Donna’s Blog

Ironically, during the decades from 1940 to 1980 — when the medical community believed that autoimmune disease was impossible – the United States was simultaneously engaged in the greatest industrial growth spurt of all time. All across America, production plants were starting to spring up in town after town, as corporations ramped up production of thousands of novel products manufactured through efficient new chemical processes. New pesticides were being introduced to boost crop yields, prolong the shelf life of produce, keep lice, fleas, roaches, and termites out of the home, and zap dandelions from the lawn. Ingenious new chemicals were being used to help manufacture everything we Americans wanted to make our lives easier, simpler and more luxurious – from plastics to hair shampoo, detergents, foam cushions, carpeting, cosmetics, paint strippers, dry cleaning fluids, household cleansers and bleaches, and bigger, grander cars. Almost overnight, Americans began to find themselves inundated with and clamoring for the suburban home products, packaged goods, and manufactured foods churned out by mega-industry. Fleets of trucks transported these newly manufactured goods from coast to coast, and the ChemLawn truck began to circle the cul-de-sacs in neighborhood after neighborhood.
But this coincidence in timing – between a medical community not yet educated about a mysterious, growing set of diseases with an unknown set of triggers and a society’s swell in production of everything from SUVs to Teflon pans to furniture and mattresses that have been stuffed with flame-retardant foam – would turn out to be an ominous one.

In 2004, the CDC sampled 2,500 people across the country looking for the “body burden,” or amount of chemicals and pollutants each individual was carrying. They found traces of all 116 chemicals and pollutants they looked for, including PCBs, insecticides, dioxin, mercury, cadmium and benzene, all highly toxic in higher doses.  Then, in 2005, researchers found something more alarming: a cocktail of 287 pollutants — pesticides, phthalates, dioxins, flame retardants, and breakdown chemicals of Teflon — in the fetal cord blood of ten newborn infants from around the country, in samples taken by the American Red Cross.  A few months ago, CNN headlined the story of an 18-month-old and five-year-old who were selected and tested at random for industrial chemicals and found to have toxic chemicals coursing through their bloodstreams at levels several times higher than those already known to cause health problems in lab animals.  Meanwhile, levels of a number of chemicals now found in women’s breast milk have been doubling every five years – and are particularly high in American women.

Each person, with his or her unique genetic composition, is exposed to a unique combination and level of autogens depending on what they encounter in their day-to-day lives through the air they breathe, the substances that come into contact with their skin, their stress levels, their diet and their genetic predisposition. Chemicals and heavy metals, additives in our highly processed twenty-first century diet, and viruses and bacterial agents to which we’re exposed all combine to impact our immune system. Chronic stress, which releases a slow drip of cortisol into our body, also plays a role in triggering autoimmune diseases. As long as your barrel is less than full, however, your immune system is still able to deal with what it confronts every day. But once the immune system becomes overburdened and that barrel fills to capacity it can begin to misread signals, causing the immune system to make costly mistakes and attack the body itself. Unfortunately in modern life we’ve created a perfect storm of factors – a plethora of chemicals, heavy metals, processed food additives, viral hits and stressors – for today’s autoimmune epidemic to take hold. So much of what we encounter in twenty-first century life is causing our barrel to fill to the brim – and spill over. At that point, disease strikes.

Recently, researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins reported that even people without a genetic predisposition are vulnerable to autoimmune diseases. Whether or not you get an autoimmune disease depends on how many of these triggers you’ve been exposed to over your lifetime – or how full your barrel is. People with a genetic predisposition may be more vulnerable, but anyone whose immune system is overtaxed or over-stimulated can develop an autoimmune disease.

What can we do to protect ourselves and our families, and our immune systems? If you know what can contribute to disease it’s easier to know how you can help yourself. Dietary factors, use of household cleaners, emotional stress—these all have to be watched and managed –I go over each of these in detail in the Autoimmune Epidemic. Studies show that patients with an autoimmune disease also do better if they build a wellness plan that involves reducing stress hormones through a daily habit of meditation and whatever form of exercise they can tolerate. Patients also do much better if they follow “the autoimmune diet,” which means consuming foods that are anti-inflammatory, or a whole foods, rather than a processed foods, diet. I have a detailed description of the autoimmune diet in the book. One also needs to work with a doctor who is open to treating you not just with drugs but also with dietary changes, including making sure you’re receiving adequate amounts of the main supplements that have been shown in clinical studies to help autoimmune disease patients, such as omega fatty acids, Vitamin D, antioxidants, probiotics, and glucosamine.

I often wonder if in seventy years we will have classrooms of students grilling teachers as to why their grandparents and great grandparents – you and me – weren’t more concerned about toxic contamination and the immune system. Didn’t we see what we were doing to ourselves, to our foods and water, to future generations? Didn’t we grasp the connection between the environment and skyrocketing rates of diseases in which the immune system runs amok?

On the other hand, perhaps in the future we will all have made enough educated choices, exercising cumulative veto power as consumers and demanding accountability from
government officials and agencies, that that roomful of high school students won’t be pressing teachers as to why we didn’t foresee the polluted, disease-laden legacy we were leaving behind. Rather, they’ll be asking how a generation of scientists, researchers, patients and concerned parents were prescient enough to come together to stop an autoimmune epidemic in its tracks. There can’t be a better legacy – to leave our children than that.

In the 1950s the accepted mantra of medicine, put forth by Nobel prize winner Paul Ehrlich, was horror autotoxicus, that the body could not and would not turn on itself. And this was the accepted science all through the first two-thirds of the 20th Century. It wasn’t until 1957 that a young post doc at the University at Buffalo by the name of Noel Rose discovered autoimmunity when he found that rabbits in his lab were developing antibodies that were attacking and destroying their own thyroids. But because this ran completely against accepted medical doctrine, even after this discovery, the idea that autoimmune diseases could exist – and that the body could turn on itself — was not widely accepted in medicine until the late 1970s. It took years before autoimmune disease was widely taught in medical school.

Even today, most doctors know little about these diseases or about the exact process by which our immune system turns from friend to foe. It’s only in the last ten years that scientists have been able to show in the lab exactly how the immune system, when it’s overwhelmed by foreign invaders such as chemicals and viruses, can go haywire and destroy our own tissue and organs in acts of “friendly fire.” The fact that these diseases have been challenging for the medical community to understand means that even today getting a correct diagnosis can be very difficult.
Most people who have an autoimmune disease see six doctors over four years before they get a diagnosis. One patient suffering from severe muscle fatigue and disabling weakness was told by a doctor she’d seen eight times: “We’ve given you every test known to man except for an autopsy. Would you like one of those too?” It was five years before she got a diagnosis of myasthenia gravis. The medical establishment often lacks a full understanding as to how to diagnose these diseases, dismisses women who complain of telltale symptoms, and often has little to offer in the way of effective treatment.

I have been paralyzed twice in the last seven years – once in 2001 and again in 2005 — unable to use my arms or legs, hug my son or daughter, or get up and down the stairs, or type a word to meet the impending deadline for this book.

My paralysis was caused by Guillain Barre Syndrome, an autoimmune disease in which the nerves’ myelin sheaths are destroyed by the body’s own immune system. Autoimmune diseases – a group of nearly one hundred conditions including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus — all share one common characteristic. In each case, the body’s immune system turns upon the body itself.

Normally the immune system’s army of white blood cells and antibodies help to protect us from harmful pathogens like bacteria, chemicals and viruses. But in patients with autoimmune disease, the immune system loses the ability to tell friend from foe. Rogue immune fighters begin to engage in harmful, even fatal, “friendly fire” — destroying the body’s own tissues and organs.

So there I was, paralyzed in 2001 and again in 2005, due to an autoimmune disease in which my body was attacking itself. I found myself in my mid-forties lying in the same hospital in which my father had died, in his mid-forties, from what would almost certainly, now, be diagnosed as autoimmune disorders.

Because I’m a journalist by trade, it was in some ways inevitable that my personal journey would turn into a professional quest. With the experience of autoimmune disease so profoundly affecting my own life, I wanted to know what was being done to investigate autoimmune disease. Why didn’t we as a society hear more about these illnesses? What factors in 21st Century life coalesced to cause autoimmune disease? Did environmental components play a role – and if so, what were they? And what could a patient do to stem the damage and prevent future crises?

I sought out answers from the top researchers in the field. I started interviewing scientists at NIH and Hopkins who confessed that they were gravely concerned that rates of these diseases have been steadily increasing in the last thirty to forty years. Scientists have been looking at rates of these diseases since the 1980s and have found that the number of patients afflicted with them has more than doubled in the past three decades. In fact, autoimmune diseases are reaching epidemic proportions. In the past decade, fifteen top medical journals have reported rising rates of lupus, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune thyroiditis, scleroderma, Crohn’s disease, Addison’s disease, and polymyositis in industrialized countries the world over. Over the past forty years rates of type 1 diabetes, a disease in which immune cells attack the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, have increased fivefold. In children four and under, the rate of type 1 diabetes is increasing 6 percent a year. Scientists agree these rising rates cannot be attributed to better diagnostics alone. Something in our environment is causing this change.

Today one in 12 people – and one in 9 women — has an autoimmune disease. That’s 24 million Americans. In fact, a woman today is eight times more likely to have an autoimmune disease than breast cancer.