Idar Hassan named her third child Ali, after a beloved cousin. Beautiful and alert, Ali could say "dada" and cruise around the living room, hanging onto furniture, by the time he was eight months old.
But a few months later, Ali's mood became increasingly irritable. He stopped babbling and making eye contact, and would only drink milk. His big brown eyes often filled with tears as he raged in the corner of the room.
"He was miserable. I had to stay up all night with him, watching him walk in circles," recalls Ms. Hassan, who immigrated to Toronto from Somalia in 1991. "It was like everything went black. The switch went off."
Ms. Hassan sought answers from three different doctors until she was finally referred to a developmental pediatrician at North York General Hospital. Ali was diagnosed with autism.
In his case it was regressive, which means he inexplicably lost the speech and social skills he had learned as a baby.
Ali's parents had never come across this condition back home in Kismayo, a city where children run in the streets and everyone knows everyone else's business.
"In Somalia, we had kids with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. But nobody had ever heard of autism," Ms. Hassan recalls. "And believe me, it's not something you can hide."
In the past decade, Ms. Hassan, an articulate, elegant woman in a brown head scarf, long skirt and leather jacket, has met more than 30 Somali families in Toronto with one or more autistic children.
She has also given birth to another, her fourth child, Abshir.
The condition, which Somalis call the "western disease" or the "disease from abroad," appears to have struck their community with a particular vengeance. While no data are available on prevalence, Somali parents in Canada are concerned enough to go public about what they say is a sleeping epidemic.
Autism affects about one in 150 Canadians, according to Health Canada, making it more common than childhood cancer, diabetes or AIDS.
Some experts doubt that the Somali community suffers from a higher rate of the condition. But neither Health Canada nor Statistics Canada track prevalence by ethno-racial group, making it impossible to scientifically validate the concerns of Somalis.
However, a higher-than-expected rate of autism among the children of Somali immigrants has been identified in two cities with large Somali communities: the Swedish capital of Stockholm, and Minneapolis, Minn. The issue was highlighted in a New York Times article last month, giving Canada's Somali community hope that researchers here will take note.
"I have talked to about 100 Somalis in the Toronto area whose children are autistic. We don't want to stigmatize the community, but we want to know why this is," said Fatima Kediye, an instructor in Early Childhood Education at Ryerson University who did her masters thesis on the issue. She has compiled a huge dossier of studies on autism, and has been a lone academic voice of concern.
This month, the Autism Research Unit - based at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and Bloorview Kids Rehab - will begin collecting data on the ethnic background of autistics as part of a network involving 15 sites in North America.
The network, says co-director Wendy Roberts, aims to improve the understanding of autism, a spectrum of developmental disorders that affect a person's communication and social skills.
Between 20 and 100 genes are involved in autism, and some people have a genetic susceptibility, says Dr. Roberts, a developmental pediatrician.
In the case of Somalis, she speculates that there may be epigenetic causes - external factors that can activate or deactivate certain genes.
"They may be exposed to toxins, pesticides, environmental triggers or something in their diet, and that serves to turn off or on a gene function," explains Dr. Roberts.
