An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases

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Simon and Schuster, 17 set 2013 - 416 pagine
A brilliant, groundbreaking report on the dramatic rise of allergic and autoimmune disease, and the controversial therapies scientists are developing to correct these disorders.

From asthma to Crohn’s disease, everyone knows someone who suffers from an allergic or autoimmune disorder. And if it appears that the prevalence of these maladies has increased recently, that’s because it has—to levels never before seen in human history. These days no fewer than one in five—and likely more—Americans suffers from one of these ailments. We seem newly, and bafflingly, vulnerable to immune system malfunction. Why? One possibility is that we have systematically cleaned ourselves to illness; this belief challenges deeply entrenched notions about the value of societal hygiene and the harmful nature of microbes. Yet scientists investigating the rampant immune dysfunction in the developed world have inevitably arrived at this conclusion. To address this global “epidemic of absence,” they must restore the human ecosystem.

This groundbreaking book explores the promising but controversial “worm therapy”—deliberate infection with parasitic worms—in development to treat autoimmune disease. It explains why farmers’ children so rarely get hay fever, why allergy is less prevalent in former Eastern Bloc countries, and how one cancer-causing bacterium may be good for us. It probes the link between autism and a dysfunctional immune system. It investigates the newly apparent fetal origins of allergic disease—that a mother’s inflammatory response imprints on her unborn child, tipping the scales toward allergy.

An Epidemic of Absence is a brilliant, cutting-edge exploration of the dramatic rise of allergic and autoimmune diseases and the controversial, potentially groundbreaking therapies that scientists are developing to correct these disorders.
 

Sommario

Chapter 1Meet Your Parasites
1
The Filthy Ape
21
Chapter 3Island of Autoimmunity
45
Chapter 4Parasites to Heal the Gut
62
Chapter 5What Is Asthma For?
80
Chapter 6Missing Old Friends
99
Chapter 7Mom Matters Most
129
Chapter 8The Disappearing Microbiota
144
Inflammation and the Diseases of Civilization
242
Crowdsourcing The Cure in an Age of Immune Dysfunction
263
Chapter 14Life with the American Murderer and the Bodys Largest Organ
280
Chapter 15The Collapse of the Superorganism and What to Do About It
292
Afterword to the Paperback Edition
309
Acknowledgments
317
Notes
321
Selected Bibliography
363

Chapter 9CommunityWide Derangement
164
Worms That Never Come a Tardy Virus and a Brain That Degenerates
193
Autism and the Superorganism
214

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Informazioni sull'autore (2013)

Moises Velasquez-Manoff covered science and the environment for The Christian Science Monitor, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and Slate, among other publications. He graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Master of Arts program, with a concentration in science writing.

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