In a recent paper purporting to link autism and vaccines, the
author, Gayle DeLong, chose to lump autism and speech or
language impairments together to create an autism “prevalence”
from special education data: To determine autism prevalence by
U.S. state, the number of 8-year old students classified with
either (1) autism or (2) speech or language impairments (speech
disorders) was divided by the total number of 8-year-olds in the
state. I won’t respond to the personal attacks, but I will
correct one error. The Herbert reference in the paper is
incorrect. The correct citation is: Herbert and Kenet (2007)
Brain abnormalities in language disorders and in autism.
Pediatr. Clin. North Am. 54:563-583 (abstract:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17543910). The paper shows
that brain injury of people with autism is similar to brain
injury of people with speech and language disorders. Another
paper that makes much the same point is Herbert et al. (2002)
Abnormal asymmetry in language association cortex in autism. A