
Your Environment Is Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/health/immune-system-allergies.html
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JoeAltmaier
Amish families bring the baby into the barn at a very young age, to get
exposed to the hay, animals and general dirt. They have astonishingly low
levels of allergy among their community members, despite having similar
genetics to their Swiss forebears who are typically allergy-ridden.

~~~
op00to
Yes obviously it’s the hay and animals and dirt, not any other combination of
diet or genetics.

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xg15
Citing a comment from the sidebar: [1]

> _As an immunologist for 30 years I can tell you the hygiene hypothesis is
> not uniformly accepted among immunology researchers. The author cites
> specific sources that support the hypothesis; however, it would have been a
> much better article if the author cited publications that have been reported
> in much higher impact journals that refute the hypothesis._

I assumed the ideas of the article to be common knowledge, so I was kind of
surprised by this comment. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to provide any
particular sources either. Does anyone have more information about the
counterarguments?

(That being said, there are always articles showing up that warn about
particulary unsanitary areas of everyday life that you wouldn't guess at first
glance - such as phone surfaces. So if that's true, it seems we do still get a
good amount of exposure to bacteria.)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/health/immune-system-
alle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/health/immune-system-
allergies.html#commentsContainer&permid=31017794)

~~~
op00to
Bacteria and viruses are everywhere. In the air, on every surface, even all
over our body. Our immune system does a fine job fighting them, clean
environment or not.

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magduf
So is this why I and others my age seem to have no allergies at all, yet my
younger coworkers seem to have deadly allergies to so many common foods?

Honestly, I can't even imagine not being able to eat a banana, or being
worried that some peanut might be in my food.

~~~
rincebrain
While I think the hygiene hypothesis makes a lot of sense, we need to be
careful about assuming it's correct, because we're working from "this is how
it is now, this is how we think it was then, what changed (and can we find
examples of it not changing to control with)?" not "this is how it is now, if
we do this, what do we think is going to happen?"

There's also the next logical followup of "well, if we think/assume/know this
is the case, what should we do about it?", and while we're experimenting with
a few avenues (deliberate helminth or similar mostly-harmless infection is a
surprisingly promising avenue), we're definitely in Early Days of even testing
different things, much less suggesting any concrete actions.

Growing up, I knew relatively few people with any kind of allergic response at
all, minor or major - two of my three younger siblings (the closest 4 years my
junior) developed mild (e.g. even if they got scratched they're not gonna need
an epipen) cat allergies as they got older, and a couple of their friends have
"no really there was a peanut in this room in the last 24 hours probably and
That's A Problem" levels of allergic response.

That said, it's also a retrospective problem of estimating prevalence of
something you didn't really note down the same way at the time as important if
it wasn't critical (or if e.g. you didn't have common usage of allergen tests
unless someone suspected something - for example, I've not had an
observed/suspected allergic response to anything, nor had an allergen panel
because it's just...not been an issue).

~~~
jjeaff
I believe there have been pretty conclusive studies that most, if not all, of
the peanut smell reactions are psycosomatic. Which is not to say that can't be
dangerous as well. But apparently, some have had such bad reactions to peanuts
in the past, that the mere smell just causes them to freak out. When the smell
is masked, they generally have no reaction. Similar to the many non-siliac
gluten allergies.

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sunstone
Sure but shouldn't all the vaccinations count for something in training the
immune system? These are some of the nastiest communicable diseases known to
science.

~~~
rincebrain
Exposing everyone to the same ~25 cases is almost certainly noise levels
compared to the diversity of things you'd find just from checking an adult
human hand that hasn't been violently purged with antibacterial agents in the
last 30 minutes.

Also, IIRC many of those aren't live viruses, so the fact that they grant
learned immunity to a handful of highly risky diseases is not necessarily
relevant to how helpful they are in training your immune system's friend-or-
foe responses on a wide variety of inputs.

