In remarks laced with scientific inaccuracies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that autism was preventable while directly contradicting researchers within his own agency on a primary driver behind rising rates of the condition in young children.
You know why autism rates have “increased”?
Because we understand a lot more about the condition now, and are a whole fucking lot better at determining whether a person may be on the spectrum or not - a “spectrum” that, I should add, is a whole fucking lot more nuanced and less binary than the “he’s a good worker” vs “let’s hold Timmy back a couple grades” dichotomy that you would have seen up through the late 90s and early 2000s.
By some estimates, 20% of the population is expected to be neurodivergent in one way or another. Autism and ADHD are wildly underdiagnosed to this day. Especially for AFAB people.
and its also genetic, and not organically caused by chemicals.
Also because preventative factors like obesity, type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, etc are strongly linked to having an autistic child
Sure. But the fact remains that autism prevalence in the general population probably looks a lot like the graph about left-handedness of the population throughout the 1900s - that is, logistic growth: growing, but settling towards a relatively steady percentage of the population. Btw, if anyone has a graph of that handy, please post it.