Discussion on Autism Rates and Environmental Factors

Just reinforcing something the president

said, which is the source of his concern about

this issue, and I'll just give an

example. In nineteen seventy, the biggest

epidemiological study at that time in history was performed.

A-and the university scientists from across this country looked at

all the eight-year-olds in Wisconsin, about nine hundred thousand children,

and they were looking for autism, and they knew what autism looked

like. And they came back with an incident rate

of

point eight per ten thousand. So

less than one in ten thousand.

The rate according to CDC today in this country is

one in every thirty-one children.

I-in California, it's one in every nineteen children,

one in every twelve

point five boys.

So there has been a dramatic increase.

One of the things that the industry likes to say,

one of the talking points,

which the press loves to parrot,

is, "Oh, we're just noticing it more."

But this is an absurdity, and this is an assertion that has been

debunked again and again and again by peer-reviewed literature.

Uh, it's also debunked by common sense

because if we were just noticing it more, we would notice it i-in older

groups, but we're not. We're only noticing it in

kids

who were born around nineteen eighty-nine or after.

The older generations, you're not seeing those increases.

So something happened

in the, in the mid-nineties

that changed our children, and it has to be an environmental

exposure.

Uh, because genes don't cause epidemics.

They can provide a vulnerability,

but you need an environmental toxin.

A-and what the president has charged us with

is finding which one of those exposures or which collection of

exposures are causing this epidemic.

For decades, I fought for a simple principle.

When it comes to the health of our children,

government has an obligation to follow

the evidence wherever it leads, tell the American

people the truth, and give parents the information they need

to make

informed decisions for their families.