On Immunity : An Inoculation (9781555973278) by Eula Biss Read Free Book Online Page A

Beginning around the 1920s, thousands of miles of ditches were dug, swamps were drained, window screens were installed, and tons of an arsenic-based insecticide were spread. This was all to destroy breeding grounds and repel the mosquitoes that spread malaria. In a final push, DDT was applied to the walls of millions of homes, insecticides were sprayed from airplanes, and malaria was eliminated from the United States by 1949. Among other advantages, this contributed to the growth of our economy. Matthew Bonds, an economist at Harvard Medical School, compares the global effects of disease to widespread crime or government corruption. “Infectious diseases,” he says, “systematically steal human resources.”
    “Such a catalog of illnesses!” Carson complained to a friend when an eye inflammation left her unable to read her own writing. Her work on Silent Spring had already been slowed by an ulcer, pneumonia, a staph infection, and two tumors. She kept this cancer, which would kill her shortly after the publication of Silent Spring , a secret. She did not want her work to appear to be driven by anything other than scientific evidence. And so her personal struggle with cancer was told only through dwindling numbers of bald eagles, through eggs that did not hatch, and through the robins that lay dead on the lawns of suburbia.
    Even as Carson proposed that DDT could cause cancer, she recognized its utility for disease prevention. “No responsible person,” she wrote, “contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored.” Chemicals should be used in response to real threats, she suggested, rather than “mythical situations.” She advocated for the informed, judicious use of chemicals, not the neglect of African children. But the enduring power of her book owes less to its nuances than to its capacity to induce horror.
    Silent Spring begins with a “Fable for Tomorrow” in which Carson imagines an idyllic landscape of oaks, ferns, and wild-flowers that is rapidly transformed into an apocalyptic wasteland where birds no longer sing. In the pages that follow, workers who have been picking oranges fall violently ill, a housewife who hates spiders develops leukemia, and a boy who runs to greet his father, just back from spraying the potato fields, dies that night from pesticide poisoning. It is a horror story in which man’s creation, his monster, turns against him. Like Dracula, this monster moves through the air as mist and lies dormant in the soil. And like the plot of Dracula , the drama of Silent Spring depends on emblematic oppositions—good and evil, human and inhuman, natural and unnatural, ancient and modern. The monster in Dracula has ancient origins, but in Silent Spring evil takes the form of modern life.

T RICLOSAN IS DESTROYING OUR ENVIRONMENT and slowly poisoning us all, I determined shortly after I began reading about its toxicity. Or, triclosan is harmless to humans and not a serious threat to the environment. Uncertain how to interpret the data, I called the author of one of the studies I had read, an FDA researcher with a kindly voice. I explained my problem and he said that he would like to help me, but he was not supposed to talk to the press. It had not occurred to me that I was the press, though I was writing an article for Harper’s magazine at the time.
    Frustrated, I hung up the phone and fell asleep with my face on a pile of articles about herd immunity. I woke to find that a fragment of print had been transferred to my cheek. It spelled “munity,” from the Latin munis for service or duty. “Munity is what you are really writing about,” a colleague would say to me months later, “not immunity.” This struck me as true, though I was writing about both.
    As I rode my bicycle to my son’s preschool after failing to determine how good or bad triclosan might be, it began to rain. I ran one block from the school to the public library through the rain, carrying my son, who was laughing.