7 'Controversies' That Are Total Bullsh*t

5. Autism Is On The Rise (It’s Not)

So if vaccines don't cause autism, why have autism rates rocketed since the year 2000?

Well, the simple answer is that they haven't.

And before you start waving numbers around, allow me. In the 1980s autism prevalence was reported as 1 in 10,000 children. In the nineties, it was 1 in 2500 and later 1 in 1000. In 2015, it is somewhere around 1 in 68. Now, that's one hell of a leap, but weirdly, the number of children in special education (table 3, page 92) has actually fallen since 1979 (perhaps partially to do with more support in mainstream schooling, but there are bigger factors at play).

So, why is this? Where are all the extra autistic children? By all right, our specialist schools should be bursting at the seams.

The truth is that rates of autism haven't really risen at all, but our diagnostic criteria has changed dramatically. This leads to a much higher number of children that would have been diagnosed with a generalised learning disability, receiving a diagnosis of autism instead.

So, when people attribute phantom causes such as vaccines, GMOs and even god damn gluten to the rise in autism, they're actually pinning a phantom to a phantom.

Okay, the truth is that we don't know what causes autism and, for the sake of scientific balance, we can't rule environmental factors out altogether, but the "epidemic" is nowhere near as dramatic as the raw data might suggest and the scaremongering has to stop.