Bad Title deflects attentionfrom artiicle about real problem

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The Autism Epidemic That Can No Longer Be Ignored

The article is actually about Autistic Wandering not the "epidemic"

I know about autistic children can wander I used to when I was a small child. Autism is no f*****g epidemic there are better diagnostic tests not the result of an increase in autism that is just bollocks from the Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is about as accurate as The Onion. I had no idea that their reporting was so shoddy until I started tracking down their figures.

I just took one thing that looked questionable from that article- that 49% of autistic kids wander. It sent me to autismsafetycoalition.org, which has a giant rotating banner ad with "autistic children" on it, one of which clearly has Down's. When you browse the site you find out that they are also "for" people with Down's so I'm not sure why they are the autism safety coalition. The "49%" number comes from this report. You can see where it's problematic when you get to the second page, under the heading "Methods." Yes, it is a large sample, but the sample was taken from IAN, the Interactive Autism Network, which is an online research and autism registry. I happen to be familiar with the Kennedy Krieger Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which is the parent company for IAN. I used to go there to participate in research for my neurological disease.

So the people signed up for IAN are not representative of all autistic people. They're parents who have put their kids on a list so that they can get the latest and most cutting edge information about autism treatment and cures.

That's just one tiny thing from that article that I spent a half hour tracking down. Yes, wandering kids and people are a problem, but it's not just autistic people and it's certainly not an epidemic.

I strongly suspect that the claim that half of Autistic children wander from "safe" settings is BS. I ran away dozens of times as a kid, but I never once ran away from a setting in which I felt safe. Just because an ignorant allistic caregiver believes that a given setting is safe for their Autistic child, doesn't make it so.

Autistic children wandering is actually a very important issue, but I don't understand why they titled it like this.

Clickbait? Or just a last second subject change? Interesting.

I google Autism and filter it to just show items from the previous 24 hours. There are always stories "Autistic person missing", "Autistic Person found etc". I do not know the percentages but it is a real issue. But I agree that most of time they are running for specific reason(s), it could be sensory overload from florescence lights at their school, or some sort of abuse or they are running to something (many Autistic runaways are found at train stations).

I did not mean to imply that wandering is not a legitimate concern. Only that the environments from which Autistic children wander are not nearly as safe as their caregivers seem to believe.