There were two pretty big developments on the autism story today. You've no doubt heard that for a while there it looked like a preservative in vaccinations given to children for measles, mumps and rubella was responsible for the increasing incidence of autism in American kids.
Not so much, it seems. Today the Lancet medical journal retracted a pivotal scientific paper in support of this concept. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal offered some tantalizing research tidbits that, while not identifying a cause, certainly seem to point toward an environmental factor or factors... or possibly social factors.
The backdrop here is that autism rates are skyrocketing in American children. My InvestigateWest colleague Carol Smith was onto this trend more than a decade ago, when the incidence was running no higher than 1 out of every 500 children. It's now up at something more like 1 in 100 children. That's 1 percent of the population!
In today's news, first the retraction: It was a paper by a bunch of scientists led by one Dr. Andrew Wakefield that in 1998 set off a bit of a panic among parents, particularly in Britain, about the possibilty that vaccinations could be causing autism.
It was an appealing hypothesis, because it would explain why autism rates are increasing seemingly all over.
But years of studies followed.
