No, not just better diagnosis. That implies that whatever symptoms the kid has could be mistaken for something else, but most of the cases I am familiar with are way more clear-cut than that. My kid is seriously weird; there is no question he needs to be in special ed. He has a very severe speech problem, among other things--syntax of a two-year-old, and difficulty understanding spoken language. I have heard that in some areas the incidence of autism is about 1 in 150. That argues for environmental factors, perhaps combinations that are different in different places. I mean, think about it--how many autistic kids did you know growing up in say, the fifties or sixties, and how many do you know now? The answer for me is "none," and "at least three that I met OUTSIDE Daniel's special programs." Counting the kids in his programs, "a whole lot." And by the way, autism has never run in our family. So something is up.