Throughout On Immunity: An Inoculation, the idea of an appeal to the natural world continuously butts its head as a central pillar of the argument against vaccination and modern medicine as a whole. At the same time, Eula Biss brings in the common counter-arguments against such an appeal, such as “Natural infections of measles, mumps, chicken pox, and influenza…” (Biss, 35). However, the long history of the natural world is a continuous struggle for improvement between a complex web of interacting organisms and slowly improved strategies to address each new problem. While appealing to an idea simply because it is natural is a blatantly fallacious argument, there are still a great many lessons we can learn from and apply to our new challenges.
One case which Eula Biss touched on regularly in favor of vaccination was herd immunity. By inoculating a large enough portion of the population, the disease would not have the critical number of hosts to sustain itself long-term (“Vaccines”). However, this lesson is not limited strictly to our population. One interesting application was infecting mosquito populations with Wolbachia, which decreases hatch rates, but also makes mosquito populations more resistant to viruses such as Zika in the first place (Doubek). By inoculating a disease reservoir, we can reduce infections in humans with a method heavily borrowed from nature. We are not the first species or even human population to encounter many infection related problems, and we can learn new approaches from the strategies others have tested before us.
These lessons extend beyond herd immunity though, for example, on page 51-52, Biss discussed the historical approach of inoculating people with cowpox as a defense against smallpox because of the protection observed in dairy farmers and milk maids. These techniques can be applied outside of infectious disease too. For example, the current drive on immunotherapy in cancer relies on finding biomarkers and presenting them to the immune system the way it normally sees influenza. In doing so, we borrow a tool from the world around us that does the job a bit better than the figurative shotgun, chemo, previously used.
Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from our own history is just how easy it is to cast the blame for pestilence on the other. This can range from “risk groups” today regarding the impoverished and working class to the unclean living in the slums, (Biss, 25, 74-75). As people, we have the constant desire to blame somebody else for what feels out of our control. Even the modern anti vaccination movement fits this pattern of casting blame on somebody else to better feel like we have control of the situation and an explanation as to why. As Biss explains it, “Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity” (Biss 76).
References
Biss, E. (2015). On immunity: An inoculation. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf.
Doubek, James. “To Shrink Mosquito Population, Scientists Are Releasing 20 Million Mosquitoes.” NPR, NPR, 21 July 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/21/538470321/to-shrink-the-mosquito-population-scientists-are-releasing-20-million-of-them.
“Vaccines Protect Your Community.” Vaccines.gov, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 11 Oct. 2006, www.vaccines.gov/basics/work/protection/index.html.
Unfortunately, the formatting got messed up again with this post, and fixing it ended up making the references a bit weird. I don't want to change it anymore because the main post itself is finally staying on the page.
ReplyDeleteIt is strange how much people tend to focus on being "natural," even at the expense of their own health and safety. It's like, what's the point in being natural if you're going to die from the flu or measles or something?
ReplyDeleteThe mosquito research you referenced is incredibly interesting! I like that you included some information on how other species experience infection/immunity as well as how humans do. Good work.
One of the nursing professors likes to remind us that poison ivy is completely natural and no one actually wants to interact with it. Vaccination is much the same way. Natural does not always mean better and sometimes the “natural method”, namely taking chances with disease, is far more dangerous.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea that the natural way is not always the best. This is also evident through childbirth. Women who choose to have a "natural" birth run a much higher risk of complications not only for themselves but for the baby as well.
ReplyDeleteI guess with most of the comments here focusing on one aspect of the post, the flaw in the argument of appealing to nature, I wanted to draw a bit more attention to the other major aspect: the lessons we can learn from it. On a related note to the mosquito work, some other cases of researchers borrowing from what we find in nature include PCR and Crispr. In both cases, we found enzymes and natural processes in place and coopted them from the organisms using them for our own uses. Vaccines started as just a particularly important form of this practice. The body of work we can draw on that already exists is so profoundly immense. Since we don’t exist in a vacuum, we might as well learn what we can from the world around us. This idea even goes back to mythology with stories such as that of Promethius and in that case ‘borrowing’ from our surroundings for our communal betterment.
ReplyDeleteI find your point about blame shifting interesting. Nobody likes the idea that bad things can happen to good people, so we push the blame on other things. We point to violent video games as a cause of mass shootings, we point to vaccines as the cause of diseases, when in most cases there simply is no causation, even if there is correlation. It is very human to shift blame, especially in cases where there is nothing to blame.
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