In the US state of New Jersey, ASD prevalence is higher in wealthier census tracts, perhaps due to differential access to pediatric and developmental services.

Infections in 6 states were linked to persons traveling to undergo cosmetic surgical procedures.

It is believed that gene by environmental interactions contribute to the pathogenesis of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We hypothesize that ASD are associated with early and repeated exposures to any of a number of toxicants or mixtures of toxicants. It is the cumulative effects of these repeated exposures acting upon genetically susceptible individuals that lead to the phenotypes of ASD. We report our initial observations of a considerable overlap of identified toxic landfills in the State of New Jersey and the residence of an ASD cohort, and a correlation between the identified toxic Superfund sites on each U.S. state and the total number of diagnosed cases of ASD in those states. The residence of 495 ASD patients in New Jersey by zip code and the toxic landfill sites were plotted on a map of Northern New Jersey. The area of highest ASD cases coincides with the highest density of toxic landfill sites while the area with lowest ASD cases has the lowest density of toxic landfill sites. Furthermore, the number of toxic Superfund sites and autism rate across 49 of the 50 states shows a statistically significant correlation (i.e. the number of identified superfund sites correlates with the rate of autism per 1000 residents in 49 of the states (p = 0.015; excluding the state of Oregon). These significant observations call for further organized studies to elucidate possible role(s) of environmental toxicants contributing to the pathogenesis of ASD.

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We describe an outbreak of Nocardia cyriacigeorgica soft-tissue infections attributable to unlicensed cosmetic injections and the first report using multilocus sequence typing sequence data for determining Nocardia strain relatedness in an outbreak. All 8 cases identified had a common source exposure and required hospitalization, surgical debridement, and prolonged antimicrobial therapy.