Claudya
Member
(k9 safe search results, in less than a ten minutes >> )
http://www.endowmentmed.org/index.php?Itemid=38&id=284&option=com_content&task=view
A staff member told Olmsted that she had never thought about it before, but in the five years that she had worked at the clinic she had never seen one autistic Amish.
On June 8, 2005, Olmsted reported on the autism rate in the Amish community around Middlefield, Ohio, which was 1 in 15,000, according to Dr Heng Wang, the medical director, at the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children.
In addition to the Amish, Olmsted recently discovered another large unvaccinated group. On December 7, 2005, Age of Autism reported that thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with Amish children, they have never been vaccinated and they don't have autism.
Homefirst has five offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors. "We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," said Dr Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973.
"So far," according to Age of Autism, "there is evidence of fewer than 10 Amish with autism; there should be several hundred if the disorder occurs among them at the same 166-1 prevalence as children born in the rest of the population."
There are so many lifestyle and environmental factors that are different between Amish and "average American" I bet you will find a dozen more plausible causes for why they have such a low autism rate. I could come up with 5 or 6 in an instant.
Autism probably predates vaccination, doesn't it? So if the Amish who don't get vaccinated have like no autism at all while autism was way more prevalent even in pre-vaccination time than it is among the Amish now, then vaccination is probably not the cause.