The following opinion piece by Donna Jackson Nakazawa originally appeared in the Washington Post as an article entitled "Diseases Like Mine Are a Growing Hazard" on Sunday, March 16, 2008.

Autoimmune diseases -- a group of about 100 conditions in which the body's immune system turns on the body itself -- are reaching epidemic proportions. In the past decade, 15 top medical journals have reported rising rates of lupus, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, Crohn's disease, Addison's disease and polymyositis in industrialized countries around the world. Over the past 40 years, rates of Type 1 diabetes have increased fivefold; in children 4 and under, it's increasing 6 percent a year.

If I wanted to make a movie about my life, I'd pitch it to Hollywood as "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" meets "An Inconvenient Truth," the Academy Award-winning Al Gore documentary about global warming. Rising levels of autoimmune disease may well prove to be the next environmental disaster -- only in this case, the changes taking place degree by degree are in the interior landscapes of our bodies.

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I've spent the past two years interviewing leading experts at top medical institutions nationwide to find out why cases of autoimmune disease are skyrocketing. In recent years, many allergists and immunologists have been attributing the rise to the "hygiene hypothesis" -- the theory that our germ-free homes and childhood vaccinations have eliminated challenges to our immune systems so that they don't learn how to defend us properly when we're young. The scientists I interviewed tended to discard the idea that this alone is responsible. They agreed almost to a person that our day-to-day exposure to environmental toxins -- through the air we breathe and the chemicals we absorb through our skin -- is a major trigger of autoimmune disease. "Exposures from our environment are a significant contributor to today's rising rates," says Douglas Kerr, director of the Johns Hopkins Transverse Myelitis Center and a top clinician at the Johns Hopkins Multiple Sclerosis Center.

In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sampled 2,500 people nationwide looking for the "body burden," or amount of chemicals and pollutants each individual carried. They found traces of all 116 chemicals and pollutants they tested for, including PCBs, insecticides, dioxin, mercury, cadmium and benzene, all highly toxic in higher doses. Then, in 2005, researchers from the Environmental Working Group found something more alarming: a cocktail of 287 pollutants -- pesticides, dioxins, flame retardants -- in the fetal-cord blood of 10 newborn infants from around the country. [Ed. Note: More on these can be found in the following PDF: National Learning and Developmental Disabilities Advocacy Groups Analyze Body Burden Studies]

Because most toxins are found in only trace amounts, it has been difficult to gauge what effect they might be having on our health. Yet studies of both lab animals and people provide disturbing insights into how even low exposures can cause our immune systems to go haywire. Mice exposed to pesticides at levels four times lower than the level the Environmental Protection Agency sets as acceptable for humans are more susceptible to getting lupus than control mice. Mice that absorb low doses of trichloroethylene -- a chemical used in dry cleaning, household paint thinners, glues and adhesives -- at levels the EPA deems safe and equal to what a factory worker might encounter today, quickly develop autoimmune hepatitis. And low doses of perfluorooctanoic acid, a breakdown chemical of Teflon found in 96 percent of humans tested for it, impair rats' development of a proper immune system.

Read the full Washington Post piece here.

Meanwhile, we should point out that permanent, quantitative immune system changes have been documented in workers (not just mice) exposed to low levels of TCE.