G. Frink's

This is National Autism Awareness Month.

In the Washington post today, Linda H. Davis writes of Autism Overlooked in this nation which fails to acknowledge that autistic children rarely grow up to be functional adults.

Ms. Davis, president of the nonprofit SAGE Crossing Foundation, reminds us that they typically grow up to be adults who require lifelong care.

As a nation, we are not adequately supporting that care.

The magnitude of our failure can be corrected, if we inform ourselves, and take appropriate action.

The parents of autistic children can rarely deal with this unassisted.

They need our help, and one measure of our humanity is and will be how much and how effectively we provide the needed help.

Growing numbers of autistic Children

Chart published under the GNU Free Documentation License | (C)Eubulides

Wikipedia's detail on how the chart was constructed:

Bar chart of the number (per 1,000 U.S. resident children ages 6-11) of children aged 6-11 who were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) with a diagnosis of autism, from 1996 through 2005.
Counts of children diagnosed with autism for each year were taken from Table 1-9 of IDEA Part B Child Count (2005).
These were divided by census estimates for U.S. resident population aged 6-11 taken from US census estimates for 1990-1999 resident population by age and the similar estimates for 2000-2005; for all years, the September population estimates were used.