2,231 Measles Cases

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

From CDC:

As of July 9, 2026, 2,231 confirmed* measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026. Among these, 2,218 measles cases were reported by 42 jurisdictions: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, New York State, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. A total of 13 measles cases were reported among international visitors to the United States.

There have been 32 new outbreaks** reported in 2026, and 93% of confirmed cases (2,082 of 2,231) are outbreak-associated (717 from outbreaks starting in 2026 and 1,365 from outbreaks that started in 2025).

In just a week or two, we are very likely to top last year's total of 2,289, for the greatest number of annual cases in 35 years.

Lena H. Sun at WP:

When South Carolina was battling an outbreak that ultimately sickened 997 people, most of them this year, the health department had lost dozens of epidemiologists, infection preventionists and other public health staff as a result of federal funding cuts, said Linda Bell, who recently retired as state epidemiologist.

“That was just very taxing for the remaining staff,” Bell said in an interview.

South Carolina scrambled to hire temporary staff, but Bell said the reinforcements couldn’t replace the expertise that had been lost and officials ultimately shifted from containment to mitigation.

The virus surged through dozens of schools in Spartanburg County, the outbreak epicenter, which long had lower childhood vaccination rates than much of the state. Students were sent into quarantine multiple times before the outbreak was declared over in April. Schools that required multiple rounds of quarantine had average vaccination rates of 77 percent, according to a recent study by Cornell University researchers.

Researchers said South Carolina’s outbreak reflected a pattern seen repeatedly in the U.S., in which faith communities with shared views on vaccination sustain and amplify transmission. Twenty-nine cases were linked to one church.

“I think that we transitioned from containment to mitigation because we saw ongoing spread for weeks and weeks,” said Bell, who retired in April.

...

Messages from elected and appointed leaders who reject evidence-based public health recommendations have undermined outbreak responses, said Bell, who did not identify officials by name. Since taking office, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has questioned vaccine safety, reshaped federal vaccine policy and criticized long-standing vaccination recommendations.

“In the past ... we were battling the diseases,” Bell said. “We were not battling this misinformation that is now coming from an entirely different stream that is within the federal government.”

 

Kennedy v. Public Health

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

This week's CDC purge is just the lastest installment of RFK Jr's war on public health.

 Brandy Zadrozny at MSNBC:

Save for his confirmation hearing and private promises to Cassidy, Kennedy has clearly communicated his intentions to dismantle the CDC. Over decades of activism and lawyering, Kennedy has cast the CDC as the villain in his vaccine conspiracy theories, calling the agency a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with doctors and scientists who seek to profit off of injured children.

In just seven months, Kennedy has: pushed sweeping budget cuts and canceled billions in research and development; overseen mass layoffs and reorganizations that erased whole teams tackling clear health threats; without justification, withdrawn Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant people; gutted the agency’s vaccine advisory panel, firing respected experts and replacing them with ideological loyalists; installed a vocal Covid vaccine critic to chair a safety subcommittee; reopened the long-debunked vaccines-and-autism debate, promising a cause by September; hired a discredited anti-vaccine researcher who experimented on autistic children to trawl government data and relitigate settled science; pressed for access to private data to fuel his project; undermined his own epidemiologists during the Texas measles response; downplayed a shooting that left CDC staff shaken; announced sweeping policy changes on social media with no data to back them and accused the American Academy of Pediatrics of a “pay-to-play scheme” for daring to dissent. He’s done it all mostly from the road, on a national MAHA tour, where between performative push-ups and pull-ups, he’s cheered GOP states as they have restricted food benefits for low-income families.

Inpatient Discharge Data Confirm Increase in Autism Prevalence

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss evaluation, diagnosis, and the uncertainty of prevalence estimates.

"Epidemiologic Patterns of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Pediatric Inpatients in the United States, 1997–2019," by Stanford Chihuri, Ashley Blanchard, Carolyn G DiGuiseppi & Guohua Li

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (2023) Cite this article

Abstract

The reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has more than tripled in the past two decades in the United States, due in part to improved screening and diagnostic techniques. Epidemiologic data on ASD, however, are largely limited to population-based surveillance systems. We examined epidemiologic patterns in ASD diagnoses among inpatients aged 1–20 years, using data from the Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID) from 1997 to 2019. ASD cases were identified using ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM codes. Of 9,267,881 hospital discharges studied, 110,090 (1.19%) had a diagnosis of ASD. The prevalence of ASD was higher among males compared to females (1.53% vs. 0.54%) and was highest among non-Hispanic Whites (1.28% vs. 0.95% in non-Hispanic Blacks, 0.94% in Hispanics, and 1.18% in Other races). ASD prevalence increased from 0.18% to 1997 to 3.36% in 2019 (Z= -273.40, p < 0.001). The absolute increase was higher among males compared to females (0.26–4.90% vs. 0.08–1.77%) and among non-Hispanic Whites (0.18–2.88%) compared to non-Hispanic Blacks (0.23–2.72%), Hispanics (0.14–2.60%), and Other races (0.19–2.97%). The epidemiologic patterns of ASD based on inpatient data are generally consistent with reports from the community-based autism surveillance system. Our findings indicate that KID and other health services data might play a complementary role in ASD surveillance.

Conclusion

In a national study of pediatric inpatient discharges, there was a marked increase in ASD prevalence, with more rapid increase among younger birth cohorts, males, and non-Hispanic Whites. The prevalence of ASD followed a similar pattern to the ADDM Network- reported prevalence over time. Prevalence estimates for all age groups are important for informing public policy, allocating resources and services, and raising awareness. Our findings demonstrate the potential utility of hospital discharge record data for ASD surveillance.

 

Lithium

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss various ideas about what causes the condition. 

Zeyan Liew and colleagues have an article at JAMA Pediatrics titled "Association Between Estimated Geocoded Residential Maternal Exposure to Lithium in Drinking Water and Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder in Offspring in Denmark." Key Points:

• Question  Is maternal prenatal exposure to lithium in drinking water associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in offspring?
• Findings  In this Danish nationwide population-based case-control study, the study team found that maternal exposure to higher levels of residential lithium in drinking water during pregnancy was associated with a moderate increase in ASD risk in the offspring. The findings remained robust after adjusting for several maternal neighborhood socioeconomic factors and air pollution exposures.
• Meaning  This study suggests that naturally occurring lithium in drinking water may be a novel environmental risk factor for ASD development that requires further scrutiny.

Lithium joins a very long and growing list of other correlates, risk factors, and possible causes that have been the subject of serious studies:

Inflammatory bowel disease;

Pesticides;

Air pollution and proximity to freeways;

Maternal thyroid issues;

Autoimmune disorders;

Induced labor;

Preterm birth;

Fever;  

Birth by cesarean section;

Anesthesia during cesarean sections;

Maternal and paternal obesity;

Maternal diabetes;

Maternal and paternal age;

Grandparental age;

Maternal post-traumatic stress disorder;

Maternal anorexia;

Smoking during pregnancy;

Cannabis use during pregnancy;

Antidepressant use during pregnancy;

Polycystic ovary syndrome;

Infant opioid withdrawal;

Zinc deficiency;

Sulfate deficiency;

Processed foods;

Maternal occupational exposure to solvents;

Congenital heart disease;

Insufficient placental allopregnanolone.

Estrogen in the womb;

Morning sickness;

Paternal family history;

Parental preterm birth;

Antiseizure meds

Location of forebears

1. 
   

Yet Another Correlate: Where Forebears Lived

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss various ideas about what causes the condition. 

There is a very long and growing list of other correlates, risk factors, and possible causes that have been the subject of serious studies:

Inflammatory bowel disease;

Pesticides;

Air pollution and proximity to freeways;

Maternal thyroid issues;

Autoimmune disorders;

Induced labor;

Preterm birth;

Fever;  

Birth by cesarean section;

Anesthesia during cesarean sections;

Maternal and paternal obesity;

Maternal diabetes;

Maternal and paternal age;

Grandparental age;

Maternal post-traumatic stress disorder;

Maternal anorexia;

Smoking during pregnancy;

Cannabis use during pregnancy;

Antidepressant use during pregnancy;

Polycystic ovary syndrome;

Infant opioid withdrawal;

Zinc deficiency;

Sulfate deficiency;

Processed foods;

Maternal occupational exposure to solvents;

Congenital heart disease;

Insufficient placental allopregnanolone.

Estrogen in the womb;

Morning sickness;

Paternal family history;

Parental preterm birth;

Antiseizure meds

A release from the University of Utah:

When and where are often vital clues for epidemiologists, the medical detectives who help solve the underlying mysteries of disease. The technique dates back to at least 19th century London, where a physician named John Snow mapped cholera deaths and traced the source of the outbreak to a single well in the city. Once the well was closed, the epidemic ended.


Taking this idea to a new level, University of Utah Health scientists, using a unique combination of geographic and population data, recently concluded that when and where parents and grandparents of Utah children were born and raised could contribute to an increased risk of autism among their offspring.

The scientists think this new approach could be used to explore time and space aspects of any disease where family pedigree information is available.

The study, published in the International Journal of Health Geographics, is among the first to assess the influence of time and space (when and where) across generations on the increased risk of autism. In time, the researchers say, this finding could lead to the identification of environmental factors, such as exposure to pollutants, that could have disruptive effects on genetic information passed between generations.

"Looking back at families and where and when they lived helped us detect clusters of individuals who seem to have a higher subsequent risk of autism among their descendants," says James VanDerslice, an environmental epidemiologist in the Division of Public Health at U of U Health and senior author of the study. "Knowing that the parents and grandparents of these children with autism shared space and time brings us closer to understanding the environmental factors that might have influenced this health outcome."

Epidemiological studies across generations are difficult and time-consuming, says Rebecca Richards-Steed, the study's principal investigator and graduate student in the Department of Geography at University of Utah. In fact, most of these studies have been done in animals, which reproduce quickly and can be followed for several generations in a shorter time span than humans.

Using existing technology in a new way, VanDerslice and Richards-Steed circumvented this drawback by looking at existing data available for parents and grandparents to identify places and time periods that may be associated with risk factors that increased the risk of disease in subsequent generations.

The researchers used the Utah Registry of Autism and Developmental Disabilities, in conjunction with the Utah Population Database (UPDB), to identify parents and grandparents of children born between 1989 and 2014 who have autism.

Birth certificates, driver's license information, and census and medical records in the UPDB helped the scientists track when and where these individuals lived over time. The UPDB is one of the few databases worldwide to include this type of information.

For comparison, they randomly selected parents and grandparents of children in the UPDB database who were not diagnosed with autism. Names of the individuals were withheld from the researchers.

In all, VanDerslice and colleagues pinpointed where 7,900 parents and 31,600 grandparents were born and raised. They identified 20 key clusters, or groupings, scattered across the state. After analysis, 13 of the 20 clusters—nine among grandparents and four among parents—were associated with an elevated risk of autism in their children or grandchildren. In particular, descendants of paternal grandparents were about three times more likely to have autism than expected.

"What we were seeing fits in with current scientific understanding of how paternal genetics is key to evolutionary change and adaptation," Richards-Steed says. "So, it is quite possible in the case of autism that a signal, shaped in part by environmental experiences, is coming from the paternal lineage, which is being passed down through the family."

Seven clusters, all in rural areas, had a low risk of an association between autism and family lineage.

"We're really not sure why some rural areas seemed to have what might be called a protective effect," Richards-Steed says. "It's certainly possible that parents and grandparents living in urban areas had different environmental exposures or experiences."

"What we can say, based on our findings, is what we are being exposed to now is probably not just affecting us or even our children but maybe even our children's children."

Moving forward, the researchers will delve deeper into the factors, including lifestyle, that could help explain these results.

"Evidence shows our environment has a deterministic effect on our growth and development, which includes the germline cells we carry for the next generation," VanDerslice says. "Examining the shared space and time of our ancestors may give us clues about the environmental factors that may lead to biological changes that increase the risk of disease in future generations. "

The scientists think this new approach could be used to explore time and space aspects of other conditions where family pedigree information is available.

"This idea isn't limited to autism," Richards-Steed says. "It can be applied to any disease and could enhance our ability to understand how a confluence of genetic and environmental factors can have long-term health consequences for families."


More information: Rebecca Richards Steed et al, Evidence of transgenerational effects on autism spectrum disorder using multigenerational space-time cluster detection, International Journal of Health Geographics (2022). DOI: 10.1186/s12942-022-00313-4

Identification, Evaluation, and Management of Children with ASD

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the sources of autism research funding -- including the Pentagon.

From: "Executive Summary: Identification, Evaluation, and Management of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder," by Susan L. Hyman, Susan E. Levy, Scott M. Myers and Council on Children with Disabilities, Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Pediatrics January 2020:

This document provides a summary of the clinical report “Identification, Evaluation, and Management of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” published concurrently in the online version of Pediatrics. In the years since 2007, when the American Academy of Pediatrics published the clinical reports “Identification and Diagnosis of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders” and “Management of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” reported prevalence rates of children with ASD have increased, understanding of potential risk factors has expanded, awareness of co-occurring medical and behavioral conditions and genetic contribution to etiology has improved, and the body of research supporting evidence-based interventions has grown substantially. The updated document discusses evaluation and treatment as a continuum in 1 publication with a table of contents to help the reader identify topic areas within the report. ASD is more commonly diagnosed than in the past, and the significant health, educational, and social needs of individuals with ASD and their families constitute an area of critical need for resources, research, and professional education.

... 

The American Academy of Pediatrics supports the current approach taken by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee of the National Institutes of Health of including representative stakeholders in planning a meaningful research agenda. Stakeholders include families and affected individuals, scientists, clinicians, and public health agencies. This committee’s 2009 strategic plan, updated in 2017, identified 7 areas for research funding: (1) early detection, (2) underlying biology, (3) genetic and environmental risk factors, (4) treatments and interventions, (5) services and implementation science, (6) life span services and supports, and (7) epidemiological surveillance and infrastructure. It is important that multiple levels of inquiry be pursued simultaneously to inform evidence-based clinical care. These include the following:

• basic and translational science in the areas of genetics and epigenetics, neurobiology, environmental risk factors, and psychopharmacology to understand the typical and atypical brain development and function to develop ASD-specific behavioral and pharmacologic therapies;
• clinical trials to test focused interventions informed by translational studies to provide the evidence necessary for community implementation;
• epidemiological surveillance to gather data important for planning for current and future needs, including screening, diagnosis, and life span health and mental health services, with special attention to underserved populations; and
• health services research to provide guidance for comprehensive, accessible, and culturally appropriate medical, educational, and behavioral care for children, youth, adults, and families affected by ASD.

Research in all of these areas is critical to move forward with early diagnosis, effective treatment, and evidence-based interventions at each age. To provide appropriate care to all children and families affected by ASD, organizations responsible for health, education, social services, and public health need to collaborate and build integrated and adequately funded and staffed systems. The pediatric health care provider plays a critical role in identifying young children at risk for ASD; shepherding these children through diagnosis and into effective interventions; supporting the families, including siblings; anticipating and managing co-occurring health and behavioral disorders; and preparing the youth and family for transition to adult services. The updated clinical report provides the health care provider with information and resources to support the care of the child and family affected by ASD.

Studying Prevalence in Minnesota

The Politics of Autism discusses legislation before Congress.

On Tuesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on several bills including the reauthorization of the Autism CARES Act.  The testimony of Amy Hewitt, Ph.D. the Director of the Institute on Community Integration, University of Minnesota

The Autism CARES Act has helped to build a critical infrastructure to further advance our understanding of autism. The Autism CARES Act supports several important programs. It supports the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, a group of programs funded by the CDC to estimate the number of children with ASD and other developmental disabilities living in different areas of the United States. The CDC also established regional centers of excellence for ASD and other
developmental disabilities. They make up the Centers for Autism and Developmental
Disabilities Research and Epidemiology Network (CADDRE) that are working in part to
help identify factors that may put children at risk for ASD and other developmental
disabilities.

Findings from the Minnesota-Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring  etwork (MN-ADDM) helps us to understand more about the number of children with  Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the characteristics of these children, and the age at which they are first evaluated and diagnosed.

This is the first time Minnesota has been a part of the ADDM network, and we are building our geographic area. Through this work, we know that 1 in 42 8-year-old children were identified with ASD in 2014. We now know that boys were 4.6 times more likely to be identified than girls and that there were no significant differences found in the percentage of white, black, and Hispanic children identified with ASD.

The findings in our report reflect a limited number of children concentrated in a large metropolitan area. Through the reauthorization of the Autism CARES Act, we are hopeful that we will be able to increase our scope geographically and include the lifespan of individuals with autism. This is particularly important because in addition to the  race/ethnicity categories routinely studied by CDC, in Minnesota we were interested in understanding prevalence for our local Hmong, Somali and other immigrant populations. Expansion of the geographic area in which we gather data is the only way we will be able to know with certainty if differences exist among these groups in Minnesota.

Measles Wildfire

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Antivax sentiment has been strong in the Pacific Northwest.

Kirk Johnson at NYT:

Measles, declared eliminated as a major public health threat in the United States almost 20 years ago, has re-emerged this winter in the Pacific Northwest and other states where parents have relatively broad leeway over whether to vaccinate their children.

Seventy-nine cases of measles have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the start of this year. Fifty cases of the highly contagious disease were in Washington State.

An outbreak of measles has also occurred in the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, where 64 confirmed cases of measles were reported, mostly late last year. That outbreak began, the C.D.C. said, when a child who had not had a measles vaccination caught the virus on a visit to Israel, where a large outbreak of the disease was occurring.

Lena H. Sun and Maureen O'Hagan at Wash. Post:

The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the nation’s most vocal and organized anti-vaccination activists. That movement has helped drive down child immunizations in Washington, as well as in neighboring Oregon and Idaho, to some of the lowest rates in the country, with as many as 10.5 percent of kindergartnersstatewide in Idaho unvaccinated for measles. That is almost double the median rate nationally.

Libertarian-leaning lawmakers, meanwhile, have bowed to public pressure to relax state laws to exempt virtually any child from state vaccination requirements whose parents object. Three states allow only medical exemptions; most others also permit religious exemptions. And 17, including Washington, Oregon and Idaho, allow what they call “philosophical” exemptions, meaning virtually anyone can opt out of the requirements.

All those elements combine into a dangerous mix, spurring concern about the resurgence of a deadly diseasethat once sent tens of thousands of Americans to hospitals each year and killed an estimated 400 to 500 people, many of them young children.

“You know what keeps me up at night?” said Clark County Public Health Director Alan Melnick. “Measles is exquisitely contagious. If you have an under-vaccinated population, and you introduce a measles case into that population, it will take off like a wildfire.

Dr. Haider Warraich at Vox:

If they are effective, preventive therapies treat events that a person will never witness. So a patient who takes a statin might never experience the heart attack it prevented but might experience side effects, or simply the inconvenience of taking a medication sometimes with no perceived benefit. This is unlike treatments that are therapeutic for symptoms or obvious physical manifestations of diseases after they have developed. For example, while many patients may overstate the risks of statins, the benefits of treatments such as coronary stents, which are used to increase blood flow in blocked or narrowed arteries supplying the heart to manage heart attacks and chest pain, are frequently inflated.

Outbreaks of measles in the US, largely driven by refusal of a critical mass of parents in a community to have their children vaccinated, could be a result of this phenomenon. Rumors and fears that have taken hold of largely well-educated, concerned, and well-meaning parents, connected through online networks, are fueling the anti-vaxxer movement.

Yet perhaps the answer to this modern disease that appears to have landed straight out of a Black Mirrorepisode might also lie in the online networks that have helped foment this in the first place. A team of scientists successfully predicted the measles outbreak at Disney World in 2014 using machine learning to analyze social media posts and search engine behaviors two years in advance.

Too Many Autistic People Die Young

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

Many analyses of autism speak as if it were only a childhood ailment and assume that parents are the main stakeholders. But most children with autism grow up to be adults with autism, and they suffer uniquely high levels of social isolation. Almost 40 percent of youth with an autism spectrum disorder never get together with friends, and 50 percent of never receive phone calls from friends. These figures are higher than for peers with intellectual disability, emotional disturbance, or learning disability. When school ends, many adults with autism have grim prospects. Though evidence is sparse, it seems that most do not find full-time jobs. Compared with other people their age, they have higher rates of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and suicide attempts.

David Mandell writes at Autism:

People with autism think about killing themselves and die from suicide at a horrifying rate. Small studies find that 20%–40% of adults with autism have considered killing themselves (Hedley et al., 2017) and 15% report making at least one attempt (Balfe and Tantam, 2010). A large Swedish cohort study found that adults with autism are nine times more likely to die from suicide than other adults (Hirvikoski et al., 2016). Studies of children with autism find that 11% have suicidal ideation and 4%–7% have made suicide attempts (Mayes et al., 2013), and the risk of making a suicide attempt is six times that of other children (Moses, 2017).
...
As we think about the urgent task of reducing premature mortality in people with autism, it is worth revisiting some passages from the Autistica report that deserve as much public attention as those describing suicide risk. The risk of early mortality from all causes among people with autism is nearly twice that of the general population. Those with autism and no accompanying learning disability die an average of 16 years earlier. Those with autism and intellectual or learning disabilities die an average of 30 years earlier (Hirvikoski et al., 2016). The study by Hirvikoski and colleagues represents the largest and most careful study of mortality and autism to date. They found that 12% of deaths were due to suicide; 22% were due to diseases of the circulatory system, which include heart disease and stroke; and 12% were due to neoplasms, which include cancers. Diseases of the nervous system, which include epilepsy, accounted for 9% of deaths. These numbers vary greatly between individuals with and without intellectual disability. Suicides accounted for 14% of deaths in autistic adults without intellectual disability and 4% of deaths in those with intellectual disability. Death from nervous system diseases accounted for 4% of deaths in those without and 19% of those with intellectual disability.
...
By no means am I suggesting that we divert attention or resources from determining the best ways to reduce suicide risk in people with autism, but we must not lose sight of our primary goal, which should be to reduce all premature mortality and increase quality of life among people with autism. It would be a great service if future studies of mortality in autism provided attributable fractions, with the goal of directing public health efforts. Studies to date suggest that there is no single cause or even small set of causes that accounts for all the excess mortality in autism. Until we know exactly where to direct our efforts, improving primary and preventive care for people with autism (Nicolaidis and Raymaker, 2013), and addressing the healthcare needs that are common to all adults but exacerbated in adults with autism, may result in better outcomes than specialty programs that address one risk factor at a time.

Pushback Against a WiFi-Autism Link

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss various ideas about what causes the condition.

Here is just a partial list of correlates, risk factors, and possible causes that have been the subject of serious studies:

• Pesticides;
• Air pollution and proximity to freeways;
• Maternal thyroid issues;
• Autoimmune disorders;
• Induced labor;
• Preterm birth;
• Birth by cesarean section;
• Maternal and paternal obesity;
• Maternal and paternal age;
• Maternal post-traumatic stress disorder;
• Smoking during pregnancy;
• Antidepressant use during pregnancy;

Not to mention fever during pregnancy.

There is another, though with some pushback. Tom Chivers at Buzzfeed:

The journal Child Development published what was described as a "review article" –an assessment of existing literature – by Cindy Sage and Ernesto Burgio. It was titled "Electromagnetic Fields, Pulsed Radiofrequency Radiation, and Epigenetics: How Wireless Technologies May Affect Childhood Development", and was published in a "special section" of the journal addressing technology risks.

The paper got picked up by the UK national media. An article in the Express, published in May, asked: "Could wireless technology be causing MAJOR health problems in your children?"

It said: "Wireless mobile phones, laptops and tablets could be causing major health problems in children and contributing to autism and hyperactivity, a new study warns," and said that these devices, "which even include baby monitors, emit radiation and electromagnetic fields that pierce thin skulls, harming memory, learning and other mental skills".

However, a new paper published in the journal PeerJ by Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Oxford who specialises in developmental conditions such as autism, and David Robert Grimes, a medical physicist also at the University of Oxford, has issued severe doubts about the study. They said its claims are "devoid of merit" and "should [not be] given a veneer of legitimacy".