Parents and schools struggle to find a place for more and more autistic kids.

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Money is often an issue for parents of autistic children as well. Many parents, desperate for their children to get better, try any number of expensive experimental treatments. Stories abound of families who have gone bankrupt paying for potential cures for autism, including chelation, a process which cleanses the body of mercury and other potential toxins.

But for others, money is the least of it.

Sandra Cabrillo [the real name of family is being withheld by request] is one of them. In 2003, Sandra and her husband Rafael learned that their son Jeremiah was autistic. She couldn’t understand how that was possible. “He was fine before,” Sandra Cabrillo says. “I have the videos that prove it.”

Indeed, she does. She pops the tape into the VCR in her Marina apartment and presses play. Jeremiah, born in 2001, flashes on the screen. He’s about 1 year old. A guitar sits on his legs. His face is beaming as his dad sings him a Christian song. As the camera zooms in closer to his face, Jeremiah starts banging the guitar, in fine rhythm for a 1 year old, and begins singing.

“This is how he used to be,” Sandra says. Jeremiah is now a 5 year old who speaks only a few words. After 20 months of developing normally, Jeremiah started walking on his toes. He started humming to himself. He’d slap his head endlessly for no reason. Cabrillo told her pediatrician about his strange behavior, but he blew it off—a common experience for many parents of autistic children.

“Well, he looks normal to me,” Jeremiah’s pediatrician told Sandra during one visit, she recalls.

Sandra was undaunted. She suspected autism was the culprit, and pleaded with the doctor to authorize some tests for him at Stanford University. Eventually, he relented.

The tests came back positive. “In some ways we were ready for it,” says Rafael, a bus driver. “We wanted a legal document that showed that he had what we thought he had.”

They had reason to be thinking along those lines, because almost from the beginning, the Cabrillos faced a stiff sea of doubt about their son’s ailment from friends and doctors alike. Hardly anyone believed Sandra, for example, when she’d explain that Jeremiah starting exhibiting autistic symptoms after he was about 20 months of age—not before. “People thought we were out of our minds,” she says.

This seemingly benign observation, that a child “comes down” with autism-related symptoms at about 2 years old, has been hotly disputed by some doctors and scientists for years. The reason is that if true, it means something triggered those symptoms—that the person wasn’t born with them. And to acknowledge that means a mysterious force or forces are wreaking havoc on hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.

Today, research is showing that these parents’ perceptions were right on.

Isaac Pessah, director of UC Davis’ Center for Children’s Environmental Health and a member of the MIND Institute, says new research shows that regression really does occur with some children after developing normally for a time. “It occurs much more dramatically in some kids than in others,” Pessah says.

But why does it happen at all? What’s causing autism? How can it be stopped?

Pessah says no one knows for sure—yet. The leading theory is that some people—particularly boys, who represent more than 80 percent of autism cases—are born with a genetic predisposition. When faced with an environmental trigger or triggers, then autism-related disorders set in.

“Autism probably represents several disorders that we now talk about as a single thing,” Pessah says.

Currently, the MIND Institute is in the middle of an extensive study looking at possible triggers for autism-related disorders: mercury, flame retardants, PCBs and other chemical substances. Of those being studied, none of them have caused the uproar that organic mercury has.

What makes mercury a particularly sticky issue is that the Centers for Disease Control in the late 1980s approved a series of childhood vaccinations that included the preservative thimerosol, which is composed of 49 percent mercury.

Today parents like Marcela Salaiz and Sandra Cabrillo swear that their children started developing autistic symptoms days after getting their round of childhood vaccinations.

The CDC has refuted any link between thimerosol and autism, but the CDC’s credibility on the subject is starting to crack. Last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an investigative piece in Rolling Stone magazine detailing how top CDC officials attempted to quash studies from their own researchers that showed a thimerosol-autism link. Other research shows that the symptoms of mercury poisoning are awfully similar to those of autism-related disorders.

Federal health officials continue to deny any such link to this day, but states like California have already banned thimerosol, which is also found in some flu vaccines.