Customer Reviews

The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance--and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Autoimmune Epidemic is an extraordinary book. "Extraordinary" may be an understatement. My wife suffers from an undiagnosed form of autoimmune. She has gone through many years of excruciating pain and uncertainty. We visited countless doctors, had more medical test than seemed humanly possible, searched through volumes of articles and professionals journals (we both have extensive professional experience doing research), learned the trials (so many of them) and tribulations of steroid therapy and, of course, began exploring an array of alternative approaches, all to limited avail. This is all to simply say we fortunately or unfortunately know a lot about autoimmune disease and better yet, know when we have found a resource that it comprehensive, timely and thoroughly researched (48 pages of citations). The Autoimmune Epidemic provides a comprehensive review of the evolution, impact, potential causes and potential strategies for managing and possibly dealing with various forms of autoimmune disease. Many of the major types of autoimmune disease (Lupus, Crohn's Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis, etc.) are explored in detail. The damaging affect environmental factors, some that we control and some that we don't, play on our immune systems are thoroughly analyzed. The personal stories are riveting. The connection and statistics related to the various diseases are made clear. The author, Donna Jackson Nakazawa is not only an accomplished writer (Parade Magazine, AARP the Magazine and author of Does Anyone Else Look Like Me), she is another victim, a statistic but not a quiet statistic in what we are learning is a serious and growing epidemic. If you have one of the many autoimmune diseases, if you know someone who has one or if you are looking for a well documented analysis of the evolution, present status, research and potential breakthroughs, this book is for you. You will be educated, informed and possibly enraged.

The librarians in my community have had the insight to purchase three copies and have them on our shelves in the month that this book was published. Important? Yes, quite.

There's a web site referenced in the book, from Chapter Three, entitled "Dirty Little Secrets," that includes history about what happened to children in a Buffalo, NY neighborhood. Nakazawa refers you to a web site and invites you to type in the zip code for Buffalo and then read the story that unfolds about it.

Try this now! Go to the EPA dot gov web site using /enviro/emef as a suffix and type in YOUR zip code, then look at the map that pops up. It's color coded with all the locations being monitored by the EPA right now. The water was RED in mine.

So many people I know and love have had autoimmune diseases and/or cancer. This book has made me wonder even more than I already had how this all fits together - nutrition, the environment, our health, our children, our sick or already lost loved ones. If you read this book, perhaps the puzzle will begin to fit together for you too.

Have you noticed how many CHILDREN you see in WHEELCHAIRS these days? I see several children every day in wheelchairs at our elementary school. Was it like that where you grew up as a child?

I picked up a flyer at my son's school last week about dealing with ASTHMA in your school-aged child that's being presented here this week to teachers and parents and families in our county school system. How many children did you know with ASTHMA or DIABETES when you were growing up? I lived in a community where there were 5,000 people in my church alone. I don't recall a single person with asthma in my group of friends, and there was one person that I knew of in that group of 5,000 with Type 1 diabetes - he was my family doctor.

Now, in our 740 student primary school, there are 17 children that I know with asthma and several with Type 1 diabetes and more with significant allergies and even more with some level of autism. All of these are autoimmune or related issues and are addressed in this book. What has caused this and how many more will have to happen before we get it?

This book's footnoted current facts and information about the environment, current medical advances, and many details about individuals with autoimmune conditions and progressions, including cancer will educate many people.

In Chapter six, called Shielding Your Immune System: Rethinking Food, Stress and Everyday Chemicals, there's a life-altering story about a 43 year old M.D. named Gerard Mullin. Mullin was a specialist in autoimmune disease as head of the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Division at North Shore University Hospital in New York. "He became a 43 year old disabled, unmarried, living alone, unemployed patient with a roaring autoimmune disease of his own, almost overnight." He says that for the first time, he "had become just another hard-to-treat patient that doctors didn't know what to do with." Mullin's personal experiences with his own health and the outcomes that he found to heal himself is wonderfully enlightening for anyone who takes the time to read this book.

Thank you, Donna Jackson Nakazawa for your work. I am awed at the clarity and skill in sharing this very technical information with excellent story-telling about the individuals whose lives have been forever affected, and many lost by their struggles with autoimmune diseases. Ms. Nakazawa has equaled the caliber of writing by the New York Times Reporter David Kirby, [Evidence of Harm] maybe even better.

I've been learning about nutrition and whole foods (instead of processed), "diseases of civilization", and brain health lately. This book really brings all those subjects together.

Full of thought-provoking, frightening, but hopeful examples of how - in the last several decades - we have created a toxic environment.

The most striking image was that of the "barrel effect." If one fills a rain barrel full of water - even above the top - the water will stay within. But when one more drop is added, the water just cascades down the sides. Many people, mainly women, seem to just fall apart suddenly with one autoimmune disease after another. We live in and consume this toxic soup for years and years, our body fighting it off as best as it can, until it just can't complete with the onslaught anymore.

If you wonder why each succeeding generation is suffering from more allergies, arthritis, neurological disorders, ms, etc. read this book.

If you have had doctors or family tell you that you are crazy or a hypochondriac, read this book.

Identify those things in your environment and diet you CAN change.

Change them.

I agree with many of the other reviews - everyone in the medical community should read this book. It is not only extremely well-written and thoroughly researched, but it also conveys the true anguish and fear that patients with autoimmune disease experience. I had to take numerous breaks from reading because it was so emotionally draining. Donna is a phenomenol writer who is able to truly get to the heart of this problem by enabling the reader to "feel" the impact of autoimmune disease through the personal stories of several people (not just her own, and not just lupus as another reviewer implied). I have actually found a real appreciation for my own body, as I have 4 different autoimmune disorders, but thankfully none have caused me the severe disability that others have experienced.

I am happy Donna covered the dietary approaches to managing immune function. I am a dietitian and I have long suspected that diet plays a key role. Personally, I have found relief in many of the supplements that are mentioned in Chapter 6- fish oil (omega 3), ginger, turmeric (curcumin), and vitamin D. And, although I know there is truth to the need to focus on a whole foods diet, I think this is going to be very challenging to achieve in a country that runs on processed foods. Regardless, being mindful of everything we put in our bodies really is the only way to insure optimal health. I used to take the stance that we can't be obsessed with every little thing, but I am definitely changing my mind about that. It seems that all the little things - pesticides, chemicals, food colorings, preservatives - are adding up to big problems.

Before reading this book I thought I knew a lot about autoimmune disease. But, the truths surrounding our toxic environment and the ignorance surrounding treating this problem are far beyond what I could ever imagine. This book truly is life changing.

If you're like most people in this country, you know someone who has an autoimmune disease. Did you know, for instance, that more people in the United States suffer from autoimmune disease than from cancer? I was shocked to learn this from Donna Jackson Nakazawa's brilliantly written book, The Autoimmune Epidemic. And if you are most people in this country, you MUST read this book - we all need the information that Ms. Nakazawa has painstakingly researched and accessibly written. She not only shares what scientists are saying about how and why autoimmune disease rates are rising, but what we can do to reduce our own - and perhaps more importantly - our children's risks of developing autoimmune disease. I think her message and her research are so important that I have already bought copies of this book for my children, for my parents and for several friends.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa has written a prophetic book, but not an entirely objective book. She is truly passionate about the topic of autoimmune disease and its potential links to environmental degradation and the lax regulation of foods and consumer products containing harmful substances. Given that she suffers from an autoimmune condition, one can understand her motives. However, the reader must account for that fact and take a step back from what she presents. There are legitimate reasons to suspect that many Americans are increasingly at risk of developing chronic autoimmunity because of "better living through chemistry". But much of the data and research needed to support this theory is incomplete. This is certainly a topic that needs public attention, but one that could be discredited if embraced too quickly.

The author interweaves human stories regarding the angst of having a strange and not fully understood medical condition with a bevy of facts and concepts about autoimmune disease. She also throws in a pinch of politics, as she narrates the struggles of communities seeking bureaucratic acknowledgment of disease clusters occurring near toxic waste sites. Her stories are compelling, and her knowledge of the processes of the immune system and its interactions with harmful substances such as mercury and TCE is extensive. Unfortunately, she fails give her readers "the big picture" of immunity and autoimmunity. As such, her references to CD44 proteins, toll-like receptors and other mechanisms of the immune system are scattered and disjointed.

Ms. Nakazawa provides an extensive notes section that backs up much of what she asserts. However, there are curious gaps for some of her more important and interesting claims. For example, on page 53 she talks of the "education process" in the thymus for T-cells, without any references that might assist the interested reader. On page 75, she says "if you were to look today at a chart detailing increasing rates of autoimmune disease . . " However, no citation follows. It would be nice to know where to find those charts or even see them in the book! Then on page 150, she talks about the process by which mercury forms hybrid proteins in the body, without any citation.

Regarding the studies listed in the notes about the influence of toxins on autoimmune response, one sees that most are mouse studies. Most of the supporting materials regarding disease clusters are small studies or local reports from about 12 cities. Nakazawa does not list any national studies comparing incident rates across a large number of toxic sites, and offers no references to investigations seeking common etiological factors across cluster victims. She focuses on a lupus cluster in the city of Buffalo and an academic study that was started after much bureaucratic footdragging. However, Ms. Nakazawa leaves us hanging, as the study was "not yet wrapped up" at the time of publication.

Furthermore, most of the autoimmune incidence studies that Nakazawa cites are time-limited and based on small geographic areas (sometimes in foreign nations). The only nationwide study cited regards lupus over the years 1950 to 1992. Nakazawa does not provide any sources concluding that all or most autoimmune conditions have an increasing incidence trend (although many studies show an increasing PREVALANCE, partly because of better recognition of autoimmune disease by medical workers in recent years). The author herself admits that reliable nationwide information regarding autoimmune conditions is not collected, as with AIDS and cancer.

Two more points: in several places, Nakazawa indicates that autoimmune diseases are primarily triggered by the process of viral molecular mimicry. Other sources, including The Merck Manual and William Clark's In Defense of Self, say that mimicry is one of several possible autoimmune "vectors", which may be relevant in different proportions to different diseases. I.e., one size does not fit all. Ms. Nakazawa does acknowledge these other factors, but conflates them under her "barrel" theory (which might be better described as a "tipping point" or "transition from order to chaos"). By putting everything into her allegorical barrel, environmental toxins always get in on the act. Also, Nakazawa gets behind the autism / thimerosal theory despite recent studies that conclude against it. Thimerosal, a mercury-based substance added to vaccines as a preservative, was removed from infant vaccines in California in 2001; however, studies there show that the child autism rate continued to climb.

The central premise of "The Autoimmune Epidemic" raises an obvious question: why now? Before the formation of the EPA in 1970, US citizens were exposed to many toxic pollutants that have since been eliminated or controlled. Also, since the late 1980s our economy has deindustrialized, and much of the toxic residue from our industrial past has been contained in Superfund cleanups (if imperfectly). Our paints and gasoline no longer have lead, we no longer dust our gardens with DDT, we no longer clean our paintbrushes with benzene. I feel that Ms. Nakazawa owes us a more careful analysis of whether the average American is now exposed to greater or fewer toxins. Perhaps we are exposed to different ones; but why should that set our immune systems reeling, when the old ones didn't?

In my opinion, the immune system and its disorders are an extremely important health topic. Many important discoveries are expected which will greatly increase our knowledge of the body's workings and its complicated responses to disease and injury. This will set the groundwork for therapeutic advances rivaling the antibiotics revolution of early 20th century. Toxic chemical exposure from the environment and from home products and the food chain could well be a contributor to the increasing incidence of certain autoimmune conditions. However, commercial interests having high levels of resources will challenge any public policy response. Recall how long they dragged out the global warming debate. Donna Jackson Nakazawa has taken a brave first step in garnering public attention, but carefully developed scientific evidence will be needed if her "epidemic" contention is to hold.

As a holistic physician, I wanted to see how the author made her argument that the increasing number of people with autoimmune disease is due to a toxic environment. She interviewed a number of respected scientific researchers whose research links the various toxins we all have in our body with the diseases that afflict so many people today. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to begin to understand how they may have come down with their illness. The good news is that a educated and committed patient and a physician who looks for the causes of these illnesses can develop treatments that enable healing to occur. The use of pharmaceutical drugs to suppress symptoms of the illness should be temporary because the underlying problem is not being corrected. The toxicity of the drugs is an additional burden on an already dysfunctional body. One take home lesson from the book is that we all can reduce our exposure to toxins by looking for and buying nontoxic body care and home care products.

I am, admittedly, a fan of the book because it tells a powerful story of a neighborhood activism in Buffalo, NY, and I was involved in that story in a small way. But the story of folks with undiagnosed autoimmune disease, how this poor, minority community had the strength of will to ask difficult questions, identify scientific collaborators in the local University, and lead a groundbreaking study of lupus incidence is a lesson that bears repeating all across the US. Along with that chapter, Donna Jackson Nakazawa weaves together impressive scientific review, stories of her personal challenges and why it is relevant for patients all across the US, and clearly states key issues for those wanting to know what they suffer from.

On top of that, she identifies recommendations on health and diet.

A powerful book, because it captures a citizen and journalist describing research, citizen action and health recommendations for this rising tide of unknown diseases, that affect everyone around us.

Why so many MS patients? Why is lupus so hard to diagnose? Why do we only measure asthma and cancer, and not other disease rates? Why do we insist on such a burden of proof of problematic diseases in communities? Jackson Nakazawa identifies and tackles tough science and policy questions in a book that cannot be put down.

Scientists, medical professionals, doctors, researchers, community leaders and members, citizen activists, concerned neighbors. You all should read this book.

I noticed someone who criticized this book said it was the same old advice but I found it very interesting. I learned more about auto immune response and found it very informative. I have colitis and found the advice while familiar went a little further and gave me a little more insight. I would recommend this book.

I believe this book should be REQUIRED READING for every high school senior and every new parent!! I was diagnosed with THREE auto-immune illnesses; I was so sick that I was not able to work, I didn't have the physical capacity to take care of my house, I didn't have the mental capacity to pay my bills, and at times, I couldn't even form sentences. Today, I work at a large corporation as a technologist in the computing field. I contribute the success of my healing largely to this book. It is the first book I read that explained how auto-immune illnesses happen, why you tend to get more after you've already gotten one, and what you can do to prevent that from happening. Truly a life-altering book. I can't recommend it highly enough. Even if you don't have an auto-immune illness, you should read it. It will open your eyes in a way you will be eternally greatful for, and it will give you information you need to prevent getting an auto-immune illness if you have a pre-disposition for one. Auto-immune ilnesses are only 30% genetic and 70% environmental. That means you have SEVENTY PERCENT CONTROL over whether you get one, or whether it gets worse (or, as in my case, better!) if you've already got one (or, as in my case, more!).. and this book tells you HOW to prevent the latter two!! The book reads like a novel, as opposed to being highly technical and "dry". I found it very difficult to put down once I started reading it because I wanted to know what happened next!! This book is backed by solid research, and completely inspirational. The author is gifted in being able to uniquelly explain a technical topic in a way that most anybody can understand. I rarely ever make such statements, but if you could only buy ONE book, EVER, in your entire life, on an auto-immune illness (ANY auto-immune illness)... if you could only buy ONE book EVER, in your entire LIFE, period; this is the book to buy. It's that life-altering, or at least it has been for me. God Bless this Author and her gift and will to open our eyes!! Thank you Ms. Jackson Nakazawa, GOD BLESS YOU!!