Surfing The Autism Tsunami

23 Apr

In a truly fascinating post, Autism Diva provides primary evidence for how seriously the pro-cure autism movements statistics should be taken.

Its a favourite ploy of the pro-cure crowd to whip up hysteria about the growing incidence of autism with fullsome phrases like ‘autism epidemic’ and ‘autism tsunami’ (this last was coined just after the events of Boxing Day 2004 in a tasteful, respectful way to make a point!) being bandied about. Rick Rollens, a former Secretary of the California Senate and Dad to an autistic son coined this lovely turn of phrase. Rollens says the percentage of newly enrolled autistics who are from age 3 to 5 is, 82%.

“a staggering tidal wave of young children”…an “autism tsunami”

Leaving aside the tasteless phraseology (of course, it will come as no surprise that this little beauty was in – you guessed it – a Schafer Autism Report, that purveyor of misinformation and factual ambiguity), is he right? Is California caught up in a huge increase in autism cases? Well, Autism Diva gets it stright from the horses mouth: Rollens gets his figures from California DDS and claims the system is a very accurate way of measuring autism epidemiology in California.

So Autism Diva emailed a statistician who works for California DDS and got this response (truncated):

Although the source of information for many reports on autism for California is the Department of Developmental Services (DDS)’ “Quarterly Client Characteristics Report”, the numbers reported by DDS are often misunderstood and misrepresented by others. Except for Table 2 of the Report, only persons with a Client Development Evaluation Report (CDER) on file who have “active” status in the DDS system are counted in the report tables. So, numbers reported do not represent all persons with developmental disabilities in the State of California. The numbers can not be used to report the incidence of autism, for example.

Which torpedos Rollens arguement very neatly. It also illustrates just how much trust you should put in statistics when quoted by people such as Rollens or Schafer.