WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The autism epidemic is 'running rampant' in the United States, the Health and Human Services Secretary says as new data shows that one in 31 children born in the country are disabled by autism.
Autism prevalence in the U.S. has increased from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey.
'The autism epidemic is running rampant,' said Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 'One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That's up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992, opens in a new tab. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California it's 1 in 12.5.'
He said President Donald Trump has tasked him with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic, including autism. 'We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.'
The results of the survey were published in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Wednesday.
This latest autism prevalence is 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey held 22 years ago, when prevalence was 1 in 150 children.
The increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence cannot be solely attributed to the expansion of diagnoses to include higher functioning children, the report says. On the contrary, the percentage of ASD cases with higher IQs (> 85) has decreased steadily over the last six ADDM reports to 36.1 percent. Nearly two thirds of children with ASD in the latest survey had either severe or borderline intellectual disability.
Minority children were more severely affected. Black, Asian, and Hispanic children in the 2022 survey had higher overall ASD prevalence than White children, and were also more likely to have a more severe form of autism.
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