Free The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance--and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope (No Series) by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

done she takes advantage of the children’s nap to fix a broken plastic horse with a bottle of contact cement that boasts of being “the strongest glue on the planet.” Just as she is putting the horse’s leg back on, the children wake up. Becky sits down to feed Zach while Selena plays Reader Rabbit Preschool on the computer. Zach is cooing at the sounds emitting from the monitor, or maybe it’s the sight of the bottle of breast milk—which Becky pumped the night before in anticipation of a moment just like this, when her milk might run low, and then warmed up in the microwave—that’s making him so excited. It is, by and large, a happy scene. All in all, from Becky’s point of view, her Tuesday with her children has been pretty great.

    If you were to view Becky Sandler’s life from the vantage point of the cells of her immune system, however, which are working diligently to distinguish Becky from everything “not-Becky” in order to protect her against foreign invaders and infections, her Tuesday with her children would not appear so idyllic. From the perspective of Becky’s immune cells, it is one more day of bombardment by chemical and industrial agents, forcing her immune system to stay poised on high alert. Each time Becky came into contact with a new irritant, her body engaged in an exquisite chain reaction of cellular events, making split-second decisions as to whether it needed to fight these foreign invaders or not. Throughout this Tuesday, like every day, Becky’s body labored to keep her tissue and organs from being adversely affected by all the external substances that she came into contact with.
    Becky and Rick are more environmentally minded than most—they recycle, drive a hybrid, and avoid fumigating for pests around their children. They are also healthier than most, except perhaps for the fact that Becky has Raynaud’s disease, a quite mild autoimmune disorder that causes her fingers to turn white and cold from lack of circulation. But Raynaud’s does not affect her except when she’s exposed to sudden changes in temperature or to emotional stress. Selena, like nearly a fifth of her preschool class, has eczema and food allergies (dairy and tree nuts), but other than that, the Sandlers are all quite healthy.
    Becky would no doubt be surprised, then, to learn how many noxious, invisible chemicals are quietly entering her family’s bloodstreams every day, silently lodging in their cells, fat tissue, and, in Becky’s case, her breast milk. Many of these contaminants—the by-products of our modern manufacturing chemical age—are familiar to immunotoxicologists, who study the effects of chemicals on the immune system, and are known to interfere with the intricately calibrated workings of our immune cells.
    THE BURDEN OF CHEMICALS WE ALL CARRY IN OUR BODIES
    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 causing 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,