PLT Test Blog

  The Olso to Bergen line is one of Europe’s most beautiful railways   I did have another sense of déjà vu, when I read about the big spike in autism in one city in Norway.   Norway is a very expensive country, but well worth a visit.   We enjoyed it.   One of Monty’s former 1:1 assistants emigrated to Norway to work in their excellently funded special needs therapy system.   A decade ago, there was a peak in media interest in Somali autism clusters in Sweden, Minneapolis and San Diego. Refugees had been taken to live in far away lands, with very different environmental conditions.   They soon started to produce children with a very high incidence of autism. This was a surprise to all the academics and a shock to the parents.    The Somali-Swedes even started calling it the Swedish disease, because they had never encountered such children before in Somalia.   Swedish study dissects autism risk in immigrants Swedish migration: ...

The reason I have a short list of talented researchers as my Dean’s List for this blog, is because of the generally low standard of much you can read about autism, even sometimes from governmental bodies like the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in the in the US and NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) in the UK. I suppose these days it’s just called Fake News My contribution is to highlight the researchers I think are worth paying attention to. When it comes to the prevalence of autism, Éric Fombonne is a researcher who has more than his share of common sense.   Fombonne is a French psychiatrist and epidemiologist who also worked in the UK and Canada before moving to the US. He recently gave the interview below, which highlights glaring errors/weaknesses in reports which are picked up by the mass media and put forward as facts.  Inconsistent prevalence estimates highlight studies’ flaws “… the CDC does not attempt to assess everybody in ...