This is only news to those who have had their head in the ground, listening to fox news and government shills.
This report is interesting in a couple troubling ways.
The most important one is that it is an example of "consensus science".
The two groups are presented as expert and citizen at large. The problem with
this is the experts are experts in sciences unrelated to alcohol or drug addiction.
Well educated "experts in their field" are notoriously under informed on other issues
but the ego and strength of conviction is often extreme and extraordinary.
Way too many smart or conscientious individuals were hoodwinked by the
the fabrication behind science reported by Andrew Wakefield. His extreme
and extraordinary conviction on the topic elevated his biased study of
twelve selected children to the global horror it is now. Worse the issues
with the MMR vaccine were ignored because the vastly larger numbers of
Autism cases (1 in 16) while serious febrile seizures in children is perhaps 1 in a
million doses.
The good news is that with the dismissal of the Wakefield tomfoolery and
all that was built on it -- new studies and new methods are at least making
some progress on the febrile reactions. Mild reactions are common yet
vastly less risky than any of the three childhood diseases in MMR vaccines.
The bad news is that Autism research has no clue that I know of for the
increase in our population. This increase is larger than I can ascribe to
school districts over diagnosing it to pad the special education staff and
budget. It is possible that the responsibility to report in schools gets them to report
any sniff or suspect behaviour and try to classify it. A spectrum diagnosis
can be astoundingly easy to make as I suspect we all have behaviours that
are suspect. Too quiet, too noisy, too social, not social enough. Statistics
indicates that 50% of our students across the nation are below average and
we must boost our standings in local, state and national tests so that 95% of the
the student body is above average.