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An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases
Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Scribner, 2012400 pp., hardcover, $29.00 ISBN: 1439199388
Reviewed by Paul H Plotz
npg 2013 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
An Epidemic of Absence is a timely account of the hygiene hypothesis, and it delivers a rich lode of history, epidemiological data, immuno-logical speculation and stories of human behavior. The author, Moises Velasquez-Manoff, was drawn to this subject by his near lifelong burdens of alopecia areata totalis, food allergies and asthma. I am slightly leery of researchers whose principal subject of interest is their own disease, but Velasquez-Manoff is a professional science writer, and the accounts of his own experiences in seeking to overcome his illnesses by self-infecting with helminths provide a compelling frame for his subject. Readers of this journal who have swallowed accounts of fecotherapy and read of respected medical centers carrying out studies of helminth therapy for multiple sclerosis and other diseases will be drawn into the fascinating body of knowledge and the theory that underlie this story.
Velasquez-Manoff describes how the epidemicthe new appearance or rapidly rising incidence of a variety of inflammatory, immune, allergic and autoimmune diseasesmight be due to improved general hygiene and water purification; the growth of cities; the decline of family size; and other largely nineteenth-century epidemiological phenomena. The mechanism for this...