I just want to recap the situation.
It's our opinion that we have a real health problem surrounding ASDs in Canada. To date, we are not doing national surveillance, but there is at least one region in Quebec and in other countries that are. I just want to share two examples.
In the region of Montérégie, Quebec, data taken from 2000 to 2007 shows the prevalence. And “prevalence” is the total number of cases of autism divided by the population, the total number in the population. So from 2000 to 2007, it went from 12 in 10,000 to 60 in 10,000. I called the public health department this week and asked if they had a more recent number, and they did. In 2009 the number went to 106 per 10,000. So that's from 12 to 60 to 106 per 10,000.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their last set of surveillance summaries on December 18, 2009. This resulted in a figure of 1%--or 1 in 110--of children in the United States classified as having an ASD. This is a 57% increase from 2002 to 2006.
In that same CDC paper, they went on to say, and I'll quote, “These results...underscore the need to regard ASDs as an urgent public health concern”.
Autism is now more common than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes, and pediatric AIDs combined.
You may hear that this increase is a result of changing the diagnostic criteria or broadening the definition of autism; however, note that the criteria we use to diagnose autism--which we refer to as the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition--has not changed since 1994.
You may also hear that we just called ASD something else before, what we refer to as “diagnostic substitution”. This certainly cannot be true for the CDC data. In the Montérégie data, it does not seem apparent either.
So based on that, we'd like to discuss some points that we believe the federal government can be looking at and things that they can do.