autism does correlate with birth month https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296777/?report... and does seem to be more prevalent in particular latitudes, though that may be an effect of social/industrial/economic conditions.

Somali children in Sweden are 3-4x more likely to be Autistic than Swedish children:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23221308_Prevalence...

73% of pregnant Somali women in Sweden are Vitamin D deficient vs 5% of pregnant Swedish women:

https://www.alliedacademies.org/articles/vitamin-dbinding-pr...

This is a very good example of how difficult can be the biology sometimes.

Different social strata.

Parents working in different jobs, maybe more prone to go in contact with dangerous substances or living in more contaminated areas.

Different diets, maybe relying more in very cheap food choices.

Different country, with different resources and laws that could lead this women to not be fully aware of the local opportunities available in their pregnancy, or how to ask for their rights.

Recent campaigns of hate against immigrants in Swedden, that could lead to a worse treatment in hospitals by one or a few racist members of the staff.

Not able to pay for a premium healthcare while giving birth.

And immigrants live in countries with poor environmental laws and endure a dangerous travel that can damage their health. Dangerous levels of heavy metals were found in workers that had to burn hardware and recycle computers in a third world country to pay for their travel to Europe, for example. Somali people also eat a lot of migrant fish (aka: mercury with fins).

Vitamin D is just one in a thousand of possible explanations

Lets call a spade a spade.

There are evolutionary adaptations to the local environment of Northern Europe that Africans lack: light skin, light hair, light eyes.

There are cultural aspects such as the wearing of veils for women.

This has a significant impact on Vitamin D generation from the available sunlight.

https://sunburnmap.com/ - March 2021, a central European city will give saturation-level Vitamin D generation (before redness appears from preliminary sunburn) to a person with light features in 22 minutes, or someone with the darkest features in 1h40 minutes.

Just as Northern Europeans are evolutionarily and culturally poorly adapted to central Africa, so are Africans to Northern Europe.

This is nothing and easily compensated by changing your diet even if you don’t go outside more often. There’s no valid results from genetics unless you remember diet and environment come after it. So if there’s a problem I’d say it’s because we’re not giving them supplements.

e.g. the last time I went to Hawaii I got sunburned so bad I couldn't go outside for a week.

But it's not true to say I'm racially inferior for Hawaii living or that I'm not suited for going on vacation. What I should've done is wear more sunscreen.

> 73% of pregnant Somali women in Sweden are Vitamin D deficient vs 5% of pregnant Swedish women

You have to be careful with those claims; I believe "Vitamin D deficiency" is one of the medical metrics that isn't race-normed. But there's no reason to expect Somalis to have the same natural level of Vitamin D that Swedes do.

Given the terrible health consequences of deficiency, I think assuming racial difference in healthy vitamin D levels is a more dangerous claim that requires a burden of proof.

Melanin absorbs the UV light our bodies use to produce vitamin D.

It is an important public health issue for people with darker skin living in temperate or polar areas to get enough vitamin D.

Lack of vitamin D for people with darker skin is the inverse of paler people being at risk of burns in sunny areas.

I thought a complaint that Somalis in Minnesota had was that autism in their kids was disproportionately (not sure about exact meaning of this term) "low-functioning"

Low/high functioning isn't really a specific medical term, but basically it just means if you can live on your own or not.

If you're not only high functioning but gifted* then you're "twice exceptional".

* school term that supposedly means exceptionally intelligent, sometimes gets you to a different school/class for smart kids, but actually it's like special education for kids too fast/nerdy to be in regular classes without going nuts

Really interesting, ty. Agree with the sibling comments, needs normalization of course, but if that doesn't warrant funding I'm not sure what does. If I can throw a few bucks at it, please let me know how!

Right, I remembered this because I know an autistic Swedish person whose mother was an Iranian immigrant, just not what the evidence was.

Thanks! That was the perfect paper.

Only if you assume everyone has the same diet, biology, and tendency to stay inside as each other and as previous generations, which isn't true.

There would definitely be an effect but you'd have to do things like blood tests, I don't think you can easily predict which people are deficient.