US President Donald Trump has attracted condemnation from health experts after he sought to claim there was a link between the widely used painkiller Tylenol and autism.
Accompanied by his Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump said doctors would soon be advised not to recommend the drug - called paracetamol in some other countries, including the UK - to pregnant women.
The claims have been attacked by medical experts. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the announcement was unsettling and not based on reliable data, while the UK's National Autism Society called Trump's statement dangerous, it's anti-science and it's irresponsible.
BBC Verify has looked at some of the allegations Trump and Kennedy made during their news conference at the White House.
Is Trump correct that US autism diagnoses are rising?
During the event, Trump listed a number of statistics which he said showed autism diagnoses in the US have risen rapidly over the past two decades.
Firstly, the US president claimed that incidence has increased from around one in 10,000…probably 18 years ago to one in 31 by 2025.
The final statistic quoted by Trump - that autism rates have risen to one in 31 - is correct. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2022 found that level of diagnoses among eight-year-olds across 16 US states.
While that rate has grown from 18 years ago, it did not grow by anything like the figure cited by Trump. There was no figure for 2007 - the year cited by Trump - but in 2006 the CDC estimated the rate of autism in the US population to be one in 110. In 2008 it was one in 88.
Most experts say rising rates of autism can primarily be attributed to changes in how the condition is diagnosed, as well as greater recognition of the condition and more people being tested.
Should the MMR vaccine be taken separately?
Another claim made by Trump was around the effects of the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The US president claimed the vaccinations should be taken separately rather than as a combined shot and that it seems when you mix them, there could be a problem.
Experts fear that if parents refrain from getting their children vaccinated as a result of his unfounded claims, it risks the re-emergence of diseases like measles.
The discredited idea that childhood vaccines are linked to autism first gained mainstream attention after a paper by British doctor Andrew Wakefield was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1998.
Wakefield was later found to have financial conflicts of interest - including that some of his test patients connected with a lawsuit against vaccine companies - and the UK's General Medical Council (GMC) found that he falsified his results. The research paper was retracted and Wakefield was struck off by the GMC in 2010.
Multiple studies since have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The most recent - a high-quality study from Denmark in 2019 - looked at 657,461 children and concluded that the data did not support the MMR vaccine causing or triggering autism.
On its website, the US CDC recommends that two doses of the combined MMR vaccine are given to children, starting with the first dose at 12-15 months and the second between the ages of four and six.
Are autism rates lower among Amish people?
Trump cited the Amish as a group within the US who have virtually no autism within their community.
There are relatively few studies on autism rates within the Amish community. Many children are diagnosed in school - but most Amish drop out of school after eighth grade, around 14-years-old.
I think it's very, very unlikely that there are no autistic people among the Amish, Eva Loth, professor of cognitive neuroscience at King's College London told BBC Verify.
In one 2010 study, a team of geneticists found autism occurred in approximately one in 271 Amish children. However, it is worth noting that research into this topic is limited.
What has Trump said about autism previously?
Trump has intermittently expressed concern over rising rates of autism in US children for almost 20 years. In 2007, he first publicly suggested that he believed there was a link between vaccines and the increasing prevalence.
However, during his first term Trump did support some vaccine campaigns and emphasized their importance during a measles outbreak in the US.
Overall, it is crucial to critically assess public health claims made by political figures and refer to scientifically validated information from health authorities.
