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In Minnesota, the Somali immigrants allegedly never saw autism until they came here, and they get a lot of it now.

They call it the "Minnesota Disease".

I also once read that Cable television penetration rates were correlated with autism as well...

Well, to be perfectly fair, we never "saw" it before 1943, either. I'm not trying to be flippant, our society is set up in a way to diagnose cases of autism, and it is reasonable to suspect that the increased rates of diagnosis are not all caused by increased rates of the condition.

I read somewhere a while back that said that the reason for rising autism rates in the 90's/00's was because we broadened the definition of autism.

There's also a lot of denial of autism in the Somali immigrant community, with traditional supernatural explanations of autistic behaviors.

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