There Is No Autism Epidemic

Vaccines work, get them and don’t die

Medium is a fascinating place, with a plethora of diverse opinions clashing and whirling in a wonderful maelstrom of words that is matched in few other areas of the internet. You can see gun lovers writing about shooting their AR-15s alongside the gun control advocates telling the world that we should melt them down. You get gym freaks arguing for the perfect abs next to the fat acceptance movement telling you that your body is beautiful no matter what.

And sometimes, you get people writing things that are just demonstrably untrue.

Enter: the commonly-held belief that we are experiencing a massive epidemic of autism.

There are a number of issues with this idea. It’s partly objectionable because of the way in which it dehumanizes those with a diagnosis. If anyone were to describe my learning issues as an ‘epidemic’ I would be extremely upset*.

But more importantly, inherent in this argument is the supposed ‘fact’ that autism rates are skyrocketing.

It turns out, that’s not true at all.

To talk about autism rates, it’s important that we start at the beginning. A lot of people are still not entirely sure what ‘autism’ actually is, which is partly because — like many mental health issues — the history is murky, unclear, and highly stigmatized.

All of this is important, because when we talk about an “autism epidemic” you have to remember that “autism” isn’t a single, discrete disorder. There are likely hundreds of factors that make ASDs occur, unlike say tuberculosis which is caused by a specific bacteria and that can be readily identified in a lab.

What we can say is that the rate of autism, however you define it, appears to be increasing. Quickly.

However, looking at these figures — what’s known as the ‘crude prevalence’ in epidemiological terms — can be very misleading.

What does this actually mean?

There’s a huge issue with looking at crude prevalence rates of a disorder like autism. Basically, as the diagnosis shifts, more or less people fall under the category. Imagine that the term “autism” is an umbrella. If you make the umbrella bigger — widening the diagnostic category — more people will be huddled together underneath it. There are often good reasons for this, such as increasing access to services for similar disorders, but the end result is that you see more people with a diagnosis of a disease.

Does this mean that more people have autism now than in the 90s? Not necessarily. It could just be that more people are being diagnosed as autistic who previously would’ve been undiagnosed or possibly diagnosed with something different.

And it appears that’s exactly what happened.

And contrary to all those scary stories about the autism epidemic, they found nothing.

No change in autism rates.

No “epidemic” of any kind.

It turns out, when you exclude changes in diagnosis and regional variation, the rate of autism in the general population remains pretty fixed at 0.75%. It’s certainly an issue — the other main finding of this study is that we need to improve the services that cater to autistic people — but it’s hardly the scare story you often see online.

And this is not really a surprise. Despite the fear-mongering by many anti-vaccine crusaders, there is no evidence whatsoever that autism is linked to vaccines. Autism is likely caused by a range of genetic and environmental factors, but since it’s such a broad category we really aren’t sure yet what’s happening.

Bottom line? There is no autism epidemic. The apparent increase in the number of people being diagnosed as autistic is simply down to changes in the diagnosis, not more people being sick.

And vaccines save lives.

Full. Stop.

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*To clarify, I am not autistic but have two diagnosed learning disorders

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