An Interview with Mark Blaxill on the Autism Tsunami: Half 1
NOTE: We will have an audio file accompanying Anne’s transcription. This is part 1 of a 5-part series. Thank you.
By Anne Dachel
Question 1: Tell us about your studies, Autism Tsunami: The Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States. What motivated you and the other authors to look into the future effects of autism?
Mark: My motivation has existed for 20 years. (Inaudible) … and it was pretty obvious for too long that the numbers were exploding.
California and everywhere you looked the numbers went up and that invalidated the orthodox act.
(Inaudible) Mark denied official claims of better diagnosis / replacement.
And we’ve known that for a long time, Anne.
I started writing about it in this area in 2001, 2003. I started writing in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders when they tried to blame diagnostic substitution.
It was obvious that the work they were doing … (inaudible)
I wrote to them. I have a few colleagues to write with. …
The authors who argued that it was a diagnostic substitution had to withdraw their results as they were obviously computationally incorrect.
The rate of autism increased and the rate of intellectual disability did not decrease.
Then I wrote a work that was published in 2004, What’s wrong? The question of time trends in autism.
I argued that interest rates would go up all over the world, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom.
I know your focus is very much on the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which are up with interest rates.
And then I continued to write about it.
I’ve written a book called The age of autism.
I wrote another book called Refusal, both with Dan Olmsted.
One in 2010 and one in 2017.
You’re kind of yelling at the universe, please pay attention. This is a crisis.
Anne, you do that every day. I do this in projects with longer cycles. We do a lot of the same work.
One thing that happened is Cindy Nevison, who I got to know pretty well and who does a very good job. … about the environmental causes of autism.
You and I met up with a guy named Walter Zahorodny, who’s the CDC man in New Jersey. And New Jersey has reported some of the highest rates of autism.
Walter says the same thing in his own way.
So we started writing an article that was published in 2018. The three of us were co-authors.
I had been looking at the California numbers since 2001, some of the early days. Cindy had started looking at recent numbers. We have compiled our databases.
We published this article that says these courses are exploding and they are real.
By the time we do that in 2018, that’s 20 years after I started looking. The numbers are shockingly higher, and up to your point the increases haven’t slowed down, if at all, they seem to be growing faster. …
Cynthia and I wrote another article called Diagnostic Substitution, which again shows that there is no case that the increases are due to substitutes for intellectual disability.
When they published the California newspaper in 2018, which honestly surprised me, I was surprised because it went against the orthodox narrative.
Good for the diary. They were a pleasure to deal with because they are interested in good evidence and good science, and we tried to write them very rigorously.
Right after that paper in 2018, I wrote the idea to Cindy and a few others – hey, let’s do a paper on the cost of disease because there is literature on the cost of disease.
Most and almost all of them, until recently, almost all of them assumed that autism prevalence rates were constant, which is a spectacular mistake.
First, they tend to go with the latest numbers so that they underestimate the cost of autism in children, and then they assume that at all the rates we see in children, we are also observing the elderly. So they’re going to assign all of that cost and put together a model that says that is the cost of autism in the elderly.
And they’ll add all of that up and they’ll find a number that is too high for the total cost, but underestimated the cost in children and dramatically overestimated – makes fantastic numbers for the cost of the elderly that do not exist.
So this is a mistake, a fundamental flaw in most disease studies, and we have tried to correct that. That was the idea.
Part 2 will follow tomorrow.
