2010 Census

[Guest guest]

Census time has rolled around again. It will be my second since my boy,

autistic, non-verbal was born. In that time I have seen much ado about

incidence, prevalance, etiology and such, without any real concrete information

determined and/or disseminated.

It occurs to me that if the Govt. were truly interested in answering some very

basic questions, like prevalance, there could be no better tool to do so than

the US Census. How simple it would be to place a handful of questions on it

relating to autism, and be able to poll not a few thousand on the phone or a

couple of token sites which may or may not reflect the greater US whole, but

rather the entire country, every single household in one fell swoop.

I do not believe that appropriate questions will be included on this Census, any

more than they were on the last one. however, i believe there is a way to get

around the (intentional?) omission by our Commerce Dept. If memory serves me,

there was a question in the last Census that related to people within the

household who spoke a primary language other than English. This should be on

the new Census as well, as this is a pretty important issue in and of itself.

What I am proposing is that every household who has a resident On Spectrum

should list there Aspie or Autist as speaking a language other than English.

There will be a few choices for this question, one of which will be " other " with

a blank to fill in. In this blank fill in " Autistic " , " Asperger " or " PDD-NOS " .

Make them count our children, our siblings, our uncles and cousins whether they

want to or not. Make them tally them and then let us see just how many of the

roughly 300 million Americans fall into categories of ASD. We know that

children born in 1994 are 1 in 150 and children born in 1998 are 1 in 100. Let

us see just what the ratio is or the country as a whole.

Please forward this on to every appropriate list so we can reach as many people

in the next week as possible.