Pi Day 2021 a Far Cry from when Autism Was In the Media in the 20-Teens
Yesterday was March 14, 2021. Also known as Pi day, for the mathematical 3.14159265359..., the ratio of the circumference of any circle to the diameter of that circle. Daniel Tammet, he of the book Born on a Blue Day and a man on the spectrum, holds the record for memorizing the first 22,514 digits. Tammet was in the spotlight in the 20-teens, the heyday of autism books, memoirs and society's fascination, interest and attention to autism. Age of Autism began publishing in the blog format in 2007. Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill were writing their deep dive into the origins of the epidemic together: The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic.
Autism has lost its media sheen. More the shame, because as cute kids become adults, the needs increase. School stops at 18 or 22 and the drop off is steep for services. The severely affected languish. Those who can do brilliant work and enjoy employment struggle to find and hold onto meaningful work. All while tired parents are growing older, worrying about their own retirement, many trapped in the sandwich generation, also caring for ageing parents. It's grim picture. I read on a CT special needs Facebook page a request. A woman had just become guardian for her 54 year old cousin with autism. Both of his parents had died, rather suddenly. And she was asking how she could make his weekend visits to her home enjoyable for him. Wow. Do your kids have a cousin who would take on such responsibility?
We found trillions for Covid vaccines in less than a year. Not autism. Washington DC added payments to unemployment due
to Covid that equal almost two times what SSI pays our adult children to survive. Washington DC offered PPP loans to businesses shut down by Covid. How many families had to close a business or quit a job to take care of a loved one with autism? SafeMinds featured this story in 2020. Pi day was yesterday. But autism will not get a piece of any pie we want.
Next Decade Will Add More Trillions to Looming Public Financial Burden
The lifetime cost of autism for U.S. cases identified in the 30 years between 1990 and 2019 is estimated to be $7 trillion. If costs for the next decade 2020-2029 are included, the lifetime cost will reach up to $15 trillion. The findings were reported in a new study in the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
In “The Lifetime Social Cost of Autism: 1990–2029”, authors Janet Cakir, Richard Frye, and Stephen Walker compiled findings from peer-reviewed published studies on the number of cases of autism for the decades 1990-2019 and the lifetime cost of autism per person in the U.S.
For prevalence, they used the two best known Federal monitoring systems: the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM) and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) by the National Center for Health Statistics. They estimated that 2 million new cases of autism were identified between 1990 and 2019. They factored in the severity of autism, specifically the comorbidity of intellectual disability which increases lifetime costs, and the estimated number of years living with autism. The number of years with autism is determined by the age of diagnosis and the person’s lifespan, which for those on the spectrum is shortened relative to the typically developing population.
For costs, they included the “social costs” across the lifespan. The costs are those incurred beyond what typically developing people would incur. They consist of medical and healthcare-related spending, therapies, special education services, lost wages for the person with ASD as well as parents/caregivers, accommodations, and respite care. The costs only reflect what society pays, not the expenses families incur out of their own pockets. Nor do the calculations reflect what the actual needs are of the person with autism, which are often greater than the resources available.
The average lifetime cost of autism per person was calculated to be $3.6 million. Projecting this amount to the autism prevalence data, they estimated the national social costs for all cases identified 1990-2019 to be $7 trillion. The greatest cost over the lifespan is from lost employment, followed by adult care. Medical care and education expenses were the lowest components. Read more: https://safeminds.org/research/30-years-of-autism-7-trillion-in-costs/
Benedetta, I think you are right about the many subtle vaccine injuries, as well as the problems caused by low vitamin D and other aspects of the modern lifestyle.
I think there is also something to the fact that side effects or problems that only affect a minority of people (be it a racial minority or any other kind) end up getting swept under the rug or dismissed. How did anyone in medicine not notice this (https://nypost.com/2021/02/24/pulse-oximeters-may-be-inaccurate-on-people-of-color/) about the inadequacies of pulse oximeter apps for darker skin tones until three weeks ago? Our own family doctor mass-emailed her whole practice telling us not to come in if we thought we had the coronavirus, but to monitor our own O2 levels at home with our phones.
But back to the subtle damage... You are like the rest of the commenters here: You see things and you ask questions. You don't assume everything is fine. I know very few people in my life who are like that. I've been surprised by how many in my extended family took one of the coronavirus vaccines at the first opportunity, lured by the promise of safety and the false sense of security of "no hospitalizations," "no deaths," etc., even though they must have seen some of the reports in the news (like this gentleman: https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/florida-doctor-dies-two-weeks-after-getting-covid-vaccine/) ... They just assumed it was a tiny percentage of people who'd be really hurt, and instead of being troubled on those people's behalf, they crossed their fingers and figured the problem would happen to Someone Else.
Posted by: TOB | March 16, 2021 at 02:01 PM
TOB:
I figured that is what you meant.
Easy to step on toes now a days. Too much is volatile in this country. We are living in very harsh, hard times; with political upheavals. Many are saying it is not so much about race as ideology. BLM turns out to be Marist, that is close to socialisms and communist right?
So a lot of missing dots, and making wrong connections; wrong connections makes a wrong and confusing picture. Miss Taylor is like a lot of our young ones; she was running with the wrong crowd. Did you know that the crowd she was running with actually shot at the police? (!!!!!)
And no, I feel really bad for Ms. Taylor; cause I have my own family and friends whose children have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, making the wrong choices about drugs. If not for the grace of God, go I. Hey; I am out here in middle America waiting on when the fentanyl from China hits our part of the country.
That said; what are the connections and right dots? I see everything vaccine related, minimal brain
injury for me is everywhere! Kind of l kike that little kid in that movie 'the Sixth Sense' who says, "I see dead people everywhere, and they don't know they are dead."
But that does not mean I am not missing other environmental causes as well. I read some where, that vitamin D is not really a vitamin, but much more better description would be a steroid, cortisone - hormone. I know that during the summer the sun sure helps on the psoriasis. The article (where I read it ? ) said it was because more vitamin D was available, and damping down the immune system.
One thing for sure; evolutions is driven by those that survive, and those humans coming out of Africa to the cold, northern climates had to turn out lighter for some important reason ? Kind of goes for artic foxes, artic hares, and polar bears too.
I have my own biracial family members, and they both came down with diabetes as young 10 year old. Northern Ohio, is kind of north. I blame the vaccines, and their very white mother's genetic inherited over active immune system. But should I look further? Lower vitamin D levels would be my guess is part of that heartbreak too. .
Our attorney general here in Kentucky, I just love him. HE won by a land slide, . https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/kentucky-s-attorney-general-takes-heat-for-breonna-taylor-grand-jury-decision/ar-BB19mut3
Posted by: benedetta | March 16, 2021 at 12:56 PM
Bob Moffitt, I always appreciate your comments on here. I didn't mean to offend anyone. I am just reporting what I heard in some surprising conversations I had, with people I had always viewed as "nice," last June.
I would talk about Philando Castile (cafeteria worker, no threat to anyone) and Breonna Taylor, and the folks (nice, church-going folks) would respond, "Well, we don't want the police to be held back from doing their jobs," or "Police are scared. There's a lot of danger out there, and we don't want to put any more restrictions on them."
I'm not saying that these people *like* the thought of an EMS worker being shot to death by police. I'm saying they're willing to tolerate it--they're essentially OK with it--because they frame it as necessarily collateral damage of the policing system that keeps them feeling safe.
I would argue the same is true of the majority of the poplation with respect to people who have suffered dramatic vaccine injuries. If their own children were unscathed (or seem to be), then they just shrug and look the other way. It is the very indifference of the vast majority of the American public that allows the government to continue vaccine mandates and continue to ignore the very real financial challenges autism families face.
Over the past year, between the coronavirus-related restrictions and police shootings of civilians, I've come to learn some ugly truths about people I previously regarded as nice, even good. It's much trickier than "nice" and "good." Plenty of good-seeming people are willing to (and do every day) trade someone else's misery for their own feeling of safety. They aren't happy about it, but they still do it.
Obviously I have not done a survey, so I couldn't tell you how many people look the other way, but the persistence of the problem almost speaks for itself. As Kim and others have pointed out, Congress has had very little trouble spending our great-grandchildren's money on one bailout after another, while lifting not a finger to get services, education, etc., restored to kids who need it (or doing jack**** for members of the autism community who are working-age but will likely never work).
To be clear: I never meant the comment about black victims of police violence to describe anyone here at AoA. I meant that the same folks who let that stuff happen are the folks who are fine with autism families bearing the entire brunt of being collateral damage. They feel bad about it, but (they tell themselves), what can they do? And they choose the appearance of safety that aggressive cops and an aggressive vaccine program give them.
Posted by: TOB | March 16, 2021 at 06:18 AM
TOB while we are discussing more blacks compared to their size of the population are being killed vs the whites compared to their population
Always brings me back to Dr. William Thompson that Blacks were showing inflammation problems with the MMR even at the age of three while the whites were not.
Blacks seems to have more problems with strokes than the whites.
Blacks seems to have had more trouble with covid which boiled down to it all - virus driving a vascular disease.
And so we are right back to Harris Coulter's book "Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality: The Medical Assault on the American Brain by Harris Coulter (1999-04-23)" Which Amazon has priced right now for a mere 982 dollars and "A Shot in the Dark" a mere 191 dollars. Oh for heaven sakes.
Some times the truth on things are not as clear as it should be.
Poverty is driven by mental health though. Something to think about.
Posted by: benedetta | March 15, 2021 at 07:16 PM
@ TOB
"A lot of people find it not-intolerable to shoot a black man in a hoodie who has a taillight out because they think that kind of policing makes sure drug dealers aren't roaming the streets and looting nice white people's homes"
A "lot of people" think that? I think it safe to say whoever those "lot of people " are .. they probably have nothing in common with AoA community .. so using "them" as an example of government INDIFFERENCE to our children is a stretch too far for me. Just my opinion.
Posted by: Bob Moffit | March 15, 2021 at 12:53 PM
It's now clear that America will deal with the autism epidemic by ignoring it. The media has learned that they can make a problem go away by not reporting it. In its recent survey of disability 30 years after the ADA, the New York Times ignored autism, and when autism activists protested, the paper ignored them as well. Autism was a big issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, but it wasn't even mentioned in 2020. There have been plenty of autistic George Floyds, abused or killed by group home workers, but they don't rate national coverage. Politicians and the media know that autism parents are too exhausted to mount effective protests (and they're all "antivaxxers" anyway), and autistic individuals are too disabled to organize on their own behalf. And if a reporter needs a quote from an "autism activist", he can always go to a Neurodiversity advocate who will assure everyone that there is no epidemic, that every great genius in history was autistic, and that autistic people only need "acceptance", which conveniently costs nothing. The enormous economic costs of autism will be borne largely by their families and even more by the autistic, many of whom will end up impoverished and homeless (they are no doubt contributing to the growing homeless populations in our cities today). Of course they will also cost the government trillions, but politicians have already decided to run up trillions in deficits, so what's a few trillion more? If that leads to economic collapse, well, hopefully that won't happen until after the next election, and no doubt the billionaires will emerge from the crash unscathed, so what's the problem? Anyway, they can only deal with the autism epidemic by acknowledging its causes, and that's absolutely out of the question.
Posted by: Jonathan Rose | March 15, 2021 at 11:42 AM
15 trillion dollars. The USA will go bankrupt and collapse.
This isn’t the fault of the autistics at all, this is the fault of the vaccine industry.
The U.S. government, owned by Pharma and Freemasonry on all parties, allowed psychiatry, western “medicine”, public “education” and vaccines to do this.
They’ll just keep damaging babies and children’s brains so they’ll be tortured and neglected inside mental hospitals like I was, unemployable, unable to have nor keep any significant job, unable to learn meaningfully, perhaps trapped on psych drugs and homeless shelters.
Posted by: Stop the Shots | March 15, 2021 at 09:55 AM
The problem is that the families are still bearing the cost, so dramatic iatrogenic injuries continue to be OK with the not-too-scrutinizing American public.
The situation is similar in many ways to conversations I had with Boomers after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The perceived risk to the average person is low--and in the cases of vaccine-induced autism and death-by-police, the risk is lower for white folks: https://news.yale.edu/2020/10/27/racial-disparity-police-shootings-unchanged-over-5-years--so the average white Boomer (who is a member of the most influential group in the country, basically dictating policy as much as any non-corporation can) is OK with shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing.
Weighed against this low perceived risk (because although, as Laura Hayes has pointed out, subtle vaccine-induced side effects like food allergies, weird autoimmune issues, etc., are pervasive, most people will never connect those dots) is the promise of safety. A lot of people find it not-intolerable to shoot a black man in a hoodie who has a taillight out because they think that kind of policing makes sure drug dealers aren't roaming the streets and looting nice white people's homes. These same folks think it's OK to give autism to American children, kill off folks in nursing homes, and give black folks yet another disproportionate cost, because they believe vaccines keep the rest of us from getting the dreaded measles, flu, or coronavirus.
Both the risk perception and the safety benefit perception are deeply flawed, but the only way to make regular people care about the risk is to put the cost on them. Show up at school board meetings and demand the expensive services that your child needs to succeed in school. Bring your child with you. Let the taxpayer see that when the folks society has successfully "other-ized" for decades have their costs fairly borne by the community, the "safety" of massively untested vaccination programs, overzealous policing, etc., is not actually such a bargain.
I don't think society is going to do the right thing based on its collective conscience. One might hope for an Emmett Till moment (open coffin shames people into realizing that by golly, it *is* wrong to lynch black people), but only a wallet moment is going to matter.
Posted by: TOB | March 15, 2021 at 09:42 AM
Reading the stunning statistics of rising estimations of caring for aging autism population in our country … I cannot help but wonder why this issue was not a PRIORITY within the recently passed COVID RELIEF LEGISLATION COSTING OVER A TRILLION DOLLARS?
Silly me .. a PRIORITY? Not only is the rising cost of aging autism population NOT A PRIORITY … IT ISN'T EVEN AN ISSUE WORTH RECOGNIZING.
Posted by: Bob Moffit | March 15, 2021 at 09:05 AM
"The average lifetime cost of autism per person was calculated to be $3.6 million. Projecting this amount to the autism prevalence data, they estimated the national social costs for all cases identified 1990-2019 to be $7 trillion. The greatest cost over the lifespan is from lost employment, followed by adult care. Medical care and education expenses were the lowest components."
In my 2015 eBook Pervasive Causes of Disease (https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/53714), I did an estimate of the total lifetime costs for the African-American children who developed autism, assuming the allegations of Dr. Thompson were correct (Section 9C5a1). Those results may be instructive in light of the quoted comments above, and I reproduce some of those 2015 comments below.
"For purposes of the present cost estimates, I will use a much more conservative estimate of twice the [144] authors' published numbers, with a mean of about $4M lifetime cost per capita for all USA autism afflicted. As I will show in the next paragraph, both the $4M conservative lifetime cost per capita and the $2M extremely conservative lifetime cost per capita (based on the numbers in [144]) result in astronomical total costs.
For 100,000 African-American children in the USA over the period 2001-2015, using the approximate mean lifetime cost per capita of $4M from the above computations yields a total lifetime cost for the sub-group of roughly $400B! Using the approximate mean lifetime cost per capita of $2M based on the numbers in [144] would have yielded a total lifetime cost for the sub-group of roughly $200B. Either cost figure is astronomical, especially when the narrowness of the afflicted group is considered. Even if we followed [147] and used an undiscounted cost stream for the computations, we would have obtained total lifetime costs approaching $500B. The overall conclusions are essentially the same irrespective of which of these cost streams we assume; for purposes of further computation, the conservative assumption of $4M lifetime cost per capita will be used.
That $400B total lifetime cost estimate neglects the other sub-group identified at risk in the CDC study, children of all races who developed Isolated Autism from the MMR vaccine (according to Dr. Thompson's revelations to Dr. Hooker). This latter sub-group would be about seven or eight times as large as the African-American sub-group, since it includes all races, and the economic costs could be numerically larger than the African-American sub-group, depending on the level of increased risk for Isolated Autism.
As a side note, the NVICP (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program), which is a special Court set up to compensate the vaccine injured, has paid out approximately $3.2B since 1988 for injuries from all vaccines. Approximately 9% of all compensated claims were for the MMR vaccine, for all groups, so the total MMR compensation would be somewhat less (perhaps substantially less) than $1B since 1988. Compare that with the ~$400B cost estimate above for African-American children for the 2001-2015 time period for the USA for the MMR vaccine only. That's a small fraction of one percent of the total costs being compensated for this one group over one period. Other sub-groups potentially injured from the MMR vaccine, such as children with Isolated Autism, are not included in the $400B estimate!
So, if the lifetime autism cost for this one afflicted sub-group is ~$400B over its lifetime, and the Trust Fund compensation has been on the order of one-tenth of one percent of the lifetime autism cost (or less), then on the order of 99.9% (or more) of the total lifetime autism costs are being borne by sources other than the Trust Fund. Who are these sources? The main sources would appear to be the afflicted (and their families) and the taxpayers, through their support of myriad social services.
Thus, 99.9+% of the ~$400B total lifetime autism costs is the effective subsidy provided (for this one narrow sub-group only) by the 1986 Act and confirmed by the 2011 Supreme Court decision!"
Posted by: Ronald N. Kostoff | March 15, 2021 at 08:14 AM
Speaking of the grim picture as autism parents grow older, take a peek at the 3-minute "Prologue" I made after my son Ben aged out of school.
https://vimeo.com/303927660
I used the prologue to raise autism awareness in live presentations to about a dozen Rotary clubs, pre-covid. One parent was so moved he came up to me after the show, shook my hand, and left a $100 dollar bill in my palm. I used the money plus grants from Rotary clubs to help make a follow up video, "Hide Your Love Away,"
https://vimeo.com/497137370
The adult issues are housing, friends, and jobs. It takes an autism parent to fully appreciate the dilemmas of aging with ASD. But some non-autism parents get it too, when they see the videos.
So here we are, readers, media sheen gone, and we are largely on on own.
Posted by: Dan E. Burns | March 15, 2021 at 07:31 AM