(44 reviews) Author: ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFA groundbreaking book, The Age of Autism explores how mankind has unwittingly poisoned itself for half a millennium.
For centuries, medicine has made reckless use of one of earth's most toxic substances: mercury - and the consequences, often invisible or ignored, continue to be tragic. Today, background pollution levels, including global emissions of mercury as well as other toxicants, make us all more vulnerable to its effects. From the worst cases of syphilis to Sigmund Freud's first cases of hysteria, from baffling new disorders in 19th century Britain to the modern scourge of autism, The Age of Autism traces the long overlooked history of mercury poisoning.
Now, for the first time, authors Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill uncover that history. Within this context, they present startling findings: investigating the first cases of autism diagnosed in the 1940s revealed an unsuspected link to a new form of mercury in seed disinfectants, lumber fungicides and vaccines.
In the tradition of Silent Spring and An Inconvenient Truth, Olmsted and Blaxill demonstrate with clarity how chemical and environmental clues may have been missed as medical "experts," many of them blinded by decades of systemic bias, instead placed blamed on parental behavior or children's biology. By exposing the roots and rise of The Age of Autism, this book attempts to point the way out - to a safer future for our children and the planet.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 17 hours and 22 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: August 26, 2013
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EKT92Q0
The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and as Man-Made Epidemic PDF
The content of this book is a bit different than what this reviewer had expected. Much of the material presented here can actually be read apart from what the authors discuss about autism, even though autism is one of the core elements in some areas of the text, comprising perhaps about one-third of the book. In reading some of the reviews here, as well as the great amount of comments that have been submitted in response to these reviews, it is rather apparent that some have not actually read this book (the reader of this review can rest assured that this reviewer has read the entire content before submitting this review), so this review was submitted with the goal of addressing these, even though it is difficult to review a book of this nature in just a couple paragraphs.
As the authors discuss in their introduction, the intention was to investigate the natural history of the autism disorder, beginning with the original landmark 1943 report by Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Leo Kanner on 11 children born in the 1930s. While traditional researchers often state that autism rates consist of only a handful per 10 thousand individuals, and that this rate has existed for quite some time and is common, the authors state that autism was newly discovered in the 1930s because it was new and did not exist in previous generations. In reading the account of Kanner, the presentation that the authors provide is compelling. If individuals have had this disorder at a natural rate for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, why would its existence not have been documented?
In the opinion of this reviewer, one of the best aspects of this book is the fact that the authors research each of the 11 individual cases reported by Kanner.
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