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I wrote a guest post over at the Human Food Project on a study testing how parasites might stabilize the microbiome and prevent autoimmune type 1 diabetes. Prevention is if course the Holy Grail. Much better than trying to manage or halt ongoing autoimmune disease. I also encourage people to check out The American Gut Project, an open source attempt to catalog what’s living in… well, American guts.

I don’t know how I missed this the first time — probably because of the nearly incomprehensibly jargon-y title — but in a study published late last year, Harvard scientists showed that a sugar derived from parasitic worms could reverse metabolic syndrome in mice. The sugar works as an immune suppressant. Here’s the oddest part: the two places humans encounter this sugar in “nature” are parasitic worms and—wait for it—breast milk. Metabolic syndrome, that pre d

Last month, Ars Technica reviewed Epidemic. The write-up mostly works like a synopsis. But in the final section, the review veers into a kind of reality distortion field. Immune dysregulation is not implicated in cancer, cardiovascular disease or obesity, the reviewer proclaims. Yet inflammatory involvement in all three is fairly well established, at this point. It’s verging on old news, in fact. Some recent reviews on inflammation in colon cancer; adipose tissue, inflammation and cardiovascular

People, So I promised to counter “smack downs” of my NYT oped on autism. My rebuttal is disappointingly simple and boring. As I told Wired.com, talk to scientists. See what they say about this research, and about my piece. Check it out with them. Paul Patterson, who pioneered much of the prenatal-inflammation-autism research, has made this quite easy. He has a blog. (I did not know this when I wrote the oped.) He writes about new work in the field, and answers questions. It’s r

Yahoo ran a follow-up article to my NYT oped. The reporter’s focus was on vaccines during pregnancy — are they safe given the evidence suggesting that an inflammatory response may damage the fetus? (Vaccines prompt an inflammatory response.) That was an issue I deliberately avoided in my piece. I wanted to steer very clear of vaccines. Here’s Dr. Patterson’s response, though, from his blog. In short, there is no evidence that maternal vaccination is a risk factor for auti

Autism Speaks hosted a live chat with Dr. Paul Patterson, whose work I cite, apropos of the NYT article. Interesting questions. Good answers.

People, lots of interest in my recent NYT op-ed. I’m posting a source list below. I’ll add more later, so check back. The literature on autism and inflammation is extensive, as is the literature linking autism to autoimmunity. But this should provide a solid entry-point for those curious to know more. I’m including reviews when possible. Easier to read for lay people, and they also contain extensive citations for those who want to dig deeper. I’m listing them more-or-less in the same order

A study just began at NYU looking at how porcine whipworms change the microbiota of patients with ulcerative colitis. P’ng Loke is leading it. He conducted an earlier study on a fellow who’d acquired a human whipworm infection, and sent his ulcerative colitis into remission. (I tell this guy’s story in the book. It’s remarkable.) A major find to come from Loke’s case study was that restoring the mucous barrier could send UC into remission, and that whipworms, which

Two years in the writing. Dozens of scientists in the interviewing. Thousands of abstracts in the skimming. Countless papers in the reading. Scores of books in the accumulating. Many metaphors in the dreaming up. Lots of writing and rewriting and re-rewriting. Days, weeks, and months of subconscious synthesizing. Nights and nights of fact-checking. And finally the finished book has arrived —  white cover, solid heft, red-lettered title, simple cover design. Beautiful. Take a look. Esthetic