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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Autism, Somalians, and Minnesota |
| 2009-03-19 |
| Perhaps just a statistical 'cluster', but if not...., very strange. Autism is terrifying the community of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, and some pediatricians and educators have joined parents in raising the alarm. But public health experts say it is hard to tell whether the apparent surge of cases is an actual outbreak, with a cause that can be addressed, or just a statistical fluke. A small recent study of refugees in schools in Stockholm found that Somalis were in classes for autistic children at three times the normal rate. Somalis began arriving in Minneapolis in 1993, driven out by civil war; now their population in Minnesota is estimated at 30,000 to 60,000. The city is welcoming and social benefits are generous, but many live a life apart as conservative Muslims, the women in head scarves and long dresses. Many Somali men have jobs as taxi drivers or security guards; others are accountants or run shops in the mini-malls catering to Somalis. Antivaccine activists are campaigning among them, which worries public health officials, especially because some families go back and forth to Somalia, where measles is still a significant cause of childhood death, according to Unicef. One of the first to raise the alarm was Anne Harrington, who worked in special education in the Minneapolis schools for 21 years. In the last decade, she said, "we've begun seeing a tremendous number of kids born here who have the more severe forms of autism." Last year, she said, 25 percent of the children in preschool classes offering the most intensive treatment had Somali parents, while only about 6 percent of public school enrollment is Somali. Dr. Daniel S. McLellan, a pediatrician, said that when he began practicing at Children's Hospital six years ago, he was struck by how many autistic Somali children he saw. |
| Posted by:Glenmore |
| #8 KBK, if you don't have an autistic child, then just shut up. You seem to have been in the bathroom when God was passing out empathy. |
| Posted by: mom 2009-03-19 23:41 |
| #7 Wall to wall victims all. Useful idiots helping Islamists work the generous MN support systems. Next, convince them vaccines are the work of the devil and measles is better. |
| Posted by: KBK 2009-03-19 22:06 |
| #6 Here's a brief but useful article on the autism/MMR discussion: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/mmr_prog_summary.shtml Thanks, TW. History is my favorite soap opera. It's kind of odd trying to teach history to an Aspie child who doesn't get cause and effect. At the elementary school level, she could get by with memorizing the sequence of events and learning the connections later. We used American Girl as our structure for History, and the autism therapists used the American Girls short stories to teach her cause and effect from a story. That took weeks per story. At the high school level, her method isn't working so well; the issues are too complex to memorize a sequence. |
| Posted by: mom 2009-03-19 15:37 |
| #5 Since this particular incidence seems to be related to inbreeding, is there any way to check Somalis in Somalia to see if it's also occurring there, too? (Probably not. Too bad.) I see the anti-vaccine clowns are hard at it, in spite of zero scientific evidence on their side, and several scientific studies debunking any connection between vaccination and autistm.... |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2009-03-19 15:09 |
| #4 You know the most fascinating things, mom! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-03-19 14:36 |
| #3 There's a genetic connection for autism and Asperger's Syndrome. We have three Aspies out of 5 kids. My dad, who is a genius but is so narrow minded he can see through a keyhole with both eyes, shows a lot of Asperger traits. As the family historian I can see who probably had autistic traits in the last four generations, on both my dad's side and my mom's side. I'm a carrier for the Asperger gene, even though my parents' families came from different parts of what is now Germany. So it would make sense that, in a culture that encourages marriage between close relatives, we see a higher rate of autism. We'll probably see aa high concentration of other genetic conditions as well. The Spanish Habsburgs in the 16th and 17th Centuries intermarried with their Austrian cousins to the point that the Habsburg chin became a deformity, rendering Charles II of Spain unable to chew his food. The family was already dying out; and Charles II had so many physical problems that the line died out with him. |
| Posted by: mom 2009-03-19 10:01 |
| #2 Hmmm. If autism, a mental illness, gets concentrated in a population through inbreeding, is militant Islam just another variant of mental illness concentrated through inbreeding (or via contagion - maybe goats?) |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-03-19 09:05 |
| #1 Inbreeding of an already susceptible population. Middle Eastern Families Help Scientists Pinpoint Autism Genes Walsh and his colleagues took another step to make finding autism genes easier: they specifically targeted families in which the mother and father shared a recent ancestor. "This shared ancestry roughly doubles the chance of offspring being affected," he explained. "This increase in risk is modest - about the same as having a child at age 40 versus at age 20 - but more importantly, the shared ancestry provides a trace that makes it easier to track inherited mutations." |
| Posted by: ed 2009-03-19 08:53 |