It's hardly worth mentioning, since Instapundit's already linked it, but Dr Manhattan's article on McCain and the autism/vaccine connection is really very good.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I'm not about to start reading Instapundit, so please don't hesitate to post anything interesting just because it may have already been posted there.
What an excellent, balanced summary of the issue, with great links.
I agree that part of the increase in diagnosed cases is that schools have actively looked for autism-spectrum children - it has become a catch-all diagnosis. My son has documented traumatic brain injury which leads him to have langauge processing delays and poor eye contact. His school district wanted to classify him as 'autism-spectrum not elsewhere classified', and seemed to think I was just in denial when I questioned the diagnosis.
The description that is used is so vague that it would be hard for almost anyone to disprove the diagnosis. I eventually figured out that this was used by the schools when they could see that a child needed extra help but didn't fit into one of the more specific labels. A child can't get extra help without a label, after all. The schools were simply trying to help children that needed it, but surely one result has been many more diagnoses of autism-spectrum.
And if you think about the personalities of the mathematicians or engineers or economists you know, it becomes apparent that many of them would have been diagnosed as autism-spectrum when young, if the schools had been more vigilant back then.