ASD

Take a little detour from the Tovani book, and write a tad bit about ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder).  After completing the “Reading and Writing Problems” assignment, I continued researching ASD and I came across this article by Newschaffer “Autism: An Emerging Public Health Problem”.  Newschaffer’s article mostly discusses the diagnoses, burden, cost, detection, and prevention of ASD.  When discussing the health aspect, the article was mostly boilerplate, insomuch as what is ASD, theories to explain its prevalence (genetics and vaccines), and interventions early in life and medications that have been shown to be sometimes useful, but what was attention-grabbing about the article was when it discussed the burden and cost of ASD.  According to Newschaffer, the annual cost of ASD in the United States is in the billions of dollars, and that most of that cost is “…shouldered completely by the families of those affected.”. In the classroom setting, just the cost of special educators, modifications, technology, etc., the costs must be staggering, but include the cost to the family, and/or government, for specialists and health costs; it is easy to see how those numbers could make sense.

As mentioned part of the article wrote about vaccines being a piece of the cause of ASD, but I was just remarking that the article does not state that vaccines are the cause just research is being conducted, in fact the article specifically states that there is still no evidence to support vaccines being a contributing factor to ASD.

As stated earlier, what really got my attention in the article was the cost of ASD in the United States, and what 2 billion dollars a year would even look like.  If for no other reason than money, ASD really needs to be “cured”.