Now, you probably know at least something about autism. It's a spectrum disorder, ranging from kids with IQs of 70 and an almost total inability to communicate or express emotion, to people with Asperger's Syndrome, characterized by a high IQ, difficulty socializing or picking up body language, and a tendency to be obsessive. (I bet a quarter of all BFCers could be convincingly diagnosed with Asperger's.) It starts showing up, often with no prior warning, at between 18 months and three years of age, and no one knows what causes it.
The statistics are kind of amazing. As of 2011, it affects 1:88 children (1:54 boys and 1:252 girls) born in the USA, about ten times the global average. But, there are apparently no country-by-country statistics available online, save for a few first-world countries. So if it's something related to, say, vaccines, antidepressants, certain types of pollution, or other first-world issues, you'd never be able to tell.
The really weird thing? When autism was first identified in the 1950s, there was about one case in every 10,000 births. By the late 1960s, that had quintupled to 5:10,000. Then, this happened:
Possible causes include: Genetics, paternal age, breastfeeding, not breastfeeding, cell phones, getting a urinary tract infection or high fever while pregnant, proximity to freeways, dairy products, gluten, meat with antibiotics in it, processed food, household chemicals, pesticides, children's television programming, "cry it out" parenting (like, when you let the kid cry instead of picking him or her up, to foster independence), vaccines, and antidepressants.
Now, there's evidence for all these things contributing to autism. For example, if you take an autistic kid off of wheat and gluten, s/he usually shows a dramatic improvement in symptoms. There's a clear correlation between the likelihood of one child to get autism if a sibling or other relative has it. The rise in autism seems to mirror the rise in availability of children's television programming. But the ones that get the average conspiracy theorists' heart pumping are those implicating Big Pharm.
If you like slutty comedians, you're probably familiar with one woman's much-maligned crusade to have research done on the relationship between vaccines and autism. Interestingly, while this is the fastest-growing disease in the USA, and affect primarily boys (slightly more white boys than blacks or Hispanics, no less), it has a very slim federal research budget - $169 million per year, about .55% of total federal research grants. Compare this with the proposed $18 billion federal program to arm and train teachers to use guns in public schools, and/or provide security guards for public schools, to stop mass shootings that kill less than ten children per year. Former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy felt that more research should be done on vaccines.
Now her kid, along with lots of kids (including the son of a prominent autism researcher who had defended vaccines as safe, but has now changed his tune) began showing symptoms of autism right after the 18-month vaccines, which is right on schedule for when autism starts to appear, but still. And, the number of childhood vaccines recommended in the USA has risen concurrent with the rise in autism (7-8 in the 1960s and 1970s, 36 today), so it made sense to look into it. So, a bunch of studies were done and there was absolutely, positively, no causal relationship discovered between vaccines and autism, although mercury was banned from all US vaccines, just because. And every mainstream article you read about it brings up Jenny McCarthy as a "celebrity idiot" who tricked women into not getting their kids vaccinated on time and causing death and destruction blah blah blah.
ANYWAY. Since my kid has several risk factors for autism going in (dad is old, I'm old, I got a UTI, dad used flea medicine on the dogs, I'm kind of Aspergery), I'll be opting for the "hippy vaccine schedule," which only some pediatricians offer. Basically, instead of getting 36 vaccinations by age four, it spreads the vaccines out over seven years. Hey, it's my kid and my aluminum foil.
The other Big Pharm-threatening conspiracy theory is antidepressants. Like children's television and vaccinations, the rise of antidepressant use has skyrocketed concurrent with the rate of autism, about 400% since 1980. Antidepressants are also concentrated in breast milk, which has been implicated by various studies (the longer you breastfeed in the USA, you get a slightly higher chance of giving your kid autism; it's apparently the opposite in Latin America, where antidepressants are used less often, but no hard data was available). But, thus far, very few studies have been done on any relationship between antidepressants and autism, though those that have been done do suggest a clear link. Moreover, antidepressants are scientifically designed to change the brain. And, since antidepressants seem to drive adult men crazier than women (see Aurora, Newtown, Fort Bragg, Virginia Tech, Columbine, etc for more on that), the sex difference seems telling. Interestingly, my doctors and doula (like a junior midwife) both told me that antidepressants were safe during pregnancy. I don't consider antidepressants safe ever, I think it's insane to take them unless your depression is totally debilitating and you've already spent six months eating only health food and exercising rigorously. And you're not even supposed to take a fucking Tylenol during pregnancy.
So, here's the real clincher. The reason WHY they say they can't do a big huge study about antidepressants is because they're in the tap water! Seriously. If you take antidepressants, you're pissing most of them out and giving them to the rest of us. Which means, since basically everyone in the USA is on anti-depressants all the time, no study could every really conclusively link it to autism. Alex Jones and Prison Planet did a very complete article about antidepressants in the water, with links to less embarrassing sources: http://www.prisonplanet.com/scientific- ... utism.html
So. To make a long story even longer, I got to thinking. Fluoride in your tap water is a kind of silly conspiracy theory imo, just because it goes back to that largely mythological thing about how Nazis used it to make people more stupid and easy to control. But scientific studies show that it mostly just keeps you from getting cavities. Antidepressants, however, are proven to make people more stupid and easy to control - if you can't get bummed out by anything, because you've been rewired to be happy and mellow no matter what's going on, you're going to be easy to walk all over. I can shaft you for $1000 and you can just pop a couple of Xanax and be like, "Whatever man, someone just posted this inspirational quote on Facebook with flowers and kittens in the background and I'm fine with it." Unlike fluoride, which is probably just a general toxin and at worst a blunt psyops tool perfected when the Pope was but a child, antidepressants are scientifically designed to keep you smiling no matter what.
Doesn't that kind of just make sense? Why Americans were pretty much totally OK with the whole dog-and-pony show of an election cycle? The bank bailouts? Why poor people are so easy to convince that rich people should pay a lower tax rate than they do? And so on? OK, I'll shut up now....
