{"id":155654,"date":"2025-09-23T15:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T15:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/155654\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T15:07:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T15:07:07","slug":"fact-checking-three-claims-trump-made-about-autism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/155654\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact-checking three claims Trump made about autism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Trump cited the Amish as a group within the US who have &#8220;virtually no autism&#8221; within their community.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Amish typically live in remote communities and refuse to adopt many features of modern life, which can include a suspicion of modern pharmaceuticals. Trump suggested &#8211; without providing evidence &#8211; that a low rate of Tylenol use within the group could have led to a lower rate of autism.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">There are relatively few studies on autism rates within the Amish community. Many children are diagnosed in school &#8211; but most Amish drop out of school after eight grade, around 14-years-old.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I think it&#8217;s very very  unlikely that there are no autistic people among the Amish,&#8221; Eva Loth, professor of cognitive neuroscience at King&#8217;s College London told BBC Verify. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The question is how many population studies were carried out with the Amish? And are  Amish people likely to seek a diagnosis?  So there are a number of reasons why reported numbers may be low but that doesn&#8217;t mean that no cases exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In one 2010 study, a team of geneticists found autism occurred in approximately one in 271 Amish children. The research screened 1,899 children across two large Amish communities in Ohio and Indiana.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, it&#8217;s worth noting that research into this topic is limited, and we haven&#8217;t found any studies which suggest a link between low immunisation rates and autism diagnosis among Amish people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Trump made a similar claim about low levels of autism in Cuba &#8211; claiming that Tylenol supplies are low on the island as the reason.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It&#8217;s not clear what President Trump was basing the assertion on. BBC Verify could find no official Cuban statistic and the World Health Organization (WHO) has noted that the &#8220;prevalence of autism in many low- and middle-income countries is unknown&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trump cited the Amish as a group within the US who have &#8220;virtually no autism&#8221; within their community.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-155654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}