This story began around December of 2009. It had been about a month since being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Dermatomyositis (DM), a disease in which a person's immune system up and decides that those healthy skin and muscle cells are looking a little too suspicious and launches an offensive, attacking them along with the foreign matter, bacteria, viruses, etc. I had a month's worth of treatment under my belt, which included super doses of steroids, along with a few other medications that were supposed to be keeping my immune system in check. Between the symptoms of the disease and the side effects of the medications, I was pretty miserable. I had a fiery red, itchy rash that covered my face, scalp, arms, hands, neck, chest, and back. I had extreme muscle weakness, particularly in my legs. It's not entirely clear how much of that was due to the all the muscle cells that had been killed off by my own immune system, and how much was a side affect of the steroids, but either way, I had a really hard time moving my legs. The muscles in my core were pretty useless too. I had a hard time getting up even two or three stairs, I couldn't get up off the floor without help, and I shuffled around like a little 90 year old woman. Good times, I'm tellin' ya.
Of course by this time, the librarian girl in me had gone into overdrive and I started pouring over the Internet looking for information on DM and autoimmune diseases. I wanted to know exactly what was happening to my body. I found a book that I purchased called The Autoimmune Epidemic written by Donna Jackson Nakazawa and began reading. This was where it all started.
Jackson, a journalist by profession, begins the book by describing her own battle with Guillain-Barre Syndrome as a young mother of two small children. Her disease involved the immune system attacking the nerves which slowly paralyzed her. After describing her story, she began describing exactly what an autoimmune disease is and how widespread it is. I learned that many diseases that are common today are actually autoimmune diseases. The appendix lists nearly 125 diseases that are known to be autoimmune in nature or are suspected to have an autoimmune component. Here are some that I recognized:
Crohn's disease
Dermatomyositis (that one is mine)
Diabetes, type I
Lupus
Graves' disease
Juvenile arthritis
Multiple Sclerosis
Psoriasis
Pulmonary fibrosis, idiopathic
Raynaud's disease
Rheumatic fever
Rheumatoid arthritis
Scleroderma
Sjodren's syndrome
Ulcerative colitis
Vasculitis
Autism
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Lyme disease
Narcolepsy
Restless leg syndrome
As I read over this list, I was shocked. I had barely even known what an autoimmune disease was prior to my own diagnosis. (A fact I'm a little ashamed to admit to it now, considering the fact that my own brother has been dealing with is own autoimmune disease for close to 20 years now.)
As I continued to read, I was amazed by the statistics. I learned that "one in twelve Americans--and one in nine women--will develop an autoimmune disorder of some type. The American Heart Association estimates that by comparison, only one in twenty Americans will have coronary heart disease. Similarly, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, one in fourteen American adults will have cancer at some time in their life. This means that an American is more likely to get an autoimmune disease than either cancer or heart disease" (Jackson, p. xvii). Except me. Apparently, I won the lottery and got the autoimmune disease AND cancer.
As this sunk in I was confused. If so many of these health conditions were related to autoimmunity, why weren't we spending more money on understanding the immune system and how to keep it from trying to kill us? Logic would indicate that this would allow us to help so many more people with a wide variety of health issues, right? Well, it turns out that this may end up being even more critical than ever because I also learned that according to the National Institutes of Health, autoimmune disorders are on the rise. In fact, in the last 40 years, rates of lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Type I diabetes, and a wide range of of other autoimmune diseases have doubled and tripled in many western countries. Now that one got my attention.
Without rewriting the entire book, I'll just say that I learned that increasingly, scientists agree that the root causes of this growing epidemic is environmental. Our immune system is designed to kill off viruses and bacteria the keep us from getting sick, but it also fights a huge number of other toxins that are polluting our bodies that come directly from our environment. I'm not just talking about toxins that come from tobacco or alcohol. Those would be things that could be easily controlled with a little effort. I'm talking about the literally countless numbers of things that put off toxic chemicals that are slowly being absorbed into our bodies. After being overwhelmed one too many times, our immune systems short circuit and an autoimmune disease is born.
Sounds a little out there, right? You don't think you are exposed to enough toxins to really do any harm? The following passage comes straight off pages 44-45.
For decades, scientists have been studying pollutants in the air, water, and on land. But over the past five years, they have begun studying pollution in people, and the findings are casing many researchers to reevaluate their assumptions about how successfully our bodies interface, with the chemical laden world in which we live. The most telling work detailing what contaminants are entering our bodies and how much toxicity accumulates in our cells and bloodstreams over time comes from a 2003 study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, in collaboration with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an advocacy organization in Washington D.C. Their findings reveal the "body burden" of environmental chemicals and heavy metals carried by the average American. After testing the blood and urine of nine representative Americans from around the country for 210 substances (sample groups are small as these tests are prohibitively expensive), these scientists discovered that each volunteer carried an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other chemicals--including PCBs, commonly used insecticides, dioxin, mercury, cadmium, and benzene, to name just a few. This plethora of chemicals had accumulated in these individuals through the common and minute exposures that we all experience in our daily lives. None of the test participants had worked with chemicals on the job; none had lived near an industrial facility. Yet the average participant had detectable levels of 53 known immune system-suppressing chemicals their bloodstream and in their urine.
In 2003, the Centers for Disease control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta conducted a similar 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. [Are you ready for this one????] Researchers working through two major laboratories found an alarming cocktail of 287 industrial chemicals and pollutants in the fetal cord blood of ten newborn infants from around the country, in samples taken by the American Red Cross. These chemicals included pesticides, phthalates, dioxins, flame retardants, and breakdown chemicals of Teflon, among other chemicals know to damage the immune system. Shortly after, investigators in the Netherlands turned up similar findings: they discovered an array of chemicals commonly found in household cleaners, cosmetics, and furniture in the cord blood of thirty newborns."
This is where I began to get angry. The kind of angry that starts in your gut and begins to radiate outward like an internal heatwave.
And yet, this was just the beginning.
