{"id":164013,"date":"2026-04-12T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T05:12:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T05:12:42","slug":"emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/","title":{"rendered":"EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Editor&#8217;s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published May 28, 2023.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This interview was recorded in November 2018 at the annual Academy for Comprehensive and Integrative Medicine (ACIM) convention in Orlando, Florida, but it was only last year that it ran on the site. At the time there was concern that the topic was too controversial, but now that six years have passed and COVID changed the controversial landscape, we thought it would be good to release the video on this important topic.<\/p>\n<p>I had the opportunity to interview two experts on autism and dirty electricity, Peter Sullivan and Dr.\u00a0Martha Herbert, who cowrote \u201cThe Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be.\u201d<sup><span data-hash=\"#ednref1\">1<\/span><\/sup> Here, we discuss some of the toxic factors that contribute to the development of autism, especially the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and dirty electricity.<\/p>\n<h2>Sullivan\u2019s Journey<\/h2>\n<p>Sullivan has struggled with <a href=\"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2023\/05\/07\/emf-filters-for-electromagnetic-hypersensitivity.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">electromagnetic hypersensitivity<\/a>, and still does to some degree, which was his primary motivation for learning more about it. He\u2019s become a fount of knowledge as a result. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was passionate about personal technology.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cI studied in Stanford. I did all kinds of human-computer interactions. I worked at multiple companies: as a troubleshooter in Silicon Valley, an engineer and a software designer at the very end. I worked at Netflix and some other companies people would know of,\u201d<\/em> he says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In the early 2000s, problems began to take root. Fatigue and food allergies cropped up, and his children were struggling with developmental delays. He eventually realized he had toxic levels of mercury in his system.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cI eventually just took time off from work, in about 2005. I just said it\u2019s ridiculous, with all these things going on, to have two people in the family working. I was focusing on my kids\u2019 health and my health and really had some time and energy to really go deep and find out what was really out there.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>I had a great doctor, Dr. Raj Patel \u2026 an integrative medical doctor who would talk about Candida overgrowth, mercury, and all that stuff. He got us on track. Eventually, the kids slowly got better, but even after detoxing, I did not. I kept getting worse.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>I got down to 131 pounds. I became electrically sensitive. My brain kept telling me, \u2018All the stuff is safe and well-tested. I love technology.\u2019 But my body was reacting like there was something really wrong. I was catching myself just throwing a cellphone away \u2014 feeling cellphones and then transformers when I plugged them in.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>He eventually learned about dirty electricity, and once he started addressing his exposure, he regained 10 pounds in a couple of months, along with his health. Today, he\u2019s passionate about sharing information about the dangers of EMFs and dirty electricity, and how to address electromagnetic hypersensitivity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re just trying to share the information, make the field credible, because it\u2019s very credible, and make sure people don\u2019t have to suffer,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>He even created an EMF-free tent that he brings with him to different seminars and conferences that people can sit in, as many of these events are held in places where you\u2019re exposed to very high amounts of EMF. He\u2019s also funded some of Herbert\u2019s research.<\/p>\n<h2>Herbert\u2019s Story<\/h2>\n<p>I first met Herbert at a Cure Autism Now event (now Autism Speaks) in 2009. Herbert\u2019s two children struggled with symptoms of autism when they were young. Today, they\u2019re both grown and have fully recovered. Her initial focus was on mercury toxicity, looking at ways of doing noninvasive screening for toxic metals.<\/p>\n<p>A lifelong environmentalist, Herbert went to medical school after getting a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She studied pediatric neurology, and fell into working with autism after inheriting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from the first MRI study performed on autistic children in 1989.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cI was one of the first people \u2014 but not the only one \u2014 to identify white matter abnormalities in autism through brain imaging, not through gray tissue,\u201d<\/em> Herbert says. <em>\u201cThat really violated the paradigm that behavior comes from the cortex. I was already kind of a whole-body person. I was seeing patients.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>[Few of them] had these rare neurogenetic diseases that you\u2019re trained for in pediatric neurology. But everybody was coming in with diarrhea and eczema, and they couldn\u2019t sleep. It was almost like primary care in neuropsychiatry. That\u2019s where I sort of edged my way into the whole-body approach.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>I had an epiphany in 1999 \u2026 that all the stuff I was seeing in my patients really could connect with the environment \u2026 I started putting together and figuring out that this was really a systems [biology] approach to these conditions.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>A Systems Biology Approach to Autism<\/h2>\n<p>Systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web, in which everything is connected to everything else. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes. In conventional science, individual components and variables are studied in isolation. That\u2019s how clinical research is designed.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cWe\u2019re looking for pure forms of disease. But mostly in these conditions that we\u2019re talking about, it\u2019s a mess,\u201d<\/em> Herbert says. <em>\u201cEverybody has a bunch of different [symptoms], some of which are more prominent than others. Early on in figuring out autism as a systems problem, I was looking at specific language problems or developmental language disorder.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>But if you look at these people carefully, they have coordination issues \u2026 You see this subtle breakdown of the precision and fine-tuning of the brain \u2026 I finally \u2026 I found a great article about the networks in the brain that are messed up in psychiatric illnesses (not just autism but also schizophrenia, depression, and so forth).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>The hubs of these networks have very high-frequency gamma frequency \u2026 It turns out that this gamma frequency is driven by cells that are very high-energy demand mitochondrially centered cells \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>We now have enough studies showing that the metabolic stuff going on in the brain match onto the networks going on in the brain. The proportion of network disturbance in some of these cases has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>The Transcend Research Program<\/h2>\n<p>Herbert has created a brain research program at Harvard called TRANSCEND<sup><span data-hash=\"#ednref2\">2<\/span><\/sup> (Treatment, Research, and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). They use MRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). MEG measures the magnetic activity of the brain, whereas EEG measures the electrical activity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you have electrical activity, the magnetic is at 90 degrees. They measure the same thing, but in somewhat different ways,\u201d Herbert explains. Her hypothesis is that autism is not something you\u2019re born with. It\u2019s something you develop in response to environmental factors.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cIn order to study that, I started studying babies from the time they were in their mother\u2019s womb. We got biosamples from the mothers. We got biosamples at birth, and then \u2014 until the mothers stopped nursing \u2014 we get biosamples from them, plus EEG and autonomic \u2026 using wristbands \u2026 to see how things deteriorated in the kids who developed autism.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>What we found was something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. We\u2019re working on publishing this. We have EEG data of 2-week-old babies, predicting their outcome at 13 months.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Now, I just finished saying that I think that autism is something you developed. That would sound like something you\u2019re born with, but you can\u2019t say that they have autism. The way I think about it is if their brains are really excited and irritated. So, it matters very much what happens [in their early environment to make them] more predisposed.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>Whole-Body Wellness Approach Can Minimize Autism Risk<\/h2>\n<p>Using this early predictive ability, a small number of primary care pediatricians have started implementing whole-body approaches to the parents and children, showing that when whole-body lifestyle modification is implemented, such as avoidance of toxins and allergens, virtually none of these predisposed babies actually develop autism.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cMy feeling is what we need is a public health intervention where people are taught how to keep healthy from preconception to pregnancy to infancy. If they get an EEG that says that their brain is irritable, you don\u2019t want to do a drug \u2026 You want to do safe and healthy things, because [drugs and toxins are] the problem in the first place,\u201d<\/em> Herbert says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>There are many anecdotal stories from families with autistic children suggesting EMF causes problems, and Herbert and Sullivan are working on setting up an online database to capture this data.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cThat when you reduce the Wi-Fi, the symptoms abate a lot. I know a kid who was stimming like crazy. He liked to stim by the dishwasher. Guess what, there was dirty electricity in this dishwasher. They fixed it and he stopped that, and a lot of his symptoms remitted,\u201d<\/em> Herbert says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>Common Risk Factors<\/h2>\n<p>Essentially, Herbert believes autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. But what might contribute to this kind of irritability? Sullivan believes mercury, EMF, and glyphosate are three major triggers, even more so than <a href=\"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2023\/05\/13\/how-to-end-the-autism-epidemic.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">vaccines<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Herbert believes processed food is another major contributor. \u201cSimply reducing allergens in the mother\u2019s diet from preconception to pregnancy is a really big deal,\u201d Herbert says. That said, it\u2019s really the total load that matters, not any particular given factor.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are 10,000 different ways to injure mitochondria. It all piles up. All these little seemingly innocuous exposures add to the pile, so they all matter,\u201d she says. Sullivan has created a video talk and booklet, \u201cSimplifying Autism Improvement and Recovery,\u201d<sup><span data-hash=\"#ednref3\">3<\/span>,<\/sup><sup><span data-hash=\"#ednref4\">4<\/span><\/sup> which includes a list of suspects for parents to consider.<\/p>\n<p>One big one that few people consider is de novo mutations resulting from sperm being exposed to wireless radiation from cellphones and laptops. Men desiring healthy children would do well to avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket while it\u2019s on, as the cellphone radiation can mutate the genes in the sperm. If you\u2019re going to keep it in your pocket, make sure it\u2019s off or in airplane mode.<\/p>\n<p>Herbert is currently enrolling patients for her <a href=\"https:\/\/documentinghope.com\/chirp-study\/\" target=\"_blank\">Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention (CHIRP) study<\/a>, which will gather information about the associations between the total burden of environmental stressors and exposures and chronic disease in children. If you have a child between the ages of 1 and 15, you can apply<sup><span data-hash=\"#ednref5\">5<\/span><\/sup> by filling out two prescreening questionnaires to determine your eligibility.<\/p>\n<h2>Most Parents Start Treatment at the Wrong End<\/h2>\n<p>Herbert and Sullivan have worked with autistic children and have advised parents for a long time. What are some of the common mistakes they see people make? Sullivan replies:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>\u201cPeople assume it\u2019s a problem with the child. They jump in and start treating the child. They assume it\u2019s genetic or whatever, and they\u2019re doing behavioral therapy. The things that I would do again for myself, if I could do it all again, is I would start with the environment. I would start with EMF, especially at night.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>We turn off the baby monitor, the cordless phone base station, Wi-Fi, and even sometimes the circuit breaker for the bedroom \u2026 A wired baby monitor is safe \u2026 Plug everything into a power strip. Put the strip in the wall. When you go to bed, just pull out the power strip. In the morning, plug it back in. It\u2019s not hard. Or, put it on a timer.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>I would say it\u2019s a state of overload not just for the kids, but for the entire family \u2026 There are [many] things you need to do [to clean up your environment]. The key is in the sequence. Do the easiest things that get you the most impact.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>That\u2019s why we\u2019re starting with EMF. Because once you reduce that, you start sleeping better, and then you start to have more capacity. You want to build a spiral of capacity. You start an upward spiral \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Martin Pall\u2019s paper<sup><span data-hash=\"#ednref6\">6<\/span><\/sup> on the neuropsychiatric effects from microwaves and EMFs show it\u2019s a big factor, as is sleep, because sleep and [lowering] inflammation are fundamental to good mental health.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>More Information<\/h2>\n<p>For more information about autism and wireless radiation, how EMFs affect sleep, and recommendations for EMF meters and tips for EMF safety, see Sullivan\u2019s website, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.clearlightventures.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">ClearLightVentures.com<\/a>. On Herbert\u2019s site, <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20250827150225\/https:\/\/drmarthaherbert.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">drmarthaherbert.com<\/a>, you can find information about how to improve your overall health and lower your total body stress burden for a healthy pregnancy and baby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor&#8217;s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published May 28, 2023.<\/p>\n<p>This interview was recorded in November 2018 at the annual Academy for Comprehensive and Integrative Medicine (ACIM) convention in Orlando, Florida, but it was only last year that it ran on the site. At the time there was concern that the topic was too controversial, but now that six years have passed and COVID changed the controversial landscape, we thought it would be good to release the video on this important topic.<\/p>\n<p>I had the opportunity to interview two experts on autism and dirty electricity, Peter Sullivan and Dr.\u00a0Martha Herbert, who cowrote \u201cThe Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be.\u201d1 Here, we discuss some of the toxic factors that contribute to the development of autism, especially the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and dirty electricity.<\/p>\n<p>Sullivan\u2019s Journey<\/p>\n<p>Sullivan has struggled with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and still does to some degree, which was his primary motivation for learning more about it. He\u2019s become a fount of knowledge as a result. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was passionate about personal technology.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cI studied in Stanford. I did all kinds of human-computer interactions. I worked at multiple companies: as a troubleshooter in Silicon Valley, an engineer and a software designer at the very end. I worked at Netflix and some other companies people would know of,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>In the early 2000s, problems began to take root. Fatigue and food allergies cropped up, and his children were struggling with developmental delays. He eventually realized he had toxic levels of mercury in his system.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cI eventually just took time off from work, in about 2005. I just said it\u2019s ridiculous, with all these things going on, to have two people in the family working. I was focusing on my kids\u2019 health and my health and really had some time and energy to really go deep and find out what was really out there.<\/p>\n<p>I had a great doctor, Dr. Raj Patel \u2026 an integrative medical doctor who would talk about Candida overgrowth, mercury, and all that stuff. He got us on track. Eventually, the kids slowly got better, but even after detoxing, I did not. I kept getting worse.<\/p>\n<p> I got down to 131 pounds. I became electrically sensitive. My brain kept telling me, \u2018All the stuff is safe and well-tested. I love technology.\u2019 But my body was reacting like there was something really wrong. I was catching myself just throwing a cellphone away \u2014 feeling cellphones and then transformers when I plugged them in.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He eventually learned about dirty electricity, and once he started addressing his exposure, he regained 10 pounds in a couple of months, along with his health. Today, he\u2019s passionate about sharing information about the dangers of EMFs and dirty electricity, and how to address electromagnetic hypersensitivity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re just trying to share the information, make the field credible, because it\u2019s very credible, and make sure people don\u2019t have to suffer,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>He even created an EMF-free tent that he brings with him to different seminars and conferences that people can sit in, as many of these events are held in places where you\u2019re exposed to very high amounts of EMF. He\u2019s also funded some of Herbert\u2019s research.<\/p>\n<p>Herbert\u2019s Story<\/p>\n<p>I first met Herbert at a Cure Autism Now event (now Autism Speaks) in 2009. Herbert\u2019s two children struggled with symptoms of autism when they were young. Today, they\u2019re both grown and have fully recovered. Her initial focus was on mercury toxicity, looking at ways of doing noninvasive screening for toxic metals.<\/p>\n<p>A lifelong environmentalist, Herbert went to medical school after getting a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She studied pediatric neurology, and fell into working with autism after inheriting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from the first MRI study performed on autistic children in 1989.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was one of the first people \u2014 but not the only one \u2014 to identify white matter abnormalities in autism through brain imaging, not through gray tissue,\u201d Herbert says. \u201cThat really violated the paradigm that behavior comes from the cortex. I was already kind of a whole-body person. I was seeing patients.<\/p>\n<p> [Few of them] had these rare neurogenetic diseases that you\u2019re trained for in pediatric neurology. But everybody was coming in with diarrhea and eczema, and they couldn\u2019t sleep. It was almost like primary care in neuropsychiatry. That\u2019s where I sort of edged my way into the whole-body approach.<\/p>\n<p> I had an epiphany in 1999 \u2026 that all the stuff I was seeing in my patients really could connect with the environment \u2026 I started putting together and figuring out that this was really a systems [biology] approach to these conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A Systems Biology Approach to Autism<\/p>\n<p>Systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web, in which everything is connected to everything else. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes. In conventional science, individual components and variables are studied in isolation. That\u2019s how clinical research is designed.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cWe\u2019re looking for pure forms of disease. But mostly in these conditions that we\u2019re talking about, it\u2019s a mess,\u201d Herbert says. \u201cEverybody has a bunch of different [symptoms], some of which are more prominent than others. Early on in figuring out autism as a systems problem, I was looking at specific language problems or developmental language disorder.<\/p>\n<p> But if you look at these people carefully, they have coordination issues \u2026 You see this subtle breakdown of the precision and fine-tuning of the brain \u2026 I finally \u2026 I found a great article about the networks in the brain that are messed up in psychiatric illnesses (not just autism but also schizophrenia, depression, and so forth).<\/p>\n<p> The hubs of these networks have very high-frequency gamma frequency \u2026 It turns out that this gamma frequency is driven by cells that are very high-energy demand mitochondrially centered cells \u2026<\/p>\n<p> We now have enough studies showing that the metabolic stuff going on in the brain match onto the networks going on in the brain. The proportion of network disturbance in some of these cases has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Transcend Research Program<\/p>\n<p>Herbert has created a brain research program at Harvard called TRANSCEND2 (Treatment, Research, and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). They use MRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). MEG measures the magnetic activity of the brain, whereas EEG measures the electrical activity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you have electrical activity, the magnetic is at 90 degrees. They measure the same thing, but in somewhat different ways,\u201d Herbert explains. Her hypothesis is that autism is not something you\u2019re born with. It\u2019s something you develop in response to environmental factors.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cIn order to study that, I started studying babies from the time they were in their mother\u2019s womb. We got biosamples from the mothers. We got biosamples at birth, and then \u2014 until the mothers stopped nursing \u2014 we get biosamples from them, plus EEG and autonomic \u2026 using wristbands \u2026 to see how things deteriorated in the kids who developed autism.<\/p>\n<p>What we found was something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. We\u2019re working on publishing this. We have EEG data of 2-week-old babies, predicting their outcome at 13 months.<\/p>\n<p> Now, I just finished saying that I think that autism is something you developed. That would sound like something you\u2019re born with, but you can\u2019t say that they have autism. The way I think about it is if their brains are really excited and irritated. So, it matters very much what happens [in their early environment to make them] more predisposed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Whole-Body Wellness Approach Can Minimize Autism Risk<\/p>\n<p>Using this early predictive ability, a small number of primary care pediatricians have started implementing whole-body approaches to the parents and children, showing that when whole-body lifestyle modification is implemented, such as avoidance of toxins and allergens, virtually none of these predisposed babies actually develop autism.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cMy feeling is what we need is a public health intervention where people are taught how to keep healthy from preconception to pregnancy to infancy. If they get an EEG that says that their brain is irritable, you don\u2019t want to do a drug \u2026 You want to do safe and healthy things, because [drugs and toxins are] the problem in the first place,\u201d Herbert says.<\/p>\n<p>There are many anecdotal stories from families with autistic children suggesting EMF causes problems, and Herbert and Sullivan are working on setting up an online database to capture this data.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cThat when you reduce the Wi-Fi, the symptoms abate a lot. I know a kid who was stimming like crazy. He liked to stim by the dishwasher. Guess what, there was dirty electricity in this dishwasher. They fixed it and he stopped that, and a lot of his symptoms remitted,\u201d Herbert says.<\/p>\n<p>Common Risk Factors<\/p>\n<p>Essentially, Herbert believes autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. But what might contribute to this kind of irritability? Sullivan believes mercury, EMF, and glyphosate are three major triggers, even more so than vaccines.<\/p>\n<p>Herbert believes processed food is another major contributor. \u201cSimply reducing allergens in the mother\u2019s diet from preconception to pregnancy is a really big deal,\u201d Herbert says. That said, it\u2019s really the total load that matters, not any particular given factor.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are 10,000 different ways to injure mitochondria. It all piles up. All these little seemingly innocuous exposures add to the pile, so they all matter,\u201d she says. Sullivan has created a video talk and booklet, \u201cSimplifying Autism Improvement and Recovery,\u201d3,4 which includes a list of suspects for parents to consider.<\/p>\n<p>One big one that few people consider is de novo mutations resulting from sperm being exposed to wireless radiation from cellphones and laptops. Men desiring healthy children would do well to avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket while it\u2019s on, as the cellphone radiation can mutate the genes in the sperm. If you\u2019re going to keep it in your pocket, make sure it\u2019s off or in airplane mode.<\/p>\n<p>Herbert is currently enrolling patients for her Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention (CHIRP) study, which will gather information about the associations between the total burden of environmental stressors and exposures and chronic disease in children. If you have a child between the ages of 1 and 15, you can apply5 by filling out two prescreening questionnaires to determine your eligibility.<\/p>\n<p>Most Parents Start Treatment at the Wrong End<\/p>\n<p>Herbert and Sullivan have worked with autistic children and have advised parents for a long time. What are some of the common mistakes they see people make? Sullivan replies:<\/p>\n<p> \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s a problem with the child. They jump in and start treating the child. They assume it\u2019s genetic or whatever, and they\u2019re doing behavioral therapy. The things that I would do again for myself, if I could do it all again, is I would start with the environment. I would start with EMF, especially at night.<\/p>\n<p> We turn off the baby monitor, the cordless phone base station, Wi-Fi, and even sometimes the circuit breaker for the bedroom \u2026 A wired baby monitor is safe \u2026 Plug everything into a power strip. Put the strip in the wall. When you go to bed, just pull out the power strip. In the morning, plug it back in. It\u2019s not hard. Or, put it on a timer.<\/p>\n<p> I would say it\u2019s a state of overload not just for the kids, but for the entire family \u2026 There are [many] things you need to do [to clean up your environment]. The key is in the sequence. Do the easiest things that get you the most impact.<\/p>\n<p> That\u2019s why we\u2019re starting with EMF. Because once you reduce that, you start sleeping better, and then you start to have more capacity. You want to build a spiral of capacity. You start an upward spiral \u2026<\/p>\n<p> Martin Pall\u2019s paper6 on the neuropsychiatric effects from microwaves and EMFs show it\u2019s a big factor, as is sleep, because sleep and [lowering] inflammation are fundamental to good mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More Information<\/p>\n<p>For more information about autism and wireless radiation, how EMFs affect sleep, and recommendations for EMF meters and tips for EMF safety, see Sullivan\u2019s website, ClearLightVentures.com. On Herbert\u2019s site, drmarthaherbert.com, you can find information about how to improve your overall health and lower your total body stress burden for a healthy pregnancy and baby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"seo_booster_metabox":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3562,3892],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baptism-confirmation","category-dr-mercola-daily-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism - Watchman News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism - Watchman News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor&#039;s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published May 28, 2023.  This interview was recorded in November 2018 at the annual Academy for Comprehensive and Integrative Medicine (ACIM) convention in Orlando, Florida, but it was only last year that it ran on the site. At the time there was concern that the topic was too controversial, but now that six years have passed and COVID changed the controversial landscape, we thought it would be good to release the video on this important topic.  I had the opportunity to interview two experts on autism and dirty electricity, Peter Sullivan and Dr.\u00a0Martha Herbert, who cowrote \u201cThe Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be.\u201d1 Here, we discuss some of the toxic factors that contribute to the development of autism, especially the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and dirty electricity.   Sullivan\u2019s Journey  Sullivan has struggled with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and still does to some degree, which was his primary motivation for learning more about it. He\u2019s become a fount of knowledge as a result. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was passionate about personal technology.    \u201cI studied in Stanford. I did all kinds of human-computer interactions. I worked at multiple companies: as a troubleshooter in Silicon Valley, an engineer and a software designer at the very end. I worked at Netflix and some other companies people would know of,\u201d he says.  In the early 2000s, problems began to take root. Fatigue and food allergies cropped up, and his children were struggling with developmental delays. He eventually realized he had toxic levels of mercury in his system.    \u201cI eventually just took time off from work, in about 2005. I just said it\u2019s ridiculous, with all these things going on, to have two people in the family working. I was focusing on my kids\u2019 health and my health and really had some time and energy to really go deep and find out what was really out there.   I had a great doctor, Dr. Raj Patel \u2026 an integrative medical doctor who would talk about Candida overgrowth, mercury, and all that stuff. He got us on track. Eventually, the kids slowly got better, but even after detoxing, I did not. I kept getting worse.    I got down to 131 pounds. I became electrically sensitive. My brain kept telling me, \u2018All the stuff is safe and well-tested. I love technology.\u2019 But my body was reacting like there was something really wrong. I was catching myself just throwing a cellphone away \u2014 feeling cellphones and then transformers when I plugged them in.\u201d   He eventually learned about dirty electricity, and once he started addressing his exposure, he regained 10 pounds in a couple of months, along with his health. Today, he\u2019s passionate about sharing information about the dangers of EMFs and dirty electricity, and how to address electromagnetic hypersensitivity.  \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to share the information, make the field credible, because it\u2019s very credible, and make sure people don\u2019t have to suffer,\u201d he says.  He even created an EMF-free tent that he brings with him to different seminars and conferences that people can sit in, as many of these events are held in places where you\u2019re exposed to very high amounts of EMF. He\u2019s also funded some of Herbert\u2019s research.   Herbert\u2019s Story  I first met Herbert at a Cure Autism Now event (now Autism Speaks) in 2009. Herbert\u2019s two children struggled with symptoms of autism when they were young. Today, they\u2019re both grown and have fully recovered. Her initial focus was on mercury toxicity, looking at ways of doing noninvasive screening for toxic metals.  A lifelong environmentalist, Herbert went to medical school after getting a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She studied pediatric neurology, and fell into working with autism after inheriting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from the first MRI study performed on autistic children in 1989.   \u201cI was one of the first people \u2014 but not the only one \u2014 to identify white matter abnormalities in autism through brain imaging, not through gray tissue,\u201d Herbert says. \u201cThat really violated the paradigm that behavior comes from the cortex. I was already kind of a whole-body person. I was seeing patients.     [Few of them] had these rare neurogenetic diseases that you\u2019re trained for in pediatric neurology. But everybody was coming in with diarrhea and eczema, and they couldn\u2019t sleep. It was almost like primary care in neuropsychiatry. That\u2019s where I sort of edged my way into the whole-body approach.    I had an epiphany in 1999 \u2026 that all the stuff I was seeing in my patients really could connect with the environment \u2026 I started putting together and figuring out that this was really a systems [biology] approach to these conditions.\u201d    A Systems Biology Approach to Autism  Systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web, in which everything is connected to everything else. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes. In conventional science, individual components and variables are studied in isolation. That\u2019s how clinical research is designed.    \u201cWe\u2019re looking for pure forms of disease. But mostly in these conditions that we\u2019re talking about, it\u2019s a mess,\u201d Herbert says. \u201cEverybody has a bunch of different [symptoms], some of which are more prominent than others. Early on in figuring out autism as a systems problem, I was looking at specific language problems or developmental language disorder.    But if you look at these people carefully, they have coordination issues \u2026 You see this subtle breakdown of the precision and fine-tuning of the brain \u2026 I finally \u2026 I found a great article about the networks in the brain that are messed up in psychiatric illnesses (not just autism but also schizophrenia, depression, and so forth).    The hubs of these networks have very high-frequency gamma frequency \u2026 It turns out that this gamma frequency is driven by cells that are very high-energy demand mitochondrially centered cells \u2026    We now have enough studies showing that the metabolic stuff going on in the brain match onto the networks going on in the brain. The proportion of network disturbance in some of these cases has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction.\u201d    The Transcend Research Program  Herbert has created a brain research program at Harvard called TRANSCEND2 (Treatment, Research, and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). They use MRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). MEG measures the magnetic activity of the brain, whereas EEG measures the electrical activity.  \u201cWhen you have electrical activity, the magnetic is at 90 degrees. They measure the same thing, but in somewhat different ways,\u201d Herbert explains. Her hypothesis is that autism is not something you\u2019re born with. It\u2019s something you develop in response to environmental factors.    \u201cIn order to study that, I started studying babies from the time they were in their mother\u2019s womb. We got biosamples from the mothers. We got biosamples at birth, and then \u2014 until the mothers stopped nursing \u2014 we get biosamples from them, plus EEG and autonomic \u2026 using wristbands \u2026 to see how things deteriorated in the kids who developed autism.   What we found was something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. We\u2019re working on publishing this. We have EEG data of 2-week-old babies, predicting their outcome at 13 months.    Now, I just finished saying that I think that autism is something you developed. That would sound like something you\u2019re born with, but you can\u2019t say that they have autism. The way I think about it is if their brains are really excited and irritated. So, it matters very much what happens [in their early environment to make them] more predisposed.\u201d    Whole-Body Wellness Approach Can Minimize Autism Risk  Using this early predictive ability, a small number of primary care pediatricians have started implementing whole-body approaches to the parents and children, showing that when whole-body lifestyle modification is implemented, such as avoidance of toxins and allergens, virtually none of these predisposed babies actually develop autism.    \u201cMy feeling is what we need is a public health intervention where people are taught how to keep healthy from preconception to pregnancy to infancy. If they get an EEG that says that their brain is irritable, you don\u2019t want to do a drug \u2026 You want to do safe and healthy things, because [drugs and toxins are] the problem in the first place,\u201d Herbert says.   There are many anecdotal stories from families with autistic children suggesting EMF causes problems, and Herbert and Sullivan are working on setting up an online database to capture this data.    \u201cThat when you reduce the Wi-Fi, the symptoms abate a lot. I know a kid who was stimming like crazy. He liked to stim by the dishwasher. Guess what, there was dirty electricity in this dishwasher. They fixed it and he stopped that, and a lot of his symptoms remitted,\u201d Herbert says.    Common Risk Factors  Essentially, Herbert believes autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. But what might contribute to this kind of irritability? Sullivan believes mercury, EMF, and glyphosate are three major triggers, even more so than vaccines.  Herbert believes processed food is another major contributor. \u201cSimply reducing allergens in the mother\u2019s diet from preconception to pregnancy is a really big deal,\u201d Herbert says. That said, it\u2019s really the total load that matters, not any particular given factor.  \u201cThere are 10,000 different ways to injure mitochondria. It all piles up. All these little seemingly innocuous exposures add to the pile, so they all matter,\u201d she says. Sullivan has created a video talk and booklet, \u201cSimplifying Autism Improvement and Recovery,\u201d3,4 which includes a list of suspects for parents to consider.  One big one that few people consider is de novo mutations resulting from sperm being exposed to wireless radiation from cellphones and laptops. Men desiring healthy children would do well to avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket while it\u2019s on, as the cellphone radiation can mutate the genes in the sperm. If you\u2019re going to keep it in your pocket, make sure it\u2019s off or in airplane mode.  Herbert is currently enrolling patients for her Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention (CHIRP) study, which will gather information about the associations between the total burden of environmental stressors and exposures and chronic disease in children. If you have a child between the ages of 1 and 15, you can apply5 by filling out two prescreening questionnaires to determine your eligibility.    Most Parents Start Treatment at the Wrong End  Herbert and Sullivan have worked with autistic children and have advised parents for a long time. What are some of the common mistakes they see people make? Sullivan replies:    \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s a problem with the child. They jump in and start treating the child. They assume it\u2019s genetic or whatever, and they\u2019re doing behavioral therapy. The things that I would do again for myself, if I could do it all again, is I would start with the environment. I would start with EMF, especially at night.    We turn off the baby monitor, the cordless phone base station, Wi-Fi, and even sometimes the circuit breaker for the bedroom \u2026 A wired baby monitor is safe \u2026 Plug everything into a power strip. Put the strip in the wall. When you go to bed, just pull out the power strip. In the morning, plug it back in. It\u2019s not hard. Or, put it on a timer.    I would say it\u2019s a state of overload not just for the kids, but for the entire family \u2026 There are [many] things you need to do [to clean up your environment]. The key is in the sequence. Do the easiest things that get you the most impact.    That\u2019s why we\u2019re starting with EMF. Because once you reduce that, you start sleeping better, and then you start to have more capacity. You want to build a spiral of capacity. You start an upward spiral \u2026    Martin Pall\u2019s paper6 on the neuropsychiatric effects from microwaves and EMFs show it\u2019s a big factor, as is sleep, because sleep and [lowering] inflammation are fundamental to good mental health.\u201d     More Information  For more information about autism and wireless radiation, how EMFs affect sleep, and recommendations for EMF meters and tips for EMF safety, see Sullivan\u2019s website, ClearLightVentures.com. On Herbert\u2019s site, drmarthaherbert.com, you can find information about how to improve your overall health and lower your total body stress burden for a healthy pregnancy and baby.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Watchman News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-04-12T05:12:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"\u00c9crit par\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Dur\u00e9e de lecture estim\u00e9e\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/watchman.news\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/watchman.news\/#\/schema\/person\/3f4506c6002f5893ba45478a4540739f\"},\"headline\":\"EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-04-12T05:12:42+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/watchman.news\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/\"},\"wordCount\":2117,\"commentCount\":0,\"articleSection\":[\"Baptism &amp; 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It was originally published May 28, 2023.  This interview was recorded in November 2018 at the annual Academy for Comprehensive and Integrative Medicine (ACIM) convention in Orlando, Florida, but it was only last year that it ran on the site. At the time there was concern that the topic was too controversial, but now that six years have passed and COVID changed the controversial landscape, we thought it would be good to release the video on this important topic.  I had the opportunity to interview two experts on autism and dirty electricity, Peter Sullivan and Dr.\u00a0Martha Herbert, who cowrote \u201cThe Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be.\u201d1 Here, we discuss some of the toxic factors that contribute to the development of autism, especially the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) and dirty electricity.   Sullivan\u2019s Journey  Sullivan has struggled with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and still does to some degree, which was his primary motivation for learning more about it. He\u2019s become a fount of knowledge as a result. As a software engineer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, he was passionate about personal technology.    \u201cI studied in Stanford. I did all kinds of human-computer interactions. I worked at multiple companies: as a troubleshooter in Silicon Valley, an engineer and a software designer at the very end. I worked at Netflix and some other companies people would know of,\u201d he says.  In the early 2000s, problems began to take root. Fatigue and food allergies cropped up, and his children were struggling with developmental delays. He eventually realized he had toxic levels of mercury in his system.    \u201cI eventually just took time off from work, in about 2005. I just said it\u2019s ridiculous, with all these things going on, to have two people in the family working. I was focusing on my kids\u2019 health and my health and really had some time and energy to really go deep and find out what was really out there.   I had a great doctor, Dr. Raj Patel \u2026 an integrative medical doctor who would talk about Candida overgrowth, mercury, and all that stuff. He got us on track. Eventually, the kids slowly got better, but even after detoxing, I did not. I kept getting worse.    I got down to 131 pounds. I became electrically sensitive. My brain kept telling me, \u2018All the stuff is safe and well-tested. I love technology.\u2019 But my body was reacting like there was something really wrong. I was catching myself just throwing a cellphone away \u2014 feeling cellphones and then transformers when I plugged them in.\u201d   He eventually learned about dirty electricity, and once he started addressing his exposure, he regained 10 pounds in a couple of months, along with his health. Today, he\u2019s passionate about sharing information about the dangers of EMFs and dirty electricity, and how to address electromagnetic hypersensitivity.  \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to share the information, make the field credible, because it\u2019s very credible, and make sure people don\u2019t have to suffer,\u201d he says.  He even created an EMF-free tent that he brings with him to different seminars and conferences that people can sit in, as many of these events are held in places where you\u2019re exposed to very high amounts of EMF. He\u2019s also funded some of Herbert\u2019s research.   Herbert\u2019s Story  I first met Herbert at a Cure Autism Now event (now Autism Speaks) in 2009. Herbert\u2019s two children struggled with symptoms of autism when they were young. Today, they\u2019re both grown and have fully recovered. Her initial focus was on mercury toxicity, looking at ways of doing noninvasive screening for toxic metals.  A lifelong environmentalist, Herbert went to medical school after getting a Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. She studied pediatric neurology, and fell into working with autism after inheriting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from the first MRI study performed on autistic children in 1989.   \u201cI was one of the first people \u2014 but not the only one \u2014 to identify white matter abnormalities in autism through brain imaging, not through gray tissue,\u201d Herbert says. \u201cThat really violated the paradigm that behavior comes from the cortex. I was already kind of a whole-body person. I was seeing patients.     [Few of them] had these rare neurogenetic diseases that you\u2019re trained for in pediatric neurology. But everybody was coming in with diarrhea and eczema, and they couldn\u2019t sleep. It was almost like primary care in neuropsychiatry. That\u2019s where I sort of edged my way into the whole-body approach.    I had an epiphany in 1999 \u2026 that all the stuff I was seeing in my patients really could connect with the environment \u2026 I started putting together and figuring out that this was really a systems [biology] approach to these conditions.\u201d    A Systems Biology Approach to Autism  Systems biology looks at everything in biology as a web, in which everything is connected to everything else. When you tug at one part of the web, the rest of the web changes. In conventional science, individual components and variables are studied in isolation. That\u2019s how clinical research is designed.    \u201cWe\u2019re looking for pure forms of disease. But mostly in these conditions that we\u2019re talking about, it\u2019s a mess,\u201d Herbert says. \u201cEverybody has a bunch of different [symptoms], some of which are more prominent than others. Early on in figuring out autism as a systems problem, I was looking at specific language problems or developmental language disorder.    But if you look at these people carefully, they have coordination issues \u2026 You see this subtle breakdown of the precision and fine-tuning of the brain \u2026 I finally \u2026 I found a great article about the networks in the brain that are messed up in psychiatric illnesses (not just autism but also schizophrenia, depression, and so forth).    The hubs of these networks have very high-frequency gamma frequency \u2026 It turns out that this gamma frequency is driven by cells that are very high-energy demand mitochondrially centered cells \u2026    We now have enough studies showing that the metabolic stuff going on in the brain match onto the networks going on in the brain. The proportion of network disturbance in some of these cases has been shown to be proportional to the amount of mitochondrial dysfunction.\u201d    The Transcend Research Program  Herbert has created a brain research program at Harvard called TRANSCEND2 (Treatment, Research, and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). They use MRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). MEG measures the magnetic activity of the brain, whereas EEG measures the electrical activity.  \u201cWhen you have electrical activity, the magnetic is at 90 degrees. They measure the same thing, but in somewhat different ways,\u201d Herbert explains. Her hypothesis is that autism is not something you\u2019re born with. It\u2019s something you develop in response to environmental factors.    \u201cIn order to study that, I started studying babies from the time they were in their mother\u2019s womb. We got biosamples from the mothers. We got biosamples at birth, and then \u2014 until the mothers stopped nursing \u2014 we get biosamples from them, plus EEG and autonomic \u2026 using wristbands \u2026 to see how things deteriorated in the kids who developed autism.   What we found was something that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. We\u2019re working on publishing this. We have EEG data of 2-week-old babies, predicting their outcome at 13 months.    Now, I just finished saying that I think that autism is something you developed. That would sound like something you\u2019re born with, but you can\u2019t say that they have autism. The way I think about it is if their brains are really excited and irritated. So, it matters very much what happens [in their early environment to make them] more predisposed.\u201d    Whole-Body Wellness Approach Can Minimize Autism Risk  Using this early predictive ability, a small number of primary care pediatricians have started implementing whole-body approaches to the parents and children, showing that when whole-body lifestyle modification is implemented, such as avoidance of toxins and allergens, virtually none of these predisposed babies actually develop autism.    \u201cMy feeling is what we need is a public health intervention where people are taught how to keep healthy from preconception to pregnancy to infancy. If they get an EEG that says that their brain is irritable, you don\u2019t want to do a drug \u2026 You want to do safe and healthy things, because [drugs and toxins are] the problem in the first place,\u201d Herbert says.   There are many anecdotal stories from families with autistic children suggesting EMF causes problems, and Herbert and Sullivan are working on setting up an online database to capture this data.    \u201cThat when you reduce the Wi-Fi, the symptoms abate a lot. I know a kid who was stimming like crazy. He liked to stim by the dishwasher. Guess what, there was dirty electricity in this dishwasher. They fixed it and he stopped that, and a lot of his symptoms remitted,\u201d Herbert says.    Common Risk Factors  Essentially, Herbert believes autism can be predicted by looking at the level of brain irritability in the child. But what might contribute to this kind of irritability? Sullivan believes mercury, EMF, and glyphosate are three major triggers, even more so than vaccines.  Herbert believes processed food is another major contributor. \u201cSimply reducing allergens in the mother\u2019s diet from preconception to pregnancy is a really big deal,\u201d Herbert says. That said, it\u2019s really the total load that matters, not any particular given factor.  \u201cThere are 10,000 different ways to injure mitochondria. It all piles up. All these little seemingly innocuous exposures add to the pile, so they all matter,\u201d she says. Sullivan has created a video talk and booklet, \u201cSimplifying Autism Improvement and Recovery,\u201d3,4 which includes a list of suspects for parents to consider.  One big one that few people consider is de novo mutations resulting from sperm being exposed to wireless radiation from cellphones and laptops. Men desiring healthy children would do well to avoid carrying their cellphone in their pants pocket while it\u2019s on, as the cellphone radiation can mutate the genes in the sperm. If you\u2019re going to keep it in your pocket, make sure it\u2019s off or in airplane mode.  Herbert is currently enrolling patients for her Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention (CHIRP) study, which will gather information about the associations between the total burden of environmental stressors and exposures and chronic disease in children. If you have a child between the ages of 1 and 15, you can apply5 by filling out two prescreening questionnaires to determine your eligibility.    Most Parents Start Treatment at the Wrong End  Herbert and Sullivan have worked with autistic children and have advised parents for a long time. What are some of the common mistakes they see people make? Sullivan replies:    \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s a problem with the child. They jump in and start treating the child. They assume it\u2019s genetic or whatever, and they\u2019re doing behavioral therapy. The things that I would do again for myself, if I could do it all again, is I would start with the environment. I would start with EMF, especially at night.    We turn off the baby monitor, the cordless phone base station, Wi-Fi, and even sometimes the circuit breaker for the bedroom \u2026 A wired baby monitor is safe \u2026 Plug everything into a power strip. Put the strip in the wall. When you go to bed, just pull out the power strip. In the morning, plug it back in. It\u2019s not hard. Or, put it on a timer.    I would say it\u2019s a state of overload not just for the kids, but for the entire family \u2026 There are [many] things you need to do [to clean up your environment]. The key is in the sequence. Do the easiest things that get you the most impact.    That\u2019s why we\u2019re starting with EMF. Because once you reduce that, you start sleeping better, and then you start to have more capacity. You want to build a spiral of capacity. You start an upward spiral \u2026    Martin Pall\u2019s paper6 on the neuropsychiatric effects from microwaves and EMFs show it\u2019s a big factor, as is sleep, because sleep and [lowering] inflammation are fundamental to good mental health.\u201d     More Information  For more information about autism and wireless radiation, how EMFs affect sleep, and recommendations for EMF meters and tips for EMF safety, see Sullivan\u2019s website, ClearLightVentures.com. On Herbert\u2019s site, drmarthaherbert.com, you can find information about how to improve your overall health and lower your total body stress burden for a healthy pregnancy and baby.","og_url":"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx","og_site_name":"Watchman News","article_published_time":"2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-04-12T05:12:42+00:00","author":"Admin","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"\u00c9crit par":"Admin","Dur\u00e9e de lecture estim\u00e9e":"11 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/"},"author":{"name":"Admin","@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/#\/schema\/person\/3f4506c6002f5893ba45478a4540739f"},"headline":"EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism","datePublished":"2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00","dateModified":"2026-04-12T05:12:42+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/"},"wordCount":2117,"commentCount":0,"articleSection":["Baptism &amp; Confirmation","Dr Mercola Daily News"],"inLanguage":"fr-FR","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/2026\/04\/emf-exposure-a-major-factor-in-the-development-of-autism\/","url":"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx","name":"EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism - Watchman News","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/#website"},"datePublished":"2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00","dateModified":"2026-04-12T05:12:42+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/#\/schema\/person\/3f4506c6002f5893ba45478a4540739f"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"fr-FR","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/articles.mercola.com\/sites\/articles\/archive\/2026\/04\/12\/what-causes-autism.aspx#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"EMF Exposure \u2014 A Major Factor in the Development of Autism"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/#website","url":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/","name":"Actualit\u00e9s Watchman","description":"News of Importance for the True Christian Israel","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"fr-FR"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/#\/schema\/person\/3f4506c6002f5893ba45478a4540739f","name":"Administrateur","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"fr-FR","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a4dc65c7d54b24b8fa9d6d4116fd21209e86efe3563858469b00d8bddd033356?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a4dc65c7d54b24b8fa9d6d4116fd21209e86efe3563858469b00d8bddd033356?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a4dc65c7d54b24b8fa9d6d4116fd21209e86efe3563858469b00d8bddd033356?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Admin"},"url":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchman.news\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}