The most fascinating epidemic
If epidemics could win Oscars, the award for the most fascinating would go to autism.
So states Lawson Wulsin, professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Cincinnati in an article in today’s The Enquirer (Cincinnati). “[B]etter recognition through better diagnostic methods” and environmental toxins are dismissed as possible explanations in favor of the theory that older fathers are at an increased risk of having an autistic child. “With better funding for autism research,” Dr. Wulsin concludes, “we may turn this epidemic from fascinating into treatable and preventable. That’s an award to go for.”
Ought older men be screened and educated so that they know the “risks” of their having children?
Or, if older men no longer had children, would that put an end to the “most fascinating” of all, the “autism epidemic”?
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POSTED IN: Diagnosis, Environment, Family, Health, Medicine, Parenting
4 opinions for The most fascinating epidemic
Daisy
Dec 8, 2006 at 8:42 pm
I logged in to comment and realized I had more questions than anything. My dear friend had her first child, a boy with Aspergers, when she and her husband were 22. Maybe she’s the exception that proves the “rule”.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Dec 8, 2006 at 9:47 pm
I don’t think your friend and her husband are so “exceptional”!
pbuddery
Aug 30, 2007 at 2:46 am
Will Autistics save the world?
We’re out there, many of us invisible due to NT mimicry, and even as you read this our writings and attitudes are being taken up by more and more NTs.
Of course, we are all crazed subversives. We advocate such frightening things as honesty, kindness, and clear and critical thinking. Many of us believe in precision, perfection and making the world a better place. We can’t be persuaded or bought. We are tools to be used to make a better, more honest, and saner world.
We are like machines, cold and even inhuman by your feeble NT standards. We can be frighteningly competent to a level that seems completely normal, at least to us. And you NTs, with your pointless little social rules and irritating little lies, will eventually get used to the great flood of dribbling twitching stumbling bumbling honest semi-genius types.
In time you may even enjoy our company.
And I don’t feel like apologising for my little joke, because there is a certain uncomfortable truth behind it. Humanity is slowly destroying its comfortable environment and its reasonably pleasant society through greed and stupidity. I have been watching this for over thirty years, and I don’t enjoy it.
P Buddery
George Wade
Aug 30, 2007 at 8:17 am
You are right about some of us being frighteningly competent; but some of us have weaknesses that make us too easy to influence: the academic or medical researcher who is a puppet on funding strings…
It is fascinating that many of us show social ineptness, while a very few go on to become social wizards or witches and wreak havoc by manipulating marketplaces that pollute the world, that spread false science, fight the wrong wars …
You know !
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