[Clodfobble]

From HuffPo:

Autism Rate Now at 1% of All US Children?

According to data from the 2007 telephone survey of parents of nearly 82,000 US children, the odds of a child receiving an ASD diagnosis are one in 63. If it is a boy, the chances climb to a science fiction-like level of one in 38, or 2.6% of all male children in America.

If there is an environmental component to autism, hopefully scientists will want to know which exposures might have increased between, say, 1992 and 1996.

One possible answer is the Hepatitis B vaccine, (which also contained 25 micrograms of mercury containing thimerosal).

Introduced in 1991, it was the first vaccine ever given on a population basis to newborn babies (within the first three hours after delivery) in human history.

But according to the CDC's National Immunization Survey (which also includes parental telephone interviews), only 8% of infant children received the Hep B vaccine in 1992, when that birth cohort showed an ASD rate of 60-per-10,000.

By 1994, the number of children receiving Hep B vaccine had reached just 27% -- and the cohort showed an ASD rate of 66-per-10,000.

By 1996, the Hep B coverage rate had risen to 82%, when that cohort's ASD rate exploded to around 100-per-10,000.

Correlation, obviously, does not equal causation. And no one is suggesting that Hepatitis B vaccine is the singular "cause" of autism. But the uptake rate of that particular immunization is at least one environmental factor that did demonstrably change during the period in question.

A study published last October in the journal Neurology found that children who received the Hepatitis B vaccine series were 50% more likely to develop "central nervous system inflammatory demyelination" than children who did not receive the vaccine.

Most of this increase was due to the Engerix B brand of the vaccine, manufactured by the UK's GlaxoSmithKline. That brand increased the risk of demyelination by 74%, and patients with confirmed multiple sclerosis were nearly three times more likely to develop the disorder.