‘The bottom line is we want the truth. We want safe products for our kids,’ said an Ohio dad with an autistic child.
Kelly Martino took her son Luca for his scheduled vaccines when he was 18 months old.
What followed devastated the family.
“The next day, we saw changes,” Martino, a mother-of-four from northwest Ohio, told The Epoch Times.
“As time went on, we kept seeing more and more regression. He went from being a happy child to being aggressive and angry. We couldn’t take him in public. He wasn’t reaching typical milestones,” she said.
When he was 2 years and 8 months old, Luca was diagnosed with autism.
Martino said she is “all about” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. placing focus on researching the cause behind the spike in autism in the United States.
In a Cabinet meeting in April, Kennedy outlined plans to select scientists and fund their research into autism.
“We will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said at the time.
Martino said she hopes the research will bring answers so “we can make children in the future healthier than what many children are today.”
She doesn’t believe that Luca, now 10, will ever live on his own, but recently, he made his own lunch and dressed himself for school, tasks that Martino wondered if he would ever perform.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the prevalence of autism has increased to one in 31 children, up from one in 150 children in 2002 and one in 10,000 in the early 1990s.
“This is an epidemic, and it is clearly an epidemic, and it’s happening. And epidemics are not caused by genes. Genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental exposure, and we need to identify what that exposure is. What is doing this to our kids?” Kennedy said on April 28.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that although autism can be diagnosed at any age, it’s described “as a ‘developmental disorder’ because symptoms generally appear in the first two years of life.”
