Norminn wrote:


After all the hysteria trying to link vaccines with autism, coke seemed
a slightly more logical suspect ) I once had a neighbor with two
severly autistic children....they were wild! The rate of autism
diagnosis nowadays is about 1%....an epidemic like that should be
getting a lot more scientific study! Jeez!

It gets a whole lot of scientific study. The problem is that those
affected don't like the results: genetics and aged gravidas (mothers).

Females have all the eggs they're ever going to have at birth (theirs)
and those eggs age and are perhaps contaminated by various events that
happen to the mothers (e.g., radiation and even maybe cocaine) so
along comes a 40+ pregnancy with damaged eggs and hence damaged genes.
Currently they're trying to blame the aged sperm of the fathers but
that's unlikely because males generate sperm all the time. Any
environmental damage is either recent or if it damages the Sertoli
cells (the sperm-producing cells) it will probably result in
sterility.

Naturally this possible causation is likely to cause considerable
guilt feelings in those capitainesses of industry who have deferred
childbirth because of their careers so they're wiggling like crazy to
find some other cause. Similarly breast cancer.

The other aspect is simply bad genes to start with but there are PC
aspects here too. There's a series on Charlie Rose (PBS) called the
"Brain Series" which assembles some pretty heavy scientists in each
particular disease subset and they usually also include a sufferer or
in the case of autism, a mother. Although the scientists generally
admit some genetic involvement they rarely come out with the brutality
I would. In the case of autism they stumbled around the genetic
question until the mother, after having described her day-to-day
problems, mentioned that her brother was autistic! Everyone went quiet
until Charlie (PC to the hilt) jumped in and moved the conversation
off the point. I guess asking, "Why the hell did you breed?" wouldn't
have been an acceptable comment.