If it's good enough for Mark Zuckerberg: On Immunity

On Immunity: An Innoculation, Eula Biss

Fast Facts

• I found this book through Mark Zuckerberg's New Years Resolution project, A Year of Books. Zuckerberg chooses a new book every two weeks and hosts related online discussions, with some of the selections picked from relative obscurity (quite a windfall for the authors.) I figured, if it's good enough for Mark Zuckerberg...
• On the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2014
• 216 pages
• An exploration of vaccination - where our cultural attitudes about it come from, how vaccines are regulated and created, refutation of that horrible and unfounded article on a link to autism, how Biss approached vaccination as a new mother, and more
• Beautiful writing on an important subject, made as interesting to the masses as possible
• I'll admit, it felt like a bit of a slog at times (particularly when she went on and on about vampires), until suddenly the book ended when Kindle said it was 75% complete - a full quarter of On Immunity devoted to endnotes I will never read!

You Can't Live in a Bubble

There is great appeal to believing that, through your life choices, your body or family or community can be natural and pure and protected from malicious outside forces.  But this belief can be dangerous and often selfish - especially when coupled with possessing a tiny bit of unverified information.

We want to live in a closed system, but Biss' main message is that we are all connected, despite the illusion of isolationism.  As Biss' father, a physician, tells her, vaccination works by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.  The choices you make impact your fellow human beings, and vice versa.

One of Biss' most powerful anecdotes is about the birth of her son.  After giving birth without any medical intervention or painkillers or an IV, her uterus inverted and she needed an emergency blood transfusion.  We are part of one another's lives through our blood transfusions, our shared environment, our countless interactions, and the herd immunity our community members' vaccinations provide for us.  The boundaries we work hard to create in our minds are, in reality, permeable.

A few memorable facts:

• Part of the controversy surrounding vaccination is a product of luxury.  Unvaccinated children are more likely to be white, have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more.  Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.
• Environmentalist manifesto Silent Spring warned that the pesticide DDT was a widespread cause of cancer, a hypothesis that was not supported by decades of research that followed its publication.  But, because DDT became a pariah in the public mind, its use was widely banned, leading to a resurgence of mosquitos, malaria, and the deaths of one child in twenty in Africa.
• The public harbors similar fears about formaldehyde, though it is in automobile exhaust and cigarette smoke and paper bags and paper towels and gas stoves and fireplaces, and though it is a product of our bodies, essential to our metabolism, and in higher concentration in our systems than in the amount we receive through vaccination.
• Breast milk has paint thinner, dry-cleaning fluid, flame retardants, pesticides, and rocket fuel - most in microscopic amounts.  If it were sold at the convenience store, some stock would exceed federal food-safety levels for DDT residue and PCBs.
• The chicken pox can lead to infection with staph and Group A strep (flesh-eating bacteria), as well as pneumonia and encephalitis.  Once you are infected with chicken pox, the varicella virus never leaves your body and can return as painful shingles, and can cause strokes and paralysis.  Parents hold chicken pox parties for their children and pass out lollipops licked by sick children because experiencing the "real" or "natural" version feels comforting and safe on a basic level, despite the greater actual safety of the chicken pox vaccine.

Read It Because It's Good for You

I seem to have been reading a lot of thrillers and essay collections and yes, some junk food lately, and wanted to educate (punish?) myself with more non-fiction.  I bought On Immunity first, and read it (from a distance) with my brilliant pharmacist friend (though I think we've spent more time re-hashing Game of Thrones.  Can't blame us.)

I've also put H is for Hawk on the Kindle shelf, after reading an insanely glowing New Yorker review, and This Changes Everything, a book on climate change (which I feel even more morally obligated to read as an environmental lawyer.)  Suddenly it seems like I need a good fiction recommendation, or this is going to feel too much like work!

I would definitely recommend On Immunity, particularly to new parents and people who aren't necessarily science-minded but who would like an easy-to-approach, interesting primer.  Biss approaches the subject of immunity from so many different vantage points, sociological and scientific and cultural and literary and personal, so that you never nod off the way you otherwise might.  It's certainly good fodder for the playground, when a "protective" mother tells you she doesn't want to give Little Timmy his flu vaccine.