"Why do we get allergies? No one has a firm answer, but what is arguably the leading theory suggests that allergies are a misfiring of a defense against parasitic worms. In the industrialized world, where such infections are rare, this system reacts in an exaggerated fashion to harmless targets, making us miserable in the process.
Medzhitov thinks that’s wrong. Allergies are not simply a biological blunder. Instead, they’re an essential defense against noxious chemicals–a defence that has served our ancestors for tens of millions of years and continues to do so today."
Interesting thanks. This definetly reminds me also of how your eye lashes/eyebrows are a defense against dirt and particles that have also served our ancestors for millions of years
Long articles are not bad in the right context, but when publishing online authors need to get to the point right away. They should make their main case in the opening paragraph or two, and then fill in the details. The whole opening anecdote about kicking the hornet nest was useless and should be eliminated.
Not sure why publishing online necessitates getting to the point. It's long form and follows a very common story telling format. The world has room for different ways to tell a story.
I want to take a moment to ask my fellow non-americans, do you also hate the american style of storytelling in news articles? It's obnoxious, useless and recently, counter productive because we are overloaded with information and need to skim quickly over many different news.
..it doesn't strike me as particularly American? I could easily see a Danish article written in this style. I don't dislike it but I do agree that the point should be at the top. Trying to build a crescendo seems to build on the assumption that your reader is fascinated by your writing already. It might be true if you have a following. Maybe this author does, I am not sure.
Not sure it makes sense to say this is American vs non-American. Normal American newspaper stories adhere pretty well to the inverted pyramid structure, and the wiki article even suggests it first became prominent in the US:
It's really about news vs. human interest pieces, and many outlets (like the NY Times) feature both. Seems possible to me that American outlets produce more of these, but it'd be hard to disentangle this from the general dominance of American outlets on the English-speaking internet, such that non-American pieces are more likely to be directly local and, so, news rather than human interest.
The solution to this problem is well known: an abstract. It's clear that many news outlets see their job as entertainment rather than delivery of information, and it's also clear from comment's like snookca's that some people like this. (I hate it, but to each his own.) So this is never going to be solved by complaining to the author or to your fellow readers.
What could effectively solve this is if HN attached a short abstract to each article, written and updated by user submission. (The initial version could/should be provided by the submitter.) Maybe minimal GitHub-like version control with pull requests accepted by vote. This could be useful not just to save time, but also to keep article quality higher, if submitters are required to justify the intellectual value of the submission. The abstract would be more valuable than normal comments, so accepted modifications could get extra karma.
This would have similarities to summaries on slashdot (which are written by moderators and so not very scalable) and the "submission statement" required in certain subreddits.
The author simply used a rhetorical approach for having an extended conversation about a scientific topic with laymen.
Long-form science writing isn't inferior to news briefs or press release-style articles you're looking for; it can be a very effective method for engaging a reader and introducing them to a topic which they don't have detailed knowledge on (or which they just want to read about).
Recently learned about the 3-30-300 rule of article writing online:
"People will read 3 words to decide if the topic is interesting. If they think it's worth their time, you have thirty words to hook them. If they take the hook, you can probably get them to read 300 words unless they have a focused interest in the topic."
It is, unfortunately, tied to much evil online (the quick-list ad blog ecosystem is basically application of 3-30-300 writ large), but useful for creating general-consumption articles.
and originally (CC licensed, and attributed) with a few nice illustrations from http://mosaicscience.com/story/why-do-we-have-allergies where they even credit a `Fact checker`. And on first glance, that website seems quite good.
About two decades ago I got a huge case of almost-asthma pollen allergy out of nowhere, almost overnight. I got the usual treatment (desensitization + meds) and it got somewhat better over the years. Simultaneously I developed other allergies though, for example, suddenly I was very allergic to cats (I had had cats earlier, so that was new).
A few years ago I was diagnosed with a case of chronic heavy-metal poisoning.
Now, many treatments with DMPS (the main chelator for mercury) and DMSA later, I have completely lost all allergies (and a long list of other "strange" problems, including a real medical miracle that left the endocrinologist repeating "I'm amazed" over and over after checking his ultrasound results twice, after asking me to lie down again because he did not trust his results).
End of anecdote.
------------------------------
EDIT: As someone who has taken hundreds of hours of anatomy, physiology, org. chem, statistics (focus on public health and use in medicine), neuroscience, I am aware that there is not "one path that explains all". There are soooooo many pathways, and different things can affect different parts leading to similar results. So I am NOT saying "this is the one and only way to get an allergy". In fact it is highly unlikely that there is only one possible cause. So if you have found an anecdote that seems to show that something else helped and/or caused it than "heavy metals" that's just fine and normal - and has nothing to do with my anecdote. You can get a flesh wound not just by cutting yourself with a kitchen knife, there are endless possibilities.
I vaguely recall reading something on Usenet or something that would have made it onto Slashdot or Plastic in the late 90s/early 00s, where someone treated their allergies or asthma or something by deliberately infecting themselves with a parasitic worm---I forget which, maybe hookworm. They actually went to so far as to cultivate the worm in some medium that they could apply to their stomach using a custom-made patch, started pooping oocytes, and then completed the usual treatment course for whatever it was they infected themselves with. I can't recall if it cleared up the condition from which they were suffering, and obviously, this wasn't any kind of controlled trial. Lord knows that such a study would give an IRB six fits, and rightly so!
That's the one. I didn't realize Rusty put a "Disallow: *" in his robots.txt. It made me really sad to discover that Kuro5hin wasn't spidered by the Internet Archive.
Thanks. I am really, really happy to see that Rusty's alive and doing well! And that there's a chance the site will return in static, archival-ready form.
Wow, I had no idea that the guy tried to actually sell his treatment to other people! There's no way the FDA would let that fly without doing proper, controlled studies.
Oh you sweet summer child, who never got to experience Suck.com or Plastic in their (respective) heydays. Your world is objectively poorer as a result, but least the Brunching Shuttlecocks is still online!
I'd say that Plastic's closest living relative is probably MetaFilter. Reddit feels closer to Usenet because of the multiple subreddits and, frankly, because of all the trolling and shitposting that goes on. Actually, let me clarify that: The content/discussions found in most subreddits would fit comfortably into the alt.* newsgroup hierarchy. The methods by which we discuss things on the Internet have changed, but the kinds of things we talk about haven't, really.
I see this referenced continually online as if it's a miracle cure/weight loss aid. I had pinworm, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It felt like I was being stabbed at random intervals in the abdomen. Eventually went to hospital, they said it was probably IBS and sent me home. Consulted Dr. Google for a second opinion and it mentioned worms could cause abdominal pain. Sure enough I found worms after a bowel movement and, unfortunately, that was when they began crawling out my anus at night... yup.
Had eaten barely anything for a week, so I did lose a ton of weight I suppose. The psychological damage on the other hand was the worst part. I avoided touching other people and was convinced parasitic eggs were everywhere on door handles etc.
In fairness, they told me to come back if the pain came back (it miraculously recided after a few hours while sitting on a chair in A&E). They thought IBS was most likely. They also gave me an antispasmatic to go home with which did nothing, which made me do the research and find the wrigglies lol. Mebendazole did the trick. I still check a bit closer after wiping to this day though!
Fun side note: the A&E was so over capacity and understaffed (Ireland) I had to awkwardly ask for the IV drip to be removed because it had finished and my blood was tracking back up the tube.... I was 17 and my parents weren't allowed in with me :(
I deliberately infected myself with 25 hookworm, twice, in order to alleviate "allergies". In short, basically, it is indeed effective, but can have side effects of its own.
Also, I don't think it's so clearcut that I have allergies because I'm missing 50 hookworm so much as because my immune system developed without a broad range of 'germs' and 'parasites' and other natural cofactors. As a treatment option for quality-of-life, though, it's pretty sound.
Helminthic therapy is pretty analogous to supplementing probiotics, and directly analogous to supplementing the subtype of probiotics known as soil-based organisms.
Generally inert in place and it has to be inhaled to be absorbed. However, drilling/removal/chipping can release absorbable particles.
Edit: Also note -- because they are inert in place so advice from the FDA is to leave them be as long as the fillings are in good condition and there is no decay beneath the filling. In other words -- don't panic and take an ice pick to your perfectly good fillings.
I didn't see a response. Fish are very good at accumulating and concentrating biologically active mercury. My state DNR has all kinds of pamphlets along the general topic of less than one serving per week of inland lake caught fish puts you at risk of lack of omega-3 acids and more than one serving per week puts you at significant risk of mercury poisoning. And they helpfully suggest women who could become pregnant only eat certain species like once per month at most. So at camp eating fish, if you're a woman you can eat half a decades worth of contaminated fish in a couple days.
Some of the advice is crazy, or spooky. Women under 50 should eat less than one can of tuna per month according to my state DNR. I work with a low carb person who eats a can of tuna per day every day for lunch. Their blood mercury level must be off the charts. Like they could use the veins in their arm as a mercury thermometer or something.
My teenage daughter developed peanut allergies in her mid teens while traveling with a drum corps one summer. She had noticed how ill she was feeling and systematically cut out foods until she narrowed the peanut butter sandwiches (she had been an avid peanut butter eater for years before). When she got back from tour and was tested she was confirmed for strong peanut allergies and had to carry an epi-pen. However, after about a year she got tested again and now had no reaction.
I still attribute this to something else was in her system that triggered reaction in conjunction with the peanut proteins.
Timpani. She played a flute also, but not over the summer.
Every time I mention this people kind of look at me funny when I offer my co-trigger explanation as "some kind of bug", but I was reading Dawkins at the time and had come to stop thinking about unitary causes for phenotypic expressions.
Of course, that's not the easiest course of conversation to travel down with most people, so I just sort of accept the silence that follows. It does give me the fun little anecdote of how my daughter was deathly allergic to peanuts for a year, but then she got better.
I was born and raised in the countryside and lived in the same house until I was 18. When I was around 11 I developed severe hay fever out of nowhere. It's not like I wasn't exposed to pollen before, as I was a typical country kid running around in fields and such. The doctor issued me the usual antihistamines, but they didn't really help so I just sucked it up every summer.
When I was 17 I started wearing contact lenses - and after that no more hay fever. I thought at first the contact lenses were blocking the pollen from getting into my eyes, but I've now reverted back to almost always wearing glasses. 10 years later and no more hay fever. Go figure...
Interesting. This is definitely an industrial-era problem that would explain why allergies are seemingly more prevalent. I wonder if it could also apply to gluten 'sensitivity'? Whereabouts do you think the mercury came from - food or water?
(See also the recent discussions around lead including in Flint, Michigan)
Since we're talking about anecdotes and allergies, I've heard multiple people (body building enthusiasts let's say) that they lost their hayfever allergies after taking a course of body-building steroids.
I know from experience that taking steroids reduces the immune system response, so there is something to that.
Typically those are different types of steroids though. Anti allergy steroids are called the "body's universal solvent" because of all the side effects including muscle weakness and fat gain. Anabolic steroids work on a different pathway.
Of note some of modern human allergies come from infant avoidance. Kids who eat peanuts younger are less likely to get peanut allergies for example. If you want to decrease allergies, let your infants get dirty, play with dogs, and liberalize their diet.
Again, anecdote, science of 1... but that can't be universally the case because of me.
I'm Gen X (1979), grew up playing in dirt, house filled with dogs and cats. Ate a fair amount of things, apart from the things I was allergic too: apples mostly. Most of the food I ate was home cooked. My sisters do not have allergies.
It has since gone on to get much, much worse. I can no longer eat carrots or parsnips (which were my favourite). I'm now very allergic to dogs and cats and it wasn't because of a lack of exposure.
Normally when you go to the dr's office with allergies none is trying to find heavy metal poisoning. A lot of times they do not even perform regular blood work, they just do tests for allergies and prescribe meds to address symptoms (like antihistamines or steroids, or both).
With certain types of airborne allergies (like dust mite allergies or pollen allergies) they can also offer immunotherapy (allergy shots) as a treatment.
They inject gradually increasing doses of allergen which leads to development of immunity or tolerance to the allergen. Immunotherapy is the only available treatment for airborne allergies at this point, it is more than 100 years old and takes several years of injections to complete it and a lot of times it is not very effective.
Do allergy shots actually work in any measurable fashion? I had weekly shots for years as a child, to try to counter some crippling dust and pet allergies, but the only effect I ever experienced was feeling miserable for six days out of the week, and finally having the crap washed out of my system by the seventh day, just in time to get shot up again.
On the other hand, after puberty and a serious illness in my late teens that basically rebooted my immune system, I haven't had any issues with allergies ever since.
They worked well for me, not eliminating my allergic response but significantly reducing it for about a decade after 2-3 years of shots.
Note that the same treatment can be given via drops, a much less expensive option (but still considered off label use in the US). I haven't tried them (yet) but it seems like the research performed so far shows them to be just as effective (I'd guess also just as ineffective if the shots don't work for you).
There are studies that show that immunotherapy is effective and safe for certain airborne allergies (some of them are referenced here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergen_immunotherapy). Close friend of mine is going through immunotherapy for dust mite allergies for more than a year now, so far she had just a little improvement.
To me surprising part is that immunotherapy is 100 years old treatment and we did not come up with anything better after a century of rapid advancements in science. Currently in US there are estimated 20 million people suffering from dust mite allergies alone and more than 50 million Americans suffer from allergies overall. Allergies are the 6th leading cause of chronic illness in the U.S. with an annual cost in excess of $18 billion.
One of new approaches for treatment of airborne allergies is what this company is doing http://www.circassia.com. They are working on new kind of therapy, which is trying to "teach" your immune system to not identify certain harmless airborne allergens (dust mites, grass, ragweed,...) as harmful. Treatment consists of 4 injection during a year period. They are in trial phase right now (I am not related to them).
Only if the exposure was recent would this should on standard tests such as a blood test. A biopsy would show retained mercury; but your doctor or specialist will almost certainly refuse to perform a biopsy for this purpose. We're way behind on anything related to heavy metal toxicity because the Dental lobby spent a lot of money on politicians making sure research on the topic wasn't funded. A lot of the best research was done, therefore, in the former Soviet Union.
Huh, dental? Of all the lobbies, why them? I would have assumed the mining and oil companies would have been the ones downplaying it like they did with leaded gasoline.
No, it would not. A "standard" (in the US) blood test doesn't even test for just lead, so never mind cadmium or antimony or arsenic or mercury or whatever else may be poisoning a person. A doctor in Flint, Michigan, might routinely add a lead test to every blood test prescribed for patients, but most doctors won't add on specific tests like that unless there is a compelling symptomatic indication that might point to poisoning, or a known environmental exposure. Besides that, some elements are dumped into the cells or the bones, or incorporated into molecules that usually attach to another element, and may be difficult to detect with a blood test, anyway.
A 24-hour urine collection might detect chronic heavy metals poisoning. Hair tests might also work, though I don't know what a "standard" hair test looks for, specifically. I also don't know if detecting poisonous elements comes with no additional effort added to those "standard" tests. If it costs extra, it usually doesn't get done.
Of course, even if someone came into a doctor's office complaining of all the typical symptoms of heavy metals poisoning, the doc still might not have an inkling unless the patient has some kind of occupational exposure to it.
Hmmm, I have bad allergies and was born and raised in Joplin, MO, a lead and zinc mining town until after WWII, and like everyone else born in the early '60s was exposed to tetraethyllead in gasoline until it started to be phased out in the mid-70s.
Then again, I clearly got this from my mother who is in some ways worse (stays indoors during ragweed season, which doesn't bother me at all), my problems largely disappeared when I moved to the Boston area (different climate and allergens), returned when I moved to the D.C. area (very roughly the same as Joplin). But I'll think about this, I've never had a test for lead....
Thanks. I know you didn't write the headline, but it would've been less clickbaity as, "New theory suggests allergies are caused by an essential toxin defense".
I found the experiment further down to explain the theory even better.
> Some of the mice are ordinary, but others are not: using genetic engineering techniques, Medzhitov’s team has removed the animals’ ability to make IgE. They can’t get allergies.
> The animals may be spared the misery of hay fever caused by the ragweed pollen that will inevitably drift into their box on currents of air. But Medzhitov predicts they will be worse off for it. Unable to fight the pollen and other allergens, they will let these toxic molecules pass into their bodies, where they will damage organs and tissues.
> “It’s never been done before, so we don’t know what the consequences will be,” says Medzhitov. But if his theory is right, the experiment will reveal the invisible shield that allergies provide us.
Agreed. It really left me wondering, "Am I hurting myself by taking all that Claritin and NasalCort and NasalCrom and all those other anti-allergy meds that have made life livable again?"
Does he elaborate on what kind of noxious chemicals, and how that explains why allergy has been on the rise in the 20th century? (I skimmed the article but couldn't find it)
chems: No. He makes the semi-funny mistake of listing "gold allergy" and nickel allergy as if they're separate. Nickel is a component of low purity gold and that's why people who are allergic to nickel are allergic to low purity gold. The gold atoms are quite blameless, they're just in a bad neighborhood. Kinda like the gluten free guy isn't allergic to 100 individual types of pasta, he's actually allergic to one specific wheat protein, that happens to be in 100 pastas and breads and beer and who knows what else.
Why: Kinda. Paraphrasing the article its a mishmash of the establishment view is it was an evolutionary adaptation that was a net gain until recent civil engineering, and now is a net loss. The mash of the mish is fairly standard inflammation and chronic exposure to a very large and complicated semi-autonomous set of analog systems combined with very close monitoring of a very large populations means all the weird system crashes where balances go haywire will be documented.
So something like eating a peanut in 1700 was OK because your fish diet was clean and the person who died from a peanut was not noticed compared to the bodies stacked like cordwood due to cholera and typhoid and the plague and lack of clean water in general and intestinal parasites and food poisoning. But in 2016 dude eats a fish diet which is contaminated by mercury from coal burning power plants and that combined with low level exposure to a zillion things simultaneously that we know are bad at high level which means his immune system is perma-inflamed into being half way to blowing up all the time, and when he eats a peanut and dies people notice because in 2016, at least in the west, civil engineering means people are not dying of plagues all the time, so it gets documented and wondered about.
Some aspects of the article are not controversial. Consider the accepted establishment theory of epoxy, urethane, or polyester monomer sensitization. The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system (like physics, or the entire immune system vs the entire planetary industrial era environment) and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications.
> "The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system, and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications."
Not in much detail - and it seems like an obvious objection to the hypothesis: if we grant that exposure to environmental toxins could cause cellular damage that would lead to an immune (over)response, why wouldn't everyone drinking the same tainted water / eating the same pesticide-laden crops / etc. be developing allergies at once?
I humbly request "ph0rque as a Service" for all longform articles on the Internet. I read through 60% of this thing and couldn't fully put together what it was about.
You flatter me! I humbly suggest a learning algorithm might be a better summarizing service. I've noticed some bots on reddit trying to summarize articles.
> In the industrialized world, where such infections are rare, this system reacts in an exaggerated fashion to harmless targets, making us miserable in the process.
> Allergies are not simply a biological blunder. Instead, they’re an essential defense against noxious chemicals–a defence that has served our ancestors for tens of millions of years and continues to do so today.
It sounds like they're still a blunder of some sort though, I somehow doubt that people allergic to tree pollen in the spring would actually be harmed if they lost their allergic reaction. I mean, we actually have that, in the form of allergy shots/sublinguals that make people lose that reaction, and those people are fine.
There seems to be other theories similar to this, saying that our immune systems are subjected to too few pathogens in general, not just worms - due to the cleanliness of 'modern' life.
There might even be some correlation to increased rates of allergy in countries that raised the living standard and less allergies among farmers (supposedly because they roll around in pigs shit? The reasoning is a bit unclear.)
But I can't shake the feeling that there is something wrong with that theory. If you disregard large cities, 150 years ago, most people met very few people. Travelling was complicated and slow. Diseases was spreading of course, but decidedly in a slower pace than today - in most parts of the world.
I'm fairly sure that an average person 150 years ago came in contact with less people in a year than I pass by on my daily commute. Heck, the building I work in has 3500 people in it, my kids go to three different schools with a couple of hundred other kids in each and their parents most likely works in other large workplaces, and I eat at restaurants that serves hundreds of meals every day.
Is it not possible that an average person today are subjected to many -more- strains and variants of pathogens than ever. Maybe it is the increased load of _different_ pathogens that stresses the immune system?
I mean, even if I moved in into the pigsty for good, it's just me and the pig there... The only way to catch a new disease would be from birds and rats, or a random mutation.
I think the "It's a blunder" view is simplistic, but so is, "It's wonderfully adaptive!" I think like the sensation of pain, or itch, it can be both. When it's working well, in moderation, and your environment is stable, you're going to be ok. If one of those elements goes awry, then bang.
Being slightly allergic to something noxious makes sense, but being violently, potentially fatally allergic to a foodstuff? No...
Reminds me how if you ask someone why something is and they lack the knowledge to know why, they'll still try to give an answer based on what they do know.
Not sure is this article mentioned it, but from another one
"As for why allergies are seemingly on the rise, this work does nothing to dispel or support the so-called hygiene hypothesis, which links allergies to modern hyperclean environments. With the advent of clean water and childhoods devoid of consuming much dirt (and the millions of bacteria and viruses that come with them) the immune system does not receive the early training it needs to function correctly, the hypothesis says. A healthy exposure to those invaders leads the body to invest more in type 1 responses, including strong microbe defense, rather than type 2 reactions such as allergies."
This part wasn't totally clear, but I think he's actually proposing that we're now launching allergic responses to harmful chemicals present in our Westernized indoor environments (wayyy down the article). If that's what he indeed means, then it goes against the hyperclean theory.
Parasitic worms, and their modulation of the immune system (and the possible faulty human over-compensation for this) are one of a few different theories that are put forward. I thought I would link it here because it's fairly informative.
I do not have any allergies, i was born in summer and was on fresh air a lot. I have friends that were born in summer also but they were in house mostly and those that were born in winter and they both have allergies. Lately i have read scientific paper about statistically bigger amount of people with allergies that didn't born in summer. So make your kid touch the mud and ground, make it breath the air as much as he can while he is little. It's all about environment and contact with it.. IF the kid is under "parents bubble" when he is young it's not healthy for it.
You're probably being downvoted (I did upvote by mistake...) because the theory that being born in summer helps with allergies smells like BS.
One thing I agree with, though, with no other data point than my experience, is that being in contact with allergens at a young age helps, or conversely that kids raised in sterile environments are more prone to allergies and have a weaker immune system.
I'm born in winter, my siblings as well, we were raised in the country, had dogs/cats, didn't live in a very clean house and haven't found anything we're allergic to and get very rarely sick.
I can see why you might say it "smells like BS", but it's not entirely implausible. The parent referred to 2 elements: summertime birth, and "playing in the mud", both contrasted to being confined to indoor environment.
"Born in summer" implies greater exposure to sunlight (in northerly latitudes) vs. winter birth. Sunlight induces vitamin D formation in the skin. Vitamin D is implicated in normal immune system development so low D levels in infancy could conceivably be a factor in later development of allergies, etc.
"Playing in mud" suggests contact with organisms present in the natural environment. Deprivation of this exposure has been discussed (here on HN a few days ago) as the "old friends hypothesis".
Basically the idea is that through evolution our immune system "outsourced" certain functions to co-evolving microorganisms. When contact with these "friends" is lacking our immune systems are compromised and abnormal hypersensitivities develop.
I believe the hypothesis is that age may very well play an important factor in the development of the immune system. What your body learns in the first 3-4 months of your life is not equal to what it learns during the next 6... It's moved on to other things.
That's actually how the brain works. Once you form a habit, for example, you follow the developed pattern (now moved outside of the conscious level) without thinking about it much anymore. It's how people learn how to walk, talk, and basically do everything else they once learned in life with relative ease... It's the brain's method of freeing up resources for other, new things.
It doesn't sound all that implausible to me that certain other mechanisms of the body might perform in a very similar way.
From my scanning of the article my understanding is that we all have it. The difference is our magnitude of response. One made animals with no allergic reaction whatsoever and predicted that these would suffer other problems over time.
We all have this defensive mechanism, however, when it misfires (triggers in a situation where the response isn't necessary) then we call it an allergy.
There is always the possibility that some of our ancestors spent thousands of years so far north that they didn't have significant pollen & pollinating insects, or fruits, vegetables, legumes and the kinds of irritating things most other cultures evolved in harmony with during recent millennia.
Always did seem normal to be irritated by irritants, with some people more irritated than others by different things.
Seems like each person can only handle a certain amount of total irritants before they experience discomfort.
I remember intentionally overcoming an allergy to cats. Researchers have since indicated that the suspected irritant is the cat's saliva rather than just the hair itself. Regardless, it was not unexpected to become more sensitive to less-often-encountered things completely unrelated to animal hair or saliva as a tradeoff after reducing the feline sensitivity.
I grew up in Eastern Europe (born in the early 80s). In my cohort hay fever allergies are extremely rare and food ones are unheard of.
In the recent generations there are definitely more of them. EE was notoriously lax with pollution and industrial waste. So I think that toxins are not to be blamed.
The sterility hypothesis seems like a better explanation.
That would depend on the kind of toxins, not just "toxins". Also, nothing works in isolation: Maybe living in the East (I'm from the East too) had other - mitigating - advantages. Whet we are looking at is what to an account would be just the final "net income" number - but behind 10 cents there can be a multibillion dollar business or a teenager who spent most of his/her pocket money. So I don't think it can be decided so easily. Do you think the people thinking about this are not aware of global statistics and did not consider simple explanations?
I don't know about food allergies, but for hay fever I think the allergies were there before - people weren't educated enough to recognize the symptoms. My father (born in 1948) got fed with anti-biotics for the first 40 years of his life until one day he was lucky enough that a new local physician arrived who had allergy problems himself and changed the therapy.
I was born in 1977, and also remember all the anti-biotics injections I got as a child until they finally tested me for allergies at the age of 12.
I'd say the majority of medical doctors in this area got aware on allergies in early 90's.
This article is a very good example of the genre of science reporting I find very uninteresting and even boring.
The way the writer builds up to the punch line by weaving in his own life and by overemphasiaing the trope of the 'maverick scientist challenging group think' is so contrived that it probably wrote itself.
Maybe I am different that I want to read science articles to learn new things and not to be entertained. The writer proves how hard it is to do both.
Let me counter: I found the article very readable, engaging and informative. There's a lot of context in there that the top-rated summary above misses (who the researcher is, and what he's worked on, how allergy theories have changed over the years...) It would have helped to have an abstract, but that's not a failure of the article itself.
Ok, I scanned through quickly, but here is the conclusions as far as I can tell.
Allergies has an important function. The problem is the severity of it. A weak allergic reaction is what protects us from toxins, viruses etc, however for some reason the system goes in overdrive in some people and that is not good.
It might seem like there is no significant difference between this an previous understanding. But the significance as far as I can tell is that previously we thought all allergic reactions no matter how small was useless and wrong by the body. The idea was that any allergic reaction is a misfiring, while this idea suggests it isn't firing which is the problem it is the magnitude which is the problem.
But understanding the purpose of allergies could lead to dramatic changes in how they’re treated. “One implication of our view is that any attempt to completely block allergic defences would be a bad idea,” he said. Instead, allergists should be learning why a minority of people turn a protective response into a hypersensitive one. “It’s the same as with pain,” said Medzhitov. “No pain at all is deadly; normal pain is good; too much pain is bad.”
Skipping. I'm basically done reading controversial new medical theories and things that "a new study suggests."
I'm not a researcher. Wait until the finding has been confirmed in lots of studies and is Boring Standard Medical Knowledge, then tell me. Until then, it's just going to give me the illusion of knowledge.
There's so much "MAYBE eating kelp will reduce your risk of LUPUS!" that we lose sight of "I should really exercise more."
That's not at all what this is. It introduces another theory and explains the thinking behind it. At no point does it state any sort of bunk, "do X to fix Y."
As someone who has literally done the treatment the article discusses, I think your prescription is best. I used to read all the cutting-edge research but now I try to mostly ignore headlines and research.
This would explain contact alleries to for example nickel and various chemicals, which are usually quite harmful, but I don't see how this would explain pollen and animal allergies. A lot of the pollens that cause allergy in some people are coming from harmless plants. And with pollen spreading in the wind, it would be an annoyance without necessarily protecting people much against coming in contact with the plants. Would avoiding contact with certain animals be beneficial? Other than avoiding pathogens, I don't see a lot of reasons to do so.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if allergy, like many things in biology, are caused by multiple factors instead of just one.
If I'm understanding correctly, the overall hypothesis is that the allergy response is triggered by exposure to other toxins at low levels that prime the immune system to respond to the toxin, but the priming is inaccurate; the histamine-generating machinery does a quick-and-dirty approximation of the chemical that triggered the cellular damage, and while rounding up whatever industrial monomer irritated your nasal passages, it also snags the molecular tags of surrounding pollen and other common chemicals.
As a side-effect, the system gets primed against the actual threat but also primed against benign foreign chemicals as well. The change in the ecosystem that has caused this defense mechanism to become a hindrance is the introduction of novel chemicals to our daily lives that trip low levels of immuno-response (or increase in chronic exposure to those chemicals due to a general shift to indoor living, where the chemicals just sit in the environment and bathe us in them), providing the opportunity for the immune system to sensitize to frequenltly-contacted benign chemicals.
Here's another example of science publication/publisher's drag on science (the paper that changed his life cost several months of his stipend):
"As Medzhitov searched for papers on this subject, he came across references to a 1989 essay written by Charles Janeway, an immunologist at Yale, titled “Approaching the Asymptote? Evolution and revolution in immunology.” Medzhitov was intrigued and used several months’ of his stipend to buy a reprint of the paper. It was worth the wait, because the paper exposed him to Janeway’s theories, and those theories would change his life."
Perhaps someone here is more versed in the field and can help me understand something...
It seems like the "parasite" theory is a more specific example of the "fast reaction to toxins" theory being presented. Are there bigger differences that I'm not understanding, or is the resistance to the idea just that the new theory is overgeneralizing?
I found out about my daughters egg allergy while traveling abroad.
I have my own suspicion that it was the result of her having antibiotics when she was a baby. A blocked tear duct was causing an infection in her eye. Her pediatrician prescribed antibiotics.
When we eventually were able to get an appointment with an eye specialist, she recommended just wiping the eye out with mild soap.
I have seen a few articles posted on HN that talked about the lack of gut bacteria ( killed by antibiotics ) as the reason why children develop allergies.
I've read other ones about the lack of breastfeeding at a young age; that might actually also be related to the development of gut bacteria. Now I wonder if breast milk is sterile or not (or contains spores); pretty sure formula milk is / should be.
As a counterpoint, I've had a lot of antibiotics early in life. The kind that caused tooth damage (most of my dental fillings are form that). Not as young, though.
I had asthma triggered by dust, very frequently. We had an inhaler at home plus asthma medications. My brother and sister had the same issue, but they had no antibiotics prior to their symptoms.
As adults, we have no known allergies.
Your antibiotics are probably unrelated. Also, if the gut was severely affected by the antibiotics prescribed for the eye condition, you should have seen major gastrointestinal problems. Did you?
The view of hypersensitive allergic reactions as a hypersensitive home alarm system is very similar to the view in Chinese traditional medicine. In CT medicine, to fundamentally treat constitutions of such hypersensitive conditions, the treatment is more focus on long-term tuning / taming immune system, rather than just blocking the allergic defenses.
This isn't controversial at this point, it's becoming the consensus, and it isn't news. But it gives me a chance to say: if you have real "allergy" problems but test negative for histamine/IgE allergies, say on a skin test; look into MCAS. Fair warning, your allergist may very well never have heard of it - doctors are rarely paid to read.
Mastocytosis is exceedingly rare - an article in NEJM (one of the authoritative medical journals) estimates that 1 in 100,000 people have been diagnosed with the disease.
If your primary care physician has 2,000 patients (not unreasonable), s/he could reasonably expect to never encounter the disorder outside of a textbook.
Just as in programming, doctors avoid the 'premature optimization' - no need to test for a rare disorder until considerably more common ones, like allergies, are ruled out.
This also spends more time discussing what only appears in the last few paragraphs above the "*" in the OP, regarding Westernization efects and what I think are the more controversial aspects.
I would argue that ingesting something that's super toxic is not a better solution, and is part of the reason why naturopathic remedies are not a good idea to self-appy.
"The juice of freshly macerated unripe hulls of the black walnut (Juglans nigra) has been used for many years in folk medicine as a treatment for localized, topical fungal infections such as ringworm."
"Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans Houtt.) is the seed kernel of inside the fruit. It has been studied to having number of ethnopharmacological properties. Essential oils are secondary metabolites which originated from different parts of plants and made up of volatile compounds. In the present study, the essential oil extracted from nutmeg was investigated for its in vitro cytotoxicity on Vero cell line (normal cell line) and anti-parasitic activity against Toxoplasma gondii parasite. Nutmeg essential oil showed very low cytotoxic activity against Vero cells with IC 50 value of 24.83µg/mL. In the in vitro anti-T.gondii assay, the oil extract showed significant inhibiting activity with EC 50 value of 24.45µg/mL. This result was comparable to the standard drug clindamycin (EC 50 =16.57µg/mL.). Based on the promising results, nutmeg essential oil may be further studied for its mechanism of action against T.gondii and to isolate the bioactive compound(s) to treat toxoplasmosis."
It has been stated that kids who grow up in and around forested natural areas have better immune systems and are generally healthier for having grown up closer to the natural earth, as opposed to growing up in an asphalt jungle.
Take poison oak for example. I have a relative whos drinking water flows through these plants and he is now immune to it. I brought a friend to his house (never been exposed) and after sitting on his couch, within 24 hours I had to take them to the hospital over the poison oak which had spread to the majority of their body. They were given a shot and we left shortly after that.
Me? I've had allergies from a young age and actually had treatments for it. I remember laying on my stomache while the doctor pricked my back a bunch of times. I'll still sneeze around a bunch of pollen but not enough to prevent me from doing the work.
In short, I do not think there is a fixall, take a pill solution and that there are many many factors to consider when treating someone for an allergy, or anything else for that matter. My grandma was hospitalized from inhaling bat dung, and my father also after eating some peanuts. Both could probably be treated to be less allergic but, this would require a lengthy treatment plan which is not a normal solution.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] thread"Why do we get allergies? No one has a firm answer, but what is arguably the leading theory suggests that allergies are a misfiring of a defense against parasitic worms. In the industrialized world, where such infections are rare, this system reacts in an exaggerated fashion to harmless targets, making us miserable in the process.
Medzhitov thinks that’s wrong. Allergies are not simply a biological blunder. Instead, they’re an essential defense against noxious chemicals–a defence that has served our ancestors for tens of millions of years and continues to do so today."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid
It's really about news vs. human interest pieces, and many outlets (like the NY Times) feature both. Seems possible to me that American outlets produce more of these, but it'd be hard to disentangle this from the general dominance of American outlets on the English-speaking internet, such that non-American pieces are more likely to be directly local and, so, news rather than human interest.
What could effectively solve this is if HN attached a short abstract to each article, written and updated by user submission. (The initial version could/should be provided by the submitter.) Maybe minimal GitHub-like version control with pull requests accepted by vote. This could be useful not just to save time, but also to keep article quality higher, if submitters are required to justify the intellectual value of the submission. The abstract would be more valuable than normal comments, so accepted modifications could get extra karma.
This would have similarities to summaries on slashdot (which are written by moderators and so not very scalable) and the "submission statement" required in certain subreddits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introdu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_poli...
Long-form science writing isn't inferior to news briefs or press release-style articles you're looking for; it can be a very effective method for engaging a reader and introducing them to a topic which they don't have detailed knowledge on (or which they just want to read about).
"People will read 3 words to decide if the topic is interesting. If they think it's worth their time, you have thirty words to hook them. If they take the hook, you can probably get them to read 300 words unless they have a focused interest in the topic."
It is, unfortunately, tied to much evil online (the quick-list ad blog ecosystem is basically application of 3-30-300 writ large), but useful for creating general-consumption articles.
About two decades ago I got a huge case of almost-asthma pollen allergy out of nowhere, almost overnight. I got the usual treatment (desensitization + meds) and it got somewhat better over the years. Simultaneously I developed other allergies though, for example, suddenly I was very allergic to cats (I had had cats earlier, so that was new).
A few years ago I was diagnosed with a case of chronic heavy-metal poisoning.
Now, many treatments with DMPS (the main chelator for mercury) and DMSA later, I have completely lost all allergies (and a long list of other "strange" problems, including a real medical miracle that left the endocrinologist repeating "I'm amazed" over and over after checking his ultrasound results twice, after asking me to lie down again because he did not trust his results).
End of anecdote.
------------------------------
EDIT: As someone who has taken hundreds of hours of anatomy, physiology, org. chem, statistics (focus on public health and use in medicine), neuroscience, I am aware that there is not "one path that explains all". There are soooooo many pathways, and different things can affect different parts leading to similar results. So I am NOT saying "this is the one and only way to get an allergy". In fact it is highly unlikely that there is only one possible cause. So if you have found an anecdote that seems to show that something else helped and/or caused it than "heavy metals" that's just fine and normal - and has nothing to do with my anecdote. You can get a flesh wound not just by cutting yourself with a kitchen knife, there are endless possibilities.
I'm glad you are feeling better.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308
Is it more of a reddit than HN of the time?
Had eaten barely anything for a week, so I did lose a ton of weight I suppose. The psychological damage on the other hand was the worst part. I avoided touching other people and was convinced parasitic eggs were everywhere on door handles etc.
Fun side note: the A&E was so over capacity and understaffed (Ireland) I had to awkwardly ask for the IV drip to be removed because it had finished and my blood was tracking back up the tube.... I was 17 and my parents weren't allowed in with me :(
Also, I don't think it's so clearcut that I have allergies because I'm missing 50 hookworm so much as because my immune system developed without a broad range of 'germs' and 'parasites' and other natural cofactors. As a treatment option for quality-of-life, though, it's pretty sound.
Helminthic therapy is pretty analogous to supplementing probiotics, and directly analogous to supplementing the subtype of probiotics known as soil-based organisms.
http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ProductsandMedicalProcedur...
Generally inert in place and it has to be inhaled to be absorbed. However, drilling/removal/chipping can release absorbable particles.
Edit: Also note -- because they are inert in place so advice from the FDA is to leave them be as long as the fillings are in good condition and there is no decay beneath the filling. In other words -- don't panic and take an ice pick to your perfectly good fillings.
Some of the advice is crazy, or spooky. Women under 50 should eat less than one can of tuna per month according to my state DNR. I work with a low carb person who eats a can of tuna per day every day for lunch. Their blood mercury level must be off the charts. Like they could use the veins in their arm as a mercury thermometer or something.
Can you share how you were exposed to apparently toxic levels of heavy-metals?
I still attribute this to something else was in her system that triggered reaction in conjunction with the peanut proteins.
Every time I mention this people kind of look at me funny when I offer my co-trigger explanation as "some kind of bug", but I was reading Dawkins at the time and had come to stop thinking about unitary causes for phenotypic expressions.
Of course, that's not the easiest course of conversation to travel down with most people, so I just sort of accept the silence that follows. It does give me the fun little anecdote of how my daughter was deathly allergic to peanuts for a year, but then she got better.
The classic example is H. Pylori in stomach problems. I doubt that it's a lone outlier.
When I was 17 I started wearing contact lenses - and after that no more hay fever. I thought at first the contact lenses were blocking the pollen from getting into my eyes, but I've now reverted back to almost always wearing glasses. 10 years later and no more hay fever. Go figure...
(See also the recent discussions around lead including in Flint, Michigan)
I know from experience that taking steroids reduces the immune system response, so there is something to that.
Of note some of modern human allergies come from infant avoidance. Kids who eat peanuts younger are less likely to get peanut allergies for example. If you want to decrease allergies, let your infants get dirty, play with dogs, and liberalize their diet.
I'm Gen X (1979), grew up playing in dirt, house filled with dogs and cats. Ate a fair amount of things, apart from the things I was allergic too: apples mostly. Most of the food I ate was home cooked. My sisters do not have allergies.
It has since gone on to get much, much worse. I can no longer eat carrots or parsnips (which were my favourite). I'm now very allergic to dogs and cats and it wasn't because of a lack of exposure.
40 allergies.
Fuck me...
On the other hand, after puberty and a serious illness in my late teens that basically rebooted my immune system, I haven't had any issues with allergies ever since.
Note that the same treatment can be given via drops, a much less expensive option (but still considered off label use in the US). I haven't tried them (yet) but it seems like the research performed so far shows them to be just as effective (I'd guess also just as ineffective if the shots don't work for you).
To me surprising part is that immunotherapy is 100 years old treatment and we did not come up with anything better after a century of rapid advancements in science. Currently in US there are estimated 20 million people suffering from dust mite allergies alone and more than 50 million Americans suffer from allergies overall. Allergies are the 6th leading cause of chronic illness in the U.S. with an annual cost in excess of $18 billion.
One of new approaches for treatment of airborne allergies is what this company is doing http://www.circassia.com. They are working on new kind of therapy, which is trying to "teach" your immune system to not identify certain harmless airborne allergens (dust mites, grass, ragweed,...) as harmful. Treatment consists of 4 injection during a year period. They are in trial phase right now (I am not related to them).
http://www.circassia.com/pipeline/product/cat-allergy/
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/mercury.ht...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dental_woo
A 24-hour urine collection might detect chronic heavy metals poisoning. Hair tests might also work, though I don't know what a "standard" hair test looks for, specifically. I also don't know if detecting poisonous elements comes with no additional effort added to those "standard" tests. If it costs extra, it usually doesn't get done.
Of course, even if someone came into a doctor's office complaining of all the typical symptoms of heavy metals poisoning, the doc still might not have an inkling unless the patient has some kind of occupational exposure to it.
If you don't mind, I wonder if you could explain how the heavy metal poisoning occurred ? Genuinely interested.
Then again, I clearly got this from my mother who is in some ways worse (stays indoors during ragweed season, which doesn't bother me at all), my problems largely disappeared when I moved to the Boston area (different climate and allergens), returned when I moved to the D.C. area (very roughly the same as Joplin). But I'll think about this, I've never had a test for lead....
> Some of the mice are ordinary, but others are not: using genetic engineering techniques, Medzhitov’s team has removed the animals’ ability to make IgE. They can’t get allergies.
> The animals may be spared the misery of hay fever caused by the ragweed pollen that will inevitably drift into their box on currents of air. But Medzhitov predicts they will be worse off for it. Unable to fight the pollen and other allergens, they will let these toxic molecules pass into their bodies, where they will damage organs and tissues.
> “It’s never been done before, so we don’t know what the consequences will be,” says Medzhitov. But if his theory is right, the experiment will reveal the invisible shield that allergies provide us.
Why: Kinda. Paraphrasing the article its a mishmash of the establishment view is it was an evolutionary adaptation that was a net gain until recent civil engineering, and now is a net loss. The mash of the mish is fairly standard inflammation and chronic exposure to a very large and complicated semi-autonomous set of analog systems combined with very close monitoring of a very large populations means all the weird system crashes where balances go haywire will be documented.
So something like eating a peanut in 1700 was OK because your fish diet was clean and the person who died from a peanut was not noticed compared to the bodies stacked like cordwood due to cholera and typhoid and the plague and lack of clean water in general and intestinal parasites and food poisoning. But in 2016 dude eats a fish diet which is contaminated by mercury from coal burning power plants and that combined with low level exposure to a zillion things simultaneously that we know are bad at high level which means his immune system is perma-inflamed into being half way to blowing up all the time, and when he eats a peanut and dies people notice because in 2016, at least in the west, civil engineering means people are not dying of plagues all the time, so it gets documented and wondered about.
Some aspects of the article are not controversial. Consider the accepted establishment theory of epoxy, urethane, or polyester monomer sensitization. The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system (like physics, or the entire immune system vs the entire planetary industrial era environment) and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications.
I think I'd like to get that framed!
Are you talking about the TSA?
It sounds like they're still a blunder of some sort though, I somehow doubt that people allergic to tree pollen in the spring would actually be harmed if they lost their allergic reaction. I mean, we actually have that, in the form of allergy shots/sublinguals that make people lose that reaction, and those people are fine.
Maybe there's more to the story, but it's not a matter-of-fact simple defense against peanuts.
There might even be some correlation to increased rates of allergy in countries that raised the living standard and less allergies among farmers (supposedly because they roll around in pigs shit? The reasoning is a bit unclear.)
But I can't shake the feeling that there is something wrong with that theory. If you disregard large cities, 150 years ago, most people met very few people. Travelling was complicated and slow. Diseases was spreading of course, but decidedly in a slower pace than today - in most parts of the world.
I'm fairly sure that an average person 150 years ago came in contact with less people in a year than I pass by on my daily commute. Heck, the building I work in has 3500 people in it, my kids go to three different schools with a couple of hundred other kids in each and their parents most likely works in other large workplaces, and I eat at restaurants that serves hundreds of meals every day.
Is it not possible that an average person today are subjected to many -more- strains and variants of pathogens than ever. Maybe it is the increased load of _different_ pathogens that stresses the immune system?
I mean, even if I moved in into the pigsty for good, it's just me and the pig there... The only way to catch a new disease would be from birds and rats, or a random mutation.
Being slightly allergic to something noxious makes sense, but being violently, potentially fatally allergic to a foodstuff? No...
We may never know why people have allergies.
"As for why allergies are seemingly on the rise, this work does nothing to dispel or support the so-called hygiene hypothesis, which links allergies to modern hyperclean environments. With the advent of clean water and childhoods devoid of consuming much dirt (and the millions of bacteria and viruses that come with them) the immune system does not receive the early training it needs to function correctly, the hypothesis says. A healthy exposure to those invaders leads the body to invest more in type 1 responses, including strong microbe defense, rather than type 2 reactions such as allergies."
http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/the-allergy-fix
Parasitic worms, and their modulation of the immune system (and the possible faulty human over-compensation for this) are one of a few different theories that are put forward. I thought I would link it here because it's fairly informative.
Link: https://theconversation.com/your-season-of-birth-is-stamped-...
One thing I agree with, though, with no other data point than my experience, is that being in contact with allergens at a young age helps, or conversely that kids raised in sterile environments are more prone to allergies and have a weaker immune system.
I'm born in winter, my siblings as well, we were raised in the country, had dogs/cats, didn't live in a very clean house and haven't found anything we're allergic to and get very rarely sick.
But yeah, N=1
"Born in summer" implies greater exposure to sunlight (in northerly latitudes) vs. winter birth. Sunlight induces vitamin D formation in the skin. Vitamin D is implicated in normal immune system development so low D levels in infancy could conceivably be a factor in later development of allergies, etc.
"Playing in mud" suggests contact with organisms present in the natural environment. Deprivation of this exposure has been discussed (here on HN a few days ago) as the "old friends hypothesis".
Basically the idea is that through evolution our immune system "outsourced" certain functions to co-evolving microorganisms. When contact with these "friends" is lacking our immune systems are compromised and abnormal hypersensitivities develop.
That's actually how the brain works. Once you form a habit, for example, you follow the developed pattern (now moved outside of the conscious level) without thinking about it much anymore. It's how people learn how to walk, talk, and basically do everything else they once learned in life with relative ease... It's the brain's method of freeing up resources for other, new things.
It doesn't sound all that implausible to me that certain other mechanisms of the body might perform in a very similar way.
Always did seem normal to be irritated by irritants, with some people more irritated than others by different things.
Seems like each person can only handle a certain amount of total irritants before they experience discomfort.
I remember intentionally overcoming an allergy to cats. Researchers have since indicated that the suspected irritant is the cat's saliva rather than just the hair itself. Regardless, it was not unexpected to become more sensitive to less-often-encountered things completely unrelated to animal hair or saliva as a tradeoff after reducing the feline sensitivity.
In the recent generations there are definitely more of them. EE was notoriously lax with pollution and industrial waste. So I think that toxins are not to be blamed.
The sterility hypothesis seems like a better explanation.
I was born in 1977, and also remember all the anti-biotics injections I got as a child until they finally tested me for allergies at the age of 12.
I'd say the majority of medical doctors in this area got aware on allergies in early 90's.
Maybe I am different that I want to read science articles to learn new things and not to be entertained. The writer proves how hard it is to do both.
Allergies has an important function. The problem is the severity of it. A weak allergic reaction is what protects us from toxins, viruses etc, however for some reason the system goes in overdrive in some people and that is not good.
It might seem like there is no significant difference between this an previous understanding. But the significance as far as I can tell is that previously we thought all allergic reactions no matter how small was useless and wrong by the body. The idea was that any allergic reaction is a misfiring, while this idea suggests it isn't firing which is the problem it is the magnitude which is the problem.
I'm not a researcher. Wait until the finding has been confirmed in lots of studies and is Boring Standard Medical Knowledge, then tell me. Until then, it's just going to give me the illusion of knowledge.
There's so much "MAYBE eating kelp will reduce your risk of LUPUS!" that we lose sight of "I should really exercise more."
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if allergy, like many things in biology, are caused by multiple factors instead of just one.
As a side-effect, the system gets primed against the actual threat but also primed against benign foreign chemicals as well. The change in the ecosystem that has caused this defense mechanism to become a hindrance is the introduction of novel chemicals to our daily lives that trip low levels of immuno-response (or increase in chronic exposure to those chemicals due to a general shift to indoor living, where the chemicals just sit in the environment and bathe us in them), providing the opportunity for the immune system to sensitize to frequenltly-contacted benign chemicals.
Holy crap, really? I looked it up and yeah, it's true. I had no idea sepsis killed that many people.
"As Medzhitov searched for papers on this subject, he came across references to a 1989 essay written by Charles Janeway, an immunologist at Yale, titled “Approaching the Asymptote? Evolution and revolution in immunology.” Medzhitov was intrigued and used several months’ of his stipend to buy a reprint of the paper. It was worth the wait, because the paper exposed him to Janeway’s theories, and those theories would change his life."
It seems like the "parasite" theory is a more specific example of the "fast reaction to toxins" theory being presented. Are there bigger differences that I'm not understanding, or is the resistance to the idea just that the new theory is overgeneralizing?
I have my own suspicion that it was the result of her having antibiotics when she was a baby. A blocked tear duct was causing an infection in her eye. Her pediatrician prescribed antibiotics.
When we eventually were able to get an appointment with an eye specialist, she recommended just wiping the eye out with mild soap.
I have seen a few articles posted on HN that talked about the lack of gut bacteria ( killed by antibiotics ) as the reason why children develop allergies.
As a counterpoint, I've had a lot of antibiotics early in life. The kind that caused tooth damage (most of my dental fillings are form that). Not as young, though.
I had asthma triggered by dust, very frequently. We had an inhaler at home plus asthma medications. My brother and sister had the same issue, but they had no antibiotics prior to their symptoms.
As adults, we have no known allergies.
Your antibiotics are probably unrelated. Also, if the gut was severely affected by the antibiotics prescribed for the eye condition, you should have seen major gastrointestinal problems. Did you?
MCAS = Mast Cell Activation Syndrome MCAD (Mast Cell Activation Disorder) = MCAS or mastocytosis
Great links here: http://strengthflexibilityhealtheds.com/2016/02/04/diagnosin...
http://www.mastattack.org/2014/10/mcad-general-information-p...
http://evilmastcells.com/
http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(14)02927-3/full...
Dr. Anne Maitland’s presentation on Allergies & Mast Cell Activation Syndrome in EDS Patients. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktFdr-9rpIM&feature=youtu.be
https://mastcellblog.wordpress.com/mastcellguide/
If your primary care physician has 2,000 patients (not unreasonable), s/he could reasonably expect to never encounter the disorder outside of a textbook.
Just as in programming, doctors avoid the 'premature optimization' - no need to test for a rare disorder until considerably more common ones, like allergies, are ruled out.
This also spends more time discussing what only appears in the last few paragraphs above the "*" in the OP, regarding Westernization efects and what I think are the more controversial aspects.
Wormwood/nutmeg/Black Walnut. Nasty stuff.
Its good as a last resort if the conventional stuff does not kill the parasites
This is what happened to me.
"The juice of freshly macerated unripe hulls of the black walnut (Juglans nigra) has been used for many years in folk medicine as a treatment for localized, topical fungal infections such as ringworm."
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ptr.2650040104/ab...
"Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans Houtt.) is the seed kernel of inside the fruit. It has been studied to having number of ethnopharmacological properties. Essential oils are secondary metabolites which originated from different parts of plants and made up of volatile compounds. In the present study, the essential oil extracted from nutmeg was investigated for its in vitro cytotoxicity on Vero cell line (normal cell line) and anti-parasitic activity against Toxoplasma gondii parasite. Nutmeg essential oil showed very low cytotoxic activity against Vero cells with IC 50 value of 24.83µg/mL. In the in vitro anti-T.gondii assay, the oil extract showed significant inhibiting activity with EC 50 value of 24.45µg/mL. This result was comparable to the standard drug clindamycin (EC 50 =16.57µg/mL.). Based on the promising results, nutmeg essential oil may be further studied for its mechanism of action against T.gondii and to isolate the bioactive compound(s) to treat toxoplasmosis."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236031031_Anti-Para...
--
I found these within 5 minutes of googling.
Take poison oak for example. I have a relative whos drinking water flows through these plants and he is now immune to it. I brought a friend to his house (never been exposed) and after sitting on his couch, within 24 hours I had to take them to the hospital over the poison oak which had spread to the majority of their body. They were given a shot and we left shortly after that.
Me? I've had allergies from a young age and actually had treatments for it. I remember laying on my stomache while the doctor pricked my back a bunch of times. I'll still sneeze around a bunch of pollen but not enough to prevent me from doing the work.
In short, I do not think there is a fixall, take a pill solution and that there are many many factors to consider when treating someone for an allergy, or anything else for that matter. My grandma was hospitalized from inhaling bat dung, and my father also after eating some peanuts. Both could probably be treated to be less allergic but, this would require a lengthy treatment plan which is not a normal solution.