[Sca-cooks] increasing allergies
Stefan li Rous
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Sat Aug 16 17:46:02 PDT 2008
I'm going to rearrange various comments so I can address them in a
logical order.
Randell Raye:
<<< At a guess, I think allergies could be increasing because we can
detect
and prepare for them. >>>
Some increase is likely due to this. The same way that a higher
percentage is dying of ailments related to old age. If people die at
younger ages before an allergy has a chance to develop, then you
don't see the illness.
<<< In the bad old days we didn't have epipens etc, If you didn't get
the
affected person to emergency for a shot they stood the risk to die.
If they die young, they are less likely to breed and pass on the
sensitive genes. >>>
No, I don't think that has had a chance to effect things. Yet. We
haven't had enough human generations for better allergy protection to
drastically affect our genetics.
Daniel:
<<< One theory that I have heard is that we live "to clean." Our
immune system
was "designed" to work at a certain level of activity. When it
doesn't find
things to fight it fights things it finds. I understand that this
theory is
based on epidemiological data and involves all sorts of allergies. >>>
Yes, this is one that I've heard and it makes a lot of sense. The
other part of this are some studies that children that grow up
exposed to animals, including pets, are less likely to be affected by
allergies. The idea being that the various foreign viruses and
organics due to the animals give the immune system to learn with and
to attack. It may well be that in our much cleaner environment that
the immune system, like many countries, has problems sitting around
primed for a war that never comes. Think of the US and the Spanish
American War. So it finds an excuse to attack what it can find.
Isabella:
<<< In our case, where there are various allergies to this and that,
no family
allergy to peanuts exists on either side, to our best knowledge.
The pediatric allergist we went to, a very good one, said essentially
they
really didn't have a clue why peanut allergies have risen so
dramatically. >>>
My suspicion is that we'll eventually find out is that *we* are
causing this problem. Not just by cleaning up the environment of the
items that might train the immune system, but by confusing it in
other ways and this might in fact be accentuated by the too-clean
environment.
We are dumping, intentionally and not, many 'new' compounds into our
environment. A while back it was DDT. Now it is probably various
pesticides but also plastics and various synthetics. While all of
these often have beneficial uses, I suspect that some have effects we
are unaware of. But worse, it isn't that the compounds are
particularly dangerous in themselves. It is that they are *close
enough* to something else that the body should get rid of. So we are
filling the environment with various triggers that set off the immune
systems.
Immune systems are probably not perfectly specific. It comes down to
a trade-off. If the immune system is too specific, either through
evolution or learning, then it is more likely to miss something that
*is* dangerous to the survival of the individual/species. If it is
too general, it spends resources attacking something it has no reason
to. This wastes resources and energy. In the worse case, the
"something" it attacks is something the organism needs such as a
pancreas. In our case we are dumping so many compounds into the
environment that evolution has had time to tweak the immune system to
be more specific in what it considers an enemy.
So it may not be peanuts that set off a peanut allergy. It may be
something else in the environment which the body has decided is bad
and some compound in peanuts is close enough to what the body got
trained to fight that it goes into hyper-drive when it sees that
compound in peanut stuff. This would explain why such allergies could
pop up without any genetic component.
<<< Respiratory allergies is a different story, I have heard those
linked to
"too clean" houses, but not necessarily peanuts. >>>
It may be that some respiratory allergies are created by the item
that later creates the problem and others are actually caused by
something totally different but which matches too well with something
perhaps more common.
I am not an immunologist or a medical person. This last one about
synthetic environmental triggers is just my own guess.
Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous Barony of Bryn Gwlad Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris Austin, Texas
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at: http://www.florilegium.org ****
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