Autism rates and diagnosis
THANK you for your excellent article “Why does it take so long to get autism diagnosis?” (Gazette June 13.) We have a young relative on the autistic spectrum and, as your article stated, our family also had to pay privately to get a prompt diagnosis. This enabled us to help the child as soon as possible.
We paid privately for ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) oneto-one interactive therapy at home.
This is great fun for the child and is like having a friend to play and there’s much laughter.
The therapist hid a packet of raisins (a favourite of the child) and then they searched for it.
She got our young relative talking within a month of starting ABA. The child is now doing very well at normal state school. Our relative still has other interactive sessions, again paid for privately, to help with social skills.
Autism rates have increased greatly in recent years.
Research by Prof. Chris Exley from Keele University, found during autopsies that the brain tissue of young people who’d had autism, contained the highest levels of aluminium he’d ever seen.
The only time he’d seen similar levels was in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients who had died.
He was shocked that teenagers aged only 13, 14 and 15 had such high levels. The professor states that our bodies are now bombarded with aluminium in everyday products, including silver foil, some food additives, vaccines, cosmetics and cleaning products etc.
Tap water is treated with aluminium sulphate to ‘clarify it and make it sparkle,’ whereas in the past water was filtered through harmless sandbeds. I wish there was more interest by those in authority in finding why autism and Alzheimer’s have risen so much, so that in many cases it could be possible to prevent it.
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