After reading part of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I immediately thought of autism, which is a complex disorder of brain development. Symptoms of this disorder begin to show when a child is of a very young age, usually around three. It has different degrees of severity that can affect social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and repetitive behaviors. Today, it generally affects about one out of every eighty-eight children in the United States every year alone. However, this number has continued to increase for the last four decades, but some doctors have suggested that this increase in autistic cases could just be that there is actually a name for it now. It might have always been present, but now that there is a name for it, doctors are able to classify the disorder.
Despite all the information that doctors and other such medical teams have gathered and discovered, there is still no definitive reason for its occurrence. In other words, a cause for it hasn’t been found. However, many hypotheses have been created. Some of these hypotheses are: vaccines, environmental factors, genetics, immune deficiency, and differences of the brain. There has been substantial evidence to support all of these claims, but none of them give a definitive answer.
The hypothesis that autism could have been caused by environmental factors really stood out to me after reading Silent Spring. All of the insecticides that Carson discussed, and its negative impacts on individuals creates very viable evidence that these harmful solutions could be a reason for the sudden rise of autistic cases in the United States because Carson has presented evidence that these things have created other harmful medical problems in individuals. One of her examples is that there was an increase in cancer cases.
The only thing that contradicts this assumption is that her book was written during the late 1950s and early 1960s, about forty years ago. The use of the insecticides that she presents is probably no longer in use today; especially since the world that we live in today is much more environmentally conscious. I’m sure that scientists have created insecticides that aren’t as dangerous to the environment and to people. Yet, maybe the substances from the insecticides of Carson’s time have been passed down from generation to generation from the mothers, since Carson said that people were found to have large amounts of some of the substances in their systems.
It will be interesting to see what the real cause of autism is if researchers ever figure out the disorder. There have been substantial advances in this field of science, but still no major breakthroughs.