A Compelling Case for the Environmental Causes of Autoimmune Disease
Reviewed by Rob Ingraham
The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance and the Cutting Edge Science That Promises Hope, by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, New York, $25. ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7775-4.
One of the most frightening medical scenarios is the possibility that your own immune system, the body’s first line of defense against disease, might somehow rebel and start attacking healthy tissue. A pathology this insidious was unimaginable to most of the scientific community until as late as the 1960s, but today autoimmune disease is an undeniable reality and growing at an alarming rate throughout the population. It is being diagnosed at twice the rate of cancer. The Autoimmune Epidemic, by journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa, tracks the dimensions of the crisis and places the blame squarely on environmental factors.
Nakazawa writes from firsthand experience with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). Over four years, between 2001 and 2005, Nakazawa had two debilitating attacks of GBS, spent months in the hospital near death and, while she has recovered most of her motor functions, today she lives with the knowledge that she could suffer an additional, catastrophic autoimmune attack at any time. As a journalist, Nakazawa says that her personal journey into autoimmunity quickly became “a professional quest” to discover its causes.
Nakazawa reports that, as recently as 2005, a National Institutes of Health study found that nearly 100 known autoimmune diseases—multiple sclerosis, type-1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, thyroiditis, Graves disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and many others—afflict 23.5 million people in the U.S, or 1 in 12 Americans, “and these diseases are on the rise worldwide—for reasons unknown.”
But scientists are now nearly unanimous in the belief that the root cause lies with industrial and commercial chemicals that we have taken for granted for decades. Nakazawa explains that “labs round the globe have proven definitive links between a list of commonly used industrial-age chemicals, heavy metals, and toxins and the development of numerous autoimmune diseases.”
While the samples to date are relatively small, the findings are unnerving. In 2003, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in collaboration with the Environmental Working Group, tested the blood and urine of nine representative Americans from around the country for 210 substances and found that each volunteer carried an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other chemicals. None of the test participants had worked with chemicals, none had lived near an industrial facility, yet the average participant had detectable levels of 53 known immune-suppressing chemicals in their bloodstreams and urine.
“In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, conducted a study testing blood and urine samples of 2,500 people across the country. The CDC found traces of all 116 chemicals they looked for. Then, in 2005, a set of findings emerged that shocked toxicologists around the world. Researchers working through two major laboratories found an alarming cocktail of industrial chemicals and pollutants in the fetal cord blood of 10 newborn infants from around the country in samples taken by the Red Cross. These chemicals included pesticides, phthalates, dioxins, flame retardants, and breakdown chemicals of Teflon, among other chemicals known to damage the immune system.”
Nakazawa populates her report with dramatic individual medical histories illustrating how the disease has wreaked havoc with so many otherwise healthy people. But she also presents fascinating details of how current research is developing revolutionary approaches to targeting and destroying errant immune cells. Public ignorance of the scale of the crisis is one of the main obstacles to research and Nakazawa makes a convincing case for greatly expanded funding.
In his forward to The Autoimmune Epidemic, Douglas Kerr, MD, a neurologist and the founder of the Johns Hopkins Transverse Myelitis Center in Baltimore, Maryland, says, “It is the kind of book that will scare you. It will make you angry.” He’s right on both counts.
Rob Ingraham writes regularly for Action.
