Parasites, the Next Big Thing!

I read the above book (An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases* by Moises Velasquez-Manoff) in an attempt to newly understand autoimmune diseases. Let me sum up this book. The idea is that we have become way too clean (the Hygiene Hypothesis): "In the wake of immunologically new humankind, I add one recommendation...take care of the butterflies! Their disappearance indicates loss of life...shrinkage of biodiversity also takes place in the micro-world close to us, but without notice. Preserving biodiverse life might have a preventative effect on allergy and other diseases of modern civilzation." --Finnish allergist Tar Haahtela in Allergy, 2009.


Our immune systems develop better and develop the way they should when they are confronted with certain microbes, viruses, bacterium, etc. from infancy, maybe even from gestation: "The relative smallness of the late-twentieth-century family, and the unprecedented cleanliness of modernity in general, had decreased the infectious burden during childhood...the absence of robust immune challenge early in life was...making people allergic." The book is awesome in that the author presents lots of anecdotal evidence as well as scientific evidence to draw his conclusions. Some snippets:

"A single variable...most correlated with an individual's odds of having hay fever or eczema at age twenty-three: how many older children were in the house at age eleven. The greater the number of older children around in childhood, the lower an individual's risk of allergic disease in young adulthood."


"Attending daycare in the first six months of life lessened one's chances of wheezing later by three-fifths...crowded, presumably contagion-enhancing environments early in life definitively warded off asthma."

"Immune-mediated disorders arise in direct proportion to affluence and Westernization. The more that one's surroundings resemble the environment in which we evolved--rife with infections and lots of what one scientist calls "animal, faeces, and mud"--the lower the prevalence of these diseases."

In 1819, hay fever was first documented. No one knew what it was. Allergies weren't common: "The U.K. and the U.S., the two nations that first noted the curious affliction, were also among the first nations to urbanize and industrialize. They were the first to experience the disaster of the modern city, and among the first to institute major sanitary reforms. They had the first populations...with both the desire and means to clean up. Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Russia, and to a lesser degree France...remained largely agrarian countries with a mostly rural populace until later. Something without biological precedent had occurred in these populations: the removal, perhaps for the first time in human evolution, of certain microbes and parasites from the human organism."


Another idea this author presents? That an intentional parasitic infection could kind of...distract? an autoimmune-prone immune system from attacking itself. So Moises, in the very first Chapter, infects himself with a worm from Tijuana. There is so much more to tell, but I don't want to risk losing you! There's a whole chapter on how a pregnant woman's environment can actually predispose her child to allergies and autoimmune disease or protect from them. Read it and see.

Shortly after An Epidemic of Absence, I read Parasite by Mira Grant.

I loved this book--couldn't stop reading it and, in fact, picked up her other books. The premise is that once mankind realized we needed more bugs in our lives, a corporation manipulated intestinal parasites to live in us for extended periods of time and heal us from all ills. Unfortunately, these parasites learn how to migrate to our brains and--you guess it--take control of their human hosts. Some parasites are fully successful in taking over a human body. Others are only partially successful and partially sentient. Those who are stuck mid-transition are very zombie-like. :) (They probably also thirst for blood. We'll see in Book 2.) The main character is actually a parasite who has taken over the body of a brain-dead woman--all in the name of survival!

This book is what Stephenie Meyer's The Host should have been. Except the parasites in Parasite aren't aliens. But I digress...

The finally book in this thrilling trio of parasite books? The Troop by Nick Cutter.

Let's recap. Book 1: Parasites are good for you! Book 2: Parasites are kind of good and kind of bad. Book 3 (The Troop): Parasites are disgusting creatures that will consume you so someone can make a horror movie based on your short life.

The Troop is, as Stephen King puts it, 'old-school horror'. A giant parasite, easily spread, takes up residence in your gut and fills you with an unquenchable hunger. Basically, you will eat anything (a chair, for example) and eat and eat and eat and all the while your body is dying and the parasite is feeding off of you. It's gross. The End.

2014--the year of the parasite, people. It's gonna be big.

*The New York Times reviewed An Epidemic of Absence as well!