The Revolutionary Communist Party, known as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency until 1981, claimed to be a Trotskyist political organisation formed in 1978. From 1988 it published the journal Living Marxism. It started with only a few dozen supporters; its membership peaked at 200 in the mid-1990s.
Diagnoses of autism have become more frequent since the 1980s, which has led to various controversies about both the cause of autism and the nature of the diagnoses themselves. Whether autism has mainly a genetic or developmental cause, and the degree of coincidence between autism and intellectual disability, are all matters of current scientific controversy as well as inquiry. There is also more sociopolitical debate as to whether autism should be considered a disability on its own.
David Kirby was an American journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, and was formerly a regular contributor to The New York Times since 1998. He was the author of Evidence of Harm (2005), Animal Factory (2010), Death at Sea World (2012),and When They Come for You (2019). Kirby wrote on thiomersal and vaccines and has criticized factory farms.
Bernard Rimland was an American research psychologist, writer, lecturer, and influential person in the field of developmental disorders. Rimland's first book, Infantile Autism, sparked by the birth of a son who had autism, was instrumental in changing attitudes toward the disorder. Rimland founded and directed two advocacy groups: the Autism Society of America (ASA) and the Autism Research Institute. He promoted several since disproven theories about the causes and treatment of autism, including vaccine denial, facilitated communication, chelation therapy, and false claims of a link between secretin and autism. He also supported the ethically controversial practice of using aversives on autistic children.
Generation Rescue is a nonprofit organization that advocates the scientifically disproven view that autism and related disorders are primarily caused by environmental factors, particularly vaccines. The organization was established in 2005 by Lisa and J.B. Handley. Today, Generation Rescue is known as a platform for Jenny McCarthy's autism related anti-vaccine advocacy.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to autism:
The causes of autism are environmental or genetic factors that predispose an individual to develop autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Many causes of autism have been proposed, but understanding of the theory of causation of autism is incomplete. Attempts have been made to incorporate the known genetic and environmental causes into a comprehensive causative framework. ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by impairments in communicative ability and social interaction and restricted/repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities not suitable for the individual's developmental stage. The severity of symptoms and functional impairment vary between individuals.
Autism therapies include a wide variety of therapies that help people with autism, or their families. Such methods of therapy seek to aid autistic people in dealing with difficulties and increase their functional independence.
Claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have been extensively investigated and found to be false. The link was first suggested in the early 1990s and came to public notice largely as a result of the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, characterised as "perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". The fraudulent research paper authored by Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet falsely claimed the vaccine was linked to colitis and autism spectrum disorders. The paper was retracted in 2010 but is still cited by anti-vaxxers.
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around the 1998 study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world. He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London and became senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free and University College School of Medicine. He resigned from his positions there in 2001, "by mutual agreement", then moved to the United States. In 2004, Wakefield co-founded and began working at the Thoughtful House research center in Austin, Texas, serving as executive director there until February 2010, when he resigned in the wake of findings against him by the British General Medical Council.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure is a 2008 book by Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The book focuses on the controversy surrounding the now discredited link between vaccines and autism. The scientific consensus is that no convincing scientific evidence supports these claims, and a 2011 journal article described the vaccine-autism connection as "the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years".
Autism, formally called autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and social interaction, and repetitive or restricted patterns of behaviors, interests, or activities, which can include hyper- and hyporeactivity to sensory input. Autism is clinically regarded as a spectrum disorder, meaning that it can manifest very differently in each person. For example, some are nonspeaking, while others have proficient spoken language. Because of this, there is wide variation in the support needs of people across the autism spectrum.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) or autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) describe a range of conditions classified as neurodevelopmental disorders in the DSM-5, used by the American Psychiatric Association. As with many neurodivergent people and conditions, the popular image of autistic people and autism itself is often based on inaccurate media representations. Additionally, media about autism may promote pseudoscience such as vaccine denial or facilitated communication.
James Jeffrey "Jeff" Bradstreet, was an American doctor, alternative medicine practitioner, and a former preacher who ran the International Child Development Resource Center in Melbourne, Florida, a medical practice in Buford, Georgia and in Arizona, where he practiced homeopathy. He also founded the Good News Doctor Foundation, which aimed to combine Christian beliefs with his medical practice.
Vijendra Kumar Singh is a neuroimmunologist who formerly held a post at Utah State University, prior to which he was a professor at the University of Michigan. While affiliated with both institutions, he conducted some controversial autism-related research focusing on the potential role of immune system disorders in the etiology of autism. For example, he has testified before a US congressional committee that, in his view, "three quarters of autistic children suffer from an autoimmune disease."
Paul Shattock is a British autism researcher and scientific consultant to the charity Education and Services for People with Autism, of which he is also the founder. He was formerly the director of the Autism Research Unit at the University of Sunderland. He is well known for his disputed research into dietary therapy and autism, having claimed that autistic children may have a "leaky gut" which allows certain peptides to enter the bloodstream, and claimed that they excrete unusually high levels thereof. As a result of this speculation, he has promoted the use of a gluten-free, casein-free diet to ameliorate the symptoms of autism, a theory he developed along with Kalle Reichelt. In addition, he has claimed that a protein found in milk may play a role in the etiology of autism. He is also the former president of the World Autism Organization.
The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism is a biography attributed to Naoki Higashida, a nonverbal autistic person from Japan. It was first published in Japan in 2007. The English translation, by Keiko Yoshida and her husband, English author David Mitchell, was published in 2013.
Hear the Silence is a 2003 semi-fictional TV drama based around the discredited idea of a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism. By then, a contentious issue, the supposed connection originated in a paper by Andrew Wakefield published in 1998. The film debuted on 15 December 2003 at 9 pm on the British network Five. Produced on a budget of £1 million, it stars Hugh Bonneville as Wakefield and Juliet Stevenson as Christine Shields, a fictional mother who discovers the possible MMR-autism link when her son is diagnosed as autistic.
Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe is a 2016 American pseudoscience propaganda film alleging a cover-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of a purported link between the MMR vaccine and autism. According to Variety, the film "purports to investigate the claims of a senior scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who revealed that the CDC had allegedly manipulated and destroyed data on an important study about autism and the MMR vaccine"; critics derided Vaxxed as an anti-vaccine propaganda film.
The Lancet MMR autism fraud centered on the publication in February 1998 of a fraudulent research paper titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" in The Lancet. The paper, authored by now discredited and deregistered Andrew Wakefield, and twelve coauthors, falsely claimed causative links between the MMR vaccine and colitis and between colitis and autism. The fraud was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield being struck off the UK medical register three months later. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to $43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for a non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival vaccine at the time, and he had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers.
