In conversations and even within the comments of this blog, I’ve seen an unmistakable increase in stories about people falling ill with immune system and other disorders related to exposure to sunlight or other ‘normal’ environmental conditions.
It’s my gut feeling that there is the start of a new epidemic that we’ll all be forced to confront in the near future: changes in our environment are beginning to have a measurable and detrimental effect on the general health of humans across the globe, beyond the usual respiratory illness we mostly associate with pollution.
While I am sure the CDC has statistics on individual disorders, I wonder if they are looking across a broad spectrum of disease while attempting to answer the question: Are we already seeing an increase of disease across the population due to environmental factors?
Since I am no scientist, and neither are most of the folks on this blog, I’m not about to start that study. But I am still interested in promoting its commencement. To that end I’d like to make a call for anecdotal evidence that supports the theory that immune disorders in particular are on the rise due to environmental changes.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to discuss my own disorder, lupus. It is genetic and unlikely to have come from an environmental source (although there are non-genetic sources such as drug reactions..), such factors certainly effect the intensity of my symptoms, like UV exposure.
So that’s the start of my interest, but I’ve been shocked how almost everyone I speak to about this has a sister or cousin or friend with a immune disorder, most of which are supposedly very rare.
If you have a such a disorder, or have a friend or relative who does, please write a comment (no names necessary) below. If I can get a reasonable response from here and the other places that I’m making the same request, I’ll compile them and try to use them to promote study of the thesis that human sourced environmental changes are already producing dramatic changes in disease rates. It’s my hope that, if true, this information could be pivotal in motivating individuals to make change in their lives and demand change from our governments that will limit or even reverse the behaviors that cause it, and thus engage people in the environmental debate with a deeper sense of immediacy.
Thanks in advance for your candor.