The Westbury Times (Sept. 25, 2008) gave a report on autism with some very frightening information and little explanation. The headline called autism an "epidemic" and we heard that one in every 150 children is affected. Furthermore, the article said, "On the national level, the number of children diagnosed with autism has increased by 500 percent over the past 10 years. In New York State alone, the Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities serves 16,000 individuals with autism."

Many lawmakers are concerned and there's a call for action at the state level. What's missing here is any explanation for why this is happening. In the 1970s, autism affected one in 10,000 children and today, as the story noted, officially, one in every 150 children has autism. There has to be some reason for the stunning increase. A once rare disorder is now so common that everyone knows someone with an autistic child.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has watched this explosion in numbers and sounded no alarm. They've been counting children with autism for years but they still don't know if there are actually more of them or just better diagnosing by doctors and no real increase. That reasoning makes no sense but I see it daily in the news. If we always had so many of these children and if they were just mislabeled, what did we do with them? I mean we would have still have had to address their needs even if they weren't called autistic. Why are there such long waiting lists for services and why are schools facing bankrupting costs trying to educate them? Furthermore, where are all those misdiagnosed/undiagnosed adults in their 40s, 60s, and 80s with autism like we see in our children? The CDC, famous for their population studies, has never come up with one that could find the missing autistic adults.

The problem is worse than most people realize. The rate of one in 150 came to us from the CDC but it's hardly a true picture of the autism disaster. This figure, while released in 2007, is based on studies done on 8-year-olds in 2000 and 2002. These children are teenagers now. We don't know how bad the numbers are currently. In Minnesota, the recognized rate is one in every 81 kids. Others put the average rate at one in every 67 children.

At the height of the polio epidemic in the 1950s, one in 3,000 Americans came down with the disease. This was considered a health-care crisis and a massive effort was made to address it. Not so with autism. The CDC gets billions to run health in the U.S. and they've watched as autism has affected more and more children and they've sounded no alarm. It's important to note that most of the victims of the polio epidemic recovered and went on to lead productive lives. The same won't be said about the victims of the autism epidemic. They will need support and care for life. Autism will present a bill to the American taxpayers that we simply won't be able to pay. People will demand to know why no one told them this was happening. Why didn't officials make an effort to stop autism from affecting more children?

The best response we get from the CDC is out-dated statistics and a continual mantra that the cause and the cure for autism remain unknown. What will it take to make autism matter as much as polio did?

Findings by Michael Ganz at Harvard make a chilling prediction of the future cost to our society. Ganz projects that it will cost about $3.2 million to take care of one autistic person over his or her lifetime. His findings are felt by others to be a gross underestimate of the eventual autism price tag. Try multiplying the number $3.2 million just by the 16,000 autistic individuals in New York State.

The words of Laura Bono of the National Autism Association are a grim forecast for the future: "As those children reach adulthood, the U.S. is ill-equipped to care for them. Not only do we not have enough services for adults now, the light at the end of the tunnel is a train. Frankly, we don't know what we're going to do."

Anne McElroy Dachel
Member, Autism Action Coalition Board
Media Editor, Age of Austism