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More Than Rain Man
By Richard | February 28, 2007
Rare No More | With Research Up and Stigma Down, Autism Sheds More of Its Mystery
By Roy Richard Grinker | Special to The Washington Post
When my daughter Isabel’s autism was diagnosed in 1994, when she was 2 1/2 , I knew little about the condition. Autism was a strange word to most people. “You mean like Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rain Man’?” people would ask. “You mean she’s artistic?”
Back then, autism was considered a rare disorder, occurring in only about three in every 10,000 live births.
Little more than a decade later, autism has become a “major public health concern,” according to Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, chief of the developmental disabilities branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The results of a CDC survey released this month suggest that about one in every 150 children in the United States has some form of autism.
Those numbers don’t reflect an epidemic, as some reports have suggested, or even mean that the incidence of autism has necessarily increased. Instead, we are defining autism and measuring its prevalence differently than we did in the past. Isabel’s story illustrates that evolution.
The years since Isabel’s diagnosis show a rapid change in our awareness of the disorder. In 1993, the state of Maryland (where we live) told the U.S. Department of Education that the state’s public schools had provided special education services during the 1992-93 academic year to just 28 children between the ages of 6 and 21 with autism.
By the time Isabel was diagnosed, Maryland’s public schools claimed to have served 300 people in the same age group with autism in 1993-94 (still a small number, but an enormous increase over the previous year).
And by 2003 there were more than 4,084 children ages 3 to 22 who had been given the official coding for autism in the Maryland public school systems, a rate of 1 in 183 children.
Isabel was no longer alone. MORE
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