Is it vaccines? Air pollution? Infections?
Nope. The reason that the latest numbers for autism prevalence among US children have climbed traces largely to a simple change in how interviewers asked a question.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last conducted the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for the years 2011 through 2013. The 2014 survey, though, included a tweak, and that tweak is the reason that autism prevalence climbed from 1.25% to 2.24% in 2014. Not even the most die-hard causation theorist could argue that in a single year or handful of years, something environmental, like vaccines, caused a near-doubling of autism prevalence in children ages 3 to 17 years.
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