Even if a correlation does technically exist between autism and certain other things, it should be noted that as
@Nick🎢 has said in his post above,
correlation does not equal causation.
These folks may not
technically be wrong when they say that autism is correlated with, say, taking vaccines. However, correlation alone can never tell the whole story; there are all kinds of things that, while technically correlated, have no real-world relationship at all. With that in mind, I’d say that the chances of autism and taking vaccines having a genuine relationship is slim.
Just take a look at some of these links to see examples of weird correlations in action:
www.tylervigen.com
<b>One of the first things you learn in any statistics class is that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation" target="_blank">correlation</a> doesn't imply causation.</b> Nonetheless, it's fun to consider the causal relationships one could infer from these...
www.buzzfeednews.com
(Coincidentally, the BuzzFeed article shows that autism and eating organic food technically have a correlation coefficient of close to 1, which is as much of a positive correlation as you can get. Are they likely to have any real life relationship, though? Not overly likely at all, in my view.)
Besides, I thought ASD diagnosis was largely genetic?