"It's time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California," Dr. Hertz-Piccotto said.
And while soft drinks are a focal point of the report, the commission said that African countries' rapid economic and social change were two primary, environmental culprits driving the trend.
Since neither germs nor the other likely culprit, environmental poisons, make a habit of discriminating by sex, this was puzzling news indeed.
The culprits, environmental experts say, are a recent drought in north-central Florida and decades of pumping groundwater out of the aquifer to meet the demands of Florida's population boom, its sprinklers and its agricultural industry.
When South Africa's president recently seemed to suggest that the HIV virus might not be the direct cause of AIDS, he left vaguely defined "environmental" causes as the culprit.
Could California's landmark fuel standards and environmental protections be the culprit?
Reports and internal documents, CIEL says on a website about the research, "demonstrate that each industry saw in the other a convenient culprit for environmental cancers.
But again, our main point is not to identify the exact cause of what we claim is unexplained variance, just that some of the variance is unexplained by demographic stochasticity, and the likely culprit is environmental stochasticity.
So if one monozygotic twin, for example, develops an ailment that the other escapes, the culprit is probably environmental.
Chemical engineering has been one of the leading industries since the Industrial Revolution; however, in the green age, chemical engineering is deemed a major culprit of the environmental problems.
