If autism is caused by something in the environment...

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...and it's something really bad like GMO food or electromagnetic fields, what can we do about it? Have we doomed our civilization like the Romans doomed theirs by drinking lead?

I subscribe to a blog called Natural News, I did it by accident because I wanted to see some of the guy's posts on the depression we're in, only now I get 4 emails a day from his email service. Anyway, this dude is a big subscriber to eco-apocalypse theories, he thinks that someday humans won't be able to reproduce because of all the crud in our environment, he thinks that autism is caused by vaccines he thinks that 20somethings will start dropping like flies from exotic cancers due to cell phones.

And I read his stuff and wonder if there really IS an environmental cause to autism, something big we're missing, and if there is, what do we do with all the severely impaired people who become adults and who are still stuck in their own little worlds? I mean, we can't support baby boomers with Social Security and Medicare, what do we do with tens of millions of autistics who can't function in society?

And if it's something intrinsic to our civilization like computers or food, what do we DO about that? What CAN we do about that? Lead poisoning is one thing, but permanently altering the human genome, not to mention the genome of everything else, by our silly games is quite another. Species are dying at a rate not seen since an asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago, and it may be because we've altered their genomes so that they can no longer reproduce like the male fish with eggs in their testes because of birth control pills in the water, and what happens if humans have mutated ourselves out of existence? Not to mention everything else? Life might fix itself eventually, but "eventually" means millions of years! By then there would be a totally different species list. It took four billion years to evolve humans, and once humans started applying willy nilly genetic alterations, it all went to pot.

Suggest you worry about that topic on that site. .It has very little to do with Autism (the forum you posted in) and quite frankly isn't really worded in a fashion that I imagine would be welcome here... Maybe check the other forum categories here, or post on something a bit more topical.

Low-functioning autistics are the minority, I see no reason why we couldn't have a world full of high-functioning autistics.

I caught encephalitis from a girlfriend about 4 years ago, I'm sure I became more autistic after that

There are two different uses for the term "Autism." And this is what leads to so much confusion and controversy.

One is the diagnosis Autism, which is generally considered to be detectable as early as the first three years of life, but not at birth, and is usually detected much later than three years, often in teen years, and even into adulthood. Autism is usually considered to be neurological differences that exist in the brain from birth.

The other is "autism," the concept, for which a fairly decent definition can be seen here. http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=autism

The second though, is not the same as the diagnosis. It is the concept of being absorbed in one's self, and can be associated with any number of diagnoses, including depression, Bi-Polar, and Schizophrenia. This "autism" though, is a symptom of other disorders. Even many neurotpicals can present with autistic symptoms without actually having Autism.

Autism, the disorder is not a symptom, but a DX all its own, with it's own set of symptoms. In order to consider it a DX on it's own, Schizophrenia must be ruled out first.

I think it is entirely possible that environmental toxins may create autistic-like symptoms that mimic Autism, but aren't really Autism the DX, not present from birth.

That said, I think OddFiction has a good point. What you are debating is more than likely considered "not" Autism by most users here, including myself. That's not Autism according to the DSM. What you're talking about may mimic Autism, and may very well present with autistic (note the lower case "a") symptoms, but since you and most users here are likely to confuse the two, it's not likely to lead to a very productive discussion here if you think they are the same. They're not.

Autism is caused by people like that guy who blogs on Natural News. You see, there's only so much BS people can take before their brains become overloaded with crap and shut down. Afterwards, they no longer have the desire nor capability to associate with the world around them, thus becoming autistic.

Nothing. We celebrate our differences, and go on with our lives, like we always have.

Thanks for a laugh.

OP, autism is genetic. The exact genes or the exact mechanism, we don't know; but it has all the signs of being something that's passed on from your parents or results from a glitch in your DNA.

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Years ago I tried to carefully look at the whole idea of the environment and autism/Asperger/ADHD and so on. What I found was that there was something called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (Theron Randolph, M.D. - Clinical Ecology) / PBS - Trade Secrets - Bill Moyer, and a lot of scare tactics used including the Alar apple scare. Also am aware of false ideas such as: wheat causes all of autism, food additives cause all neurological challenges from polio to Parkinson's, and all neurological challenges can be fixed by megadoses of Vitamin C. There's so much garbage out there and so little good information. The only account I am aware of which I found reliable which touches a little on the topic is a How To (understand) book (1981) about ADHD by C. Thomas Wild which reports an extreme chemical reaction to a few food additives (not all food additives) such as FD&C Yellow Food Color No. 5 and the artificial sweetener, sodium saccharin. The author called for full disclosure ingredient labeling and believes that food additives do not cause classic ADHD at all but a few food additives can act as powerful, undisclosed drugs for a handful of persons - hence, the need for better ingredient labeling. Again, the problem is that there so much scare misinformation about the subject that the very rare true reports get lost in the process. The news media in general hasn't helped with giving a lot of coverage to people such as Andrew Wakefield who promoted the idea that all autism is due to vaccines (simplified) and had his medical license revoked ten years or more after he spread his false ideas around the world. Am aware of at least three other doctors who did similar things like Wakefield - promote false ideas about environmental causes - and were able to attract a lot of media press with their false ideas often because parents and the news media wanted to blame things on something like fluoride rather than genetics/a difficult delivery/subtle brain injuries/concussions/encephalitis and so on. There are a number of non-profit environmental groups today which I will not support at all because they are too much like Wakefield and the vaccines - they're blaming everything on flouride or some mysterious, unknown chemical from outer space/the moon landing. One of the groups on my do not believe completely list (2010) is the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest which (my view) more than once has made some sort of sensational false statement about something in the environment. The CSPI does it for free publicity and to raise money (my view) and has crossed over the line of truth too many times for me to believe them completely today (2010) at all. At times, the CSPI tends to make a joke out of their extremism believing that it's ok to exaggerate things if it can move their agenda forward and it gets them free publicity. That approach (exhaggeration which crosses the line of truth) has turned me off.

I debated whether to admit laughing my arse off at that. Don't want you (pezar) to take it the wrong way though. I'm not sure you've been reading WP long enough to see the humor in it. Nothing personal. But that was pretty funny.

What we know as autism is actually most likely a combination of genetic and environmental influences ( epigenetic and ordinary ). It is also a social construct, ie. disability is itself a "product" of society/social conditions; what is experienced as disability is socially determined. It's a label.

Whether or not there is something intrinsically disabling about any of the various metabolic and neurological and behavioural "differences" associated with "autism(s)", ( ie. such that no rearrangement of society would ever be able to do more than "carry" those differences ), something which is debatable, I think there's no doubt that it has environmental components.

What is currently diagnosed as autism has many etiologies; it is not a "discrete" "disease/disorder" entity, but a presenting set of "symptoms" caused by many different things, such that certain subgroups of people dx'd as autist are not even "suffering" from the same underlying problem at all in a sense; it just looks the same. The "typically ASD" neurophysiology may be the result of very different metabolic cascades of effects.

If something about autism is always going to be very difficult for society to "enable", to do anymore than merely "carry", as Pezar was saying about the ageing baby-boomers, then I can see why Pezar is so concerned/alarmed, I have also sometimes in the past felt like this, and asked the same questions.


It sounds to me as if this Natural News" site is having a rather poisonous effect on you, like the "news" ( on TV and radio ) does on me. I avoid news programmes of any sort like the plague; they are horror stories/films using real people, real pain, real death, and studies have shown that the "news" ( either on TV or in newspapers ) can increase or even cause depression, and perhaps induce a sort of numbness/loss of affect even addiction to violence.

I think that it's important not to underestimate the role that society plays in disability. Society could change to "re-enable" many/most of the people currently diagnosed/labelled as autist/disabled. ... eg. 100 years ago homosexuality was considered, treated, and also experienced, as a serious and crippling disease. ...

There will always, so long as language/the "word" exists, be "have nots" in society; groups of people that the latest set of labels/social constructs/value judgements inevitably exclude while including and valorising others. Every value judgement does that. If one person is "cool" someone else won't be. We're in the latest wave. Some of us try to make "NT" a term of inferiority instead! ( not me now, though I did go through a phase of that ) ... What is "health", for example? It gets redefined every few decades; tanned, pale, fat, slim, earnest, "happy".

But talking environmentally and so on, humans may be in the process of transforming the face of life on earth but so did the plant mutation which occurred at the end of the last ice age, in wild grasses in an area now called Iraq, ( the "Fertile Crescent" ), which produced gluten, which contains food opioid peptides so addictive that what had previously seemed like unsavoury, indigestible worthless grass seeds, became so "more'ish" that people gave up the highly evolved and perfectly adapted hunter-gatherer lifestyle in order to plant and harvest more of it. A newly mutated grass seed transformed the world ... ( maybe it was even aliens who spliced a few plant genes! ... :lol ) ...

I think that the sort of panic that you describe in your OP comes from ascribing agency, attributing cause, too concentratedly. It's the whole universe which does these things, not just one bloodline of cause and effect. But I think sites like the one you describe are absolutely addicted to the meticulous and obsessive tracing out of the scariest possible cause and effect genealogies.

What you and I and other individual people can do, which is all that any indiviual can do, about perceived and scientifically proven environmental damage, is eat organically grown food, stop buying food in plastic packets, ride a bike or walk and stop using a car, buy and wear only second-hand clothes, etc etc etc ... and campaign to raise awareness, etc ... if you can ... and if you can't then start believing things which enable you to feel ok about the way you are able to live. :lol

This issue ( about us messing up big time, etc ) has really affected me over the years, and I have only just, this last two and a half years, begun to find a way out of that nightmarish way of framing things, ( I suspect that almost three years of a gf diet has helped ).
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This kind of eco-apocalypse thing really does not help discussion.

Undoubtedly there is an interaction of genetics, gestational environment and lifetime exposure that all combine to cause autism. Most likely the genetics and prenatal experiences are far more important than anything in the environment.

Recent studies are suggesting that about half of the rise in autism diagnosis is due to changing diagnostic practices, leaving half to unknown factors. Again, these unknown factors include increasing paternal age, changes in prenatal exposure, genetic mixing and other factors not related to environmental exposure.

That is not to say we should ever exclude the possibility of environmental exposure either causing or worsening pre-existing autism, but we should keep a sense of proportion.

What I wonder is why there aren't a lot of homemade theories about cancer. People are the total opposite. They go PFF everything causes cancer. And they are ironic and mean its a hype. Cancer has increased soo much. And yet there are basically no conspiracy theories about it. people die one after the other. And people seem just not care.

Weird. Then say autism and everyone has an opinion.

Environmental exposure's would hardly be discussed, or brought to the fore, for commercial reasons. Money is usually spent to debunk, and media is engaged to spin, by corporations