An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Author:Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Life Sciences, Developmental Biology, Science, Medical, Microbiology, General, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781439199381
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2012-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Modernity’s Developmental Disorder: Autism and the Superorganism

The immune system must be understood, not just as a defense against microbial invasion, but also as a sensory organ that informs the brain.474

—Betty Diamond

In the summer of 2005, Stewart Johnson, father to an autistic teenager, received the kind of phone call that filled him with dread. Someone from the camp where his son, Lawrence, spent a few weeks every summer was on the line. Johnson and his wife, Marjorie, loved their son dearly. But they looked forward to these few blessed weeks of peace when Lawrence was away. Their sanity, and to some degree their marriage, depended on the yearly respite. Immediately, worst-case scenarios came to Johnson’s mind. Had Lawrence blown up in a violent fit? Was he smashing himself in the face? Were restraints required? Were administrators calling to tell Johnson to pick up his son early, because he’d become unmanageable?

None of the above, it turned out. Lawrence was fine—better than fine. He was participating in activities and he was sociable, the caller announced. He’d earned a pass to wander about camp unsupervised. In fact, they were calling to ask what new therapy Lawrence had begun, because it was working wonders.

“Are you sure you’re not hallucinating?” Johnson remembers responding. There was no new therapy, he explained. He doubted the described changes were real. And after he hung up, he forgot about the call.

But a few days later, when he went to collect his son at the camp, he saw the transformation himself. Lawrence hugged his father, which was highly unusual. He gave Johnson a tour around the camp, calmly relating what they’d done—unheard-of. The car ride home was the most compelling evidence that something had changed. Trips were always difficult. Any deviation from the standard route—a different highway exit taken, a detour around roadwork—sent Lawrence into histrionics. On the way to camp, in fact, he’d thrown a prolonged tantrum. But now he sat unperturbed during the nearly three-hour ride from upstate New York back to Brooklyn.

Johnson had expected this newfound self-possession to dissipate at any moment. Now that it hadn’t, he was intrigued. He decided to test it: He took Lawrence to a noisy barbecue joint in Brooklyn. At that point, Lawrence hadn’t eaten out for years. And this particular restaurant had the sort of atmosphere—crowds milling, dishes clattering, babies crying—that had triggered meltdowns before. But now Lawrence sat unfazed by the hubbub, even as the waiter took his sweet time.

“The idea of me waiting for food in a restaurant for forty-five minutes with my son was so alien you might have been talking about something on another planet,” says Johnson. “So my mind is totally blown at this point.”

What had happened to his son? Johnson was at a loss. Only when he undressed Lawrence for bed did he noticed the bites. From the hem of his shorts to his sock line, hundreds of red, scratched-at, scabbed-over chigger bites covered Lawrence’s legs.

Chiggers are a type of mite that passes through a parasitic phase.

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