The figure represents a 16.1 increase compared to the same CDC report released two years ago.
A report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 15 showed that 1 in 31 children in America has autism.
The figures, which mark another jump in a long line of increases, stem from the CDC’s latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The report prompted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to say that “the autism epidemic is running rampant.”
“That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992,” Kennedy said in an April 15 statement.
“Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”
The previous ADDM report released in 2023 discovered that 1 in 36 8-year-old American children had autism in 2020. The April 15 survey reflects a 16.1 percent increase in two years.
The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in 14 states and surveyed 8-year-old children born in 2014.
The new autism prevalence is also 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when 1 in 150 children had autism.
“The autism epidemic has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young,” Kennedy said in his April 15 statement.
“The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago,” Kennedy added.
