The U.S. Department of Education reports a 173% increase in autistic children served under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act between the 1992-93 school year, when 15,580 children were counted, and 1997-98, when the figure was 42,500.
Some call it an epidemic, while others, like Lou Danielson of the Education Department's office of special education programs, says the statistics are suspect. In regards to his office's statistics, he mentioned that until 1991, there was no category for reporting autism. "Children with autism were always there," he says, "but they just were not being counted in this category."
Despite these claims, demand for more resources for autistic children is real. Martin Babayco, head of the special education program in the Ojai (Calif.) Unified School District, says, "Within the last two years, our numbers have gone steadily up. Is this a large number? Yes, 25 in a small school district like ours; it is an extreme number. We don't know why. I've talked to other educators, and they have a similar upswing."
Scientists, though acknowledging that the increase in occurrence of autism is real, say they don't know the cause. Other people have suggested a pollutant or pesticide cause. Still other people, including parents of autistic individuals, say they know the cause. They are convinced that at least in some cases the multiple vaccines and the combination vaccines, such as measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), given children cause autism.
There haven't been any studies done in the U.S. on the effects of combined vaccines, but the UK has, and according to an article in the British journal Lancet, the rates of occurrence of autism were similar among vaccinated and unvaccinated children. According to the article, researchers say the causes of most autism cases are genetic and occur early in the embryonic development. But they do admit that there are some cases in which a child appears to be developing normally and suddenly regresses into autism.
Marie Bristol-Power, coordinator of the Network on Neurobiology and Genetics of Autism at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, says that for most children "the symptoms of autism are evident from birth. MMR is given at 12 to 15 months of age. For most children, the MMR vaccine can't be implicated because symptoms are there before they got the vaccine. But about 20% have normal development and then regress. Right now, we don't know what would cause that."
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