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: ...

Today’s post is another one filling in some gaps in this blog. I think it is common sense to say that preventing a problem from developing is much wiser than trying to solve it later on.  This is a recurring issue in both life and medicine. In the research we now see preventative measures developed to reduce the risk of cancer, we also see how some interventions are only effective when started very early. In the case of autism we have seen than often it is caused by a myriad of factors that by themselves might have been harmless but when taken together are the multiples hits that caused the brain to develop differently. Much research looks individually at these factors that increase the risk of autism.  In the wider media much disdain is directed to these findings as if each factor is THE cause of autism and how can so many things cause autism.  But by understanding these factors you can then set about countering them. I did create my simplified schematic to explain class...