Autism: The Real Reason It’s Going Up

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. This is our last episode for a little bit. We're gonna take a short break until September while we work on new episodes. So that means if you have an idea, something that you want us to versus, you've gotta tell us. There's a lot of ways to do it. You could do it on social media. There's Instagram, TikTok. There's an email address. It's all in the show notes. So, if you've got an idea of something that we have to versus, please let us know. We absolutely love hearing from you. Now, on with the show. Today's episode is all about autism because we're asking, why do so many folks have it these days? Rates of autism have been going up and up for decades. But then a couple of months ago, the CDC released the latest numbers, catapulting this issue into the spotlight. A brand new report out today from the Centers for Disease Control finds a dramatic rise in autism diagnoses among children. An alarming spike in the number of children diagnosed with autism. New data just released shows a fifteen percent jump in just two years. The CDC report found that one in every thirty one kids looked like they now had autism, which is nearly five times more common than it was twenty five years ago. The rates in boys were even higher. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says this is an epidemic. This is part of an unrelenting upward trend. Prevalence two years ago, the answer is very clear, and this is catastrophic for our country. And it's not just in The US. In Japan, Canada, Australia, Europe, rates of autism have been going up too. And now there is this huge fight brewing as to what's behind this. Why do so many people have autism these days? RFK Jr. Reckons This is coming from an environmental toxin, and somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food. There's all these different theories about what's causing this, from vaccines to pollution and a whole bunch of other stuff. Can more screen make your child autistic? A new study says yes. It might be microplastics, the forever chemicals. Living in an area with high levels of air pollution may be linked with a woman's chances of having a child with autism. But then there are folks saying, woah, woah, woah, woah. There's actually a much simpler explanation here and it all has to do with how we diagnose autism in the first place. So who's right? What is going on here? At a recent press conference, RFK Jr said that we're gonna start to have answers on the root cause of this epidemic by the end of the year. But Christmas has come early, because today on the show, we are gonna find out what's happening. When it comes to the …