causa.

How do we describe someone who has no time to explain the gory detail(s) to the little people? As Flaming Narcissists, in my book.

Your own kids are who they are, and might have their characteristic data recorded which would become statistics, but they are still individual human beings which cause the data and statistics, they are not the results of the statistics.

Harold is a concern troll. That’s his apparent MO in most blog discussions. A clear instance was demonstrated here.

Harold, I have nothing against you commenting here when you see fit. But you do not ever seem to want to actually debate the issues, just to have a quick sneer (which is usually mistaken, as in this case. You got the author wrong and mentioned some bizarre thing about your blog alerts) and then leave.

What do you get out of that exactly? We know you don’t like us. That’s fine. At least the anti-vax brigade have a go at actually debating when they visit. There’s a reason for them to be here. I have no idea what your reason for visiting any other blogs comments sections are.

I understand the problem… all I have to do is look at my eldest son. Yes, he definately started 6yrs ago on the spectrum. Yes, he still has some “quirks” that we are still working on. But he’ll be fine. Independant, hold a job, marry etc. So… will he still qualify as having PDD OR is he “cured” (I prefer the word “educated”) according to their Stats???

Not going to lose sleep over it… but it’s something to think about.

S.

But then there’s also a parallel with just about any medical condition, where the drug industry and its experts will promote stats vastly expanding the numbers affected, in order to vastly increase product markets.

Far from the anti-vaxxers being any kind of bane to the drug industry, they are among its assets. Think of the lost profit on a couple of one-off shots, and then think of the profit gained on ten years of Ritalin.

I’m surprised that Autism Speaks isn’t funded by Merck.

Or is it?

It should also be made clear that the figure is for the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. And there shouldn’t always be a motivation to show ever increasing prevalences of autism. I doubt that there could be many undiagnosed cases nowadays, particularly of those on the severe end of the spectrum. It shouldn’t be so difficult to come up with consistent numbers on prevalence rates. There should be direct methods of acquiring all of the data needed to calculate the prevalence.