NPR Boston

I  remember when my autistic son, Nat, was a baby. That was 24 years ago and back then no other kid had autism - or so it seemed. I needed a friend so badly. But the frequency of autism back then was something like two in 10,000. I still don't know what that means. Why don't they say one in 5,000? In any case, the numbers added up to acute loneliness. I can only describe my feelings back then as dread, the sense that my boy and I were somehow in trouble.

When I finally did find a playgroup, the other toddlers seemed years beyond my Nat, with their interest in trucks and Sesame Street - the characters and the stories, that is. Not the credits that rolled by at the end, the only part that delighted Nat. The hollowness inside me, the feeling that I was just acting, not being a real mom, orbiting around the playground planet. There was no relief until I finally found a support group of other autism parents in Brighton. . . .

These days, the autism advocates actually might respond that Nat's autism is indeed great, or at least that it is fine, because it is part of him. To these advocates - many of them autistic themselves, but verbal - autism is just a different and unusual way their brains perceive things and we should all try hard to learn to see things his way. He's all there, is what I hear now. He just has difficulty getting it out. This is true. I love thinking of Nat like this, as very original and someone who understands but shows it in his own quirky way. Getting to know these autistic adults has soothed my younger pain like nothing else.

I posted this comment:

We are in the midst of an epidemic of autism that has dramatically changed childhood in America. One in every 88 or one in every 50 U.S. children now has autism (depending on which CDC estimate you want to cite) and officials are completely clueless about where they're all coming from. Many people claim that all the autism is just better diagnosing of a disorder that's always been around. That makes no sense because no one has ever been able to show us a comparable rate among adults, especially adults with severe autism whose symptoms are obvious to everyone. That simple fact should be scaring us all.

OregonLive.com

If you're a woman of reproductive age: Take a multivitamin enriched with the 400-600 mg DHA omega-3 at least three months before you conceive and throughout your pregnancy. It can reduce your child's risk for autism 40 percent, of serious birth defects 80 percent and of childhood cancers (those that strike between ages 2 and 6) 65 percent. Since 50 percent of pregnancies are unplanned, taking your multi daily whether you're thinking about motherhood or not is a good idea. If you do become pregnant, talk with your doctor about other prenatal vitamins.

I'm confused. We're told that multivitamins "can reduce your child's risk for autism 40 percent." Where is the science behind that claim?

We are now in an epidemic of autism and the current rate affects two percent of children in the U.S. No official can tell us what causes it. No one can show us a comparable rate among adults but still, no one is ever worried. Here we're told that taking multivitamins can dramatically reduce a mother's chances of having a child with autism.

Are we to believe that the reason for all the autism today is that lots of moms-to-be didn't take their vitamins?  I posted a comment.

CBS

New anchor: "Today, a new medical study is shedding light on one of the key mysteries of autism--why some children have extreme reactions to noise. . . ."

. . . .For the first time, scientists at Vanderbilt University have shown one reason why.

A typical person sees a person talking and it's in sync. But in many kids with autism, there's a delay between what they see and hear, so they experience speech out of sync. It's as if they're watching a badly dubbed movie where the words and the pictures don't match up.

I attempted numerous times to post these two comments on the story, but was unable to.

Comments:

Dr. Jon Lapook talks about speeding up auditory processing.

CBS tells us this is "fascinating."

So why are kids like this?

Have children always been like this?

What's going to come from this study? When will we have any real answers about autism?

While scientists study reaction to noise, parents would like to know why their normally developing children suddenly and inexplicably lost speech, stopped making eye contact and regressed into autism. No one in mainstream medicine can tell parents how to prevent autism or what causes autism or how to cure it.

"Fascinating" is not the word parents would use to describe what they're dealing with raising a child with autism.

Anne Dachel, Media editor: Age of Autism

I can tell you the research that countless thousands of parent of autistic children would love to see. Where is a simple comparison study of fully-vaccinated and never-vaccinated children to see if never-vaccinated kids have the same autism rate as the general population? Parents have asked for this for years. Officials have refused, even though they do retrospective studies like this all the time. No one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants to see this study done. We all should be asking why not.

Anne Dachel, Media editor: Age of Autism

CNN

Watching a TV show where the words coming out of the actor's mouth are not synched with his lips can be very distracting.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University, in a study published Tuesday in The Journal of Neuroscience, suggest this is something some children with autism experience all the time, because they cannot simultaneously process what their eyes are seeing and their ears are hearing.

No crisis here.  Aren't autistic kids interesting? Let's study them a while and see how they differ from normal children.

No one is worried.  Autism isn't a bad thing.  It's just something we can't figure out yet.

They don't even mention the rate--that's how unimportant these children really are.  I posted two comments.
(And they cite Max Wiznitzer who is always someone willing to downplay the disaster.)