Darwinian medicine and the ‘hygiene’ or ‘old friends’ hypothesis | Hacker News Reader

Darwinian medicine and the ‘hygiene’ or ‘old friends’ hypothesis

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

55 pointsslicktux8 comments

Dear Websites: Don't fuck with scroll.

If you're going to do it (and there's a case to be made for page-flipping mode, I made it on HN earlier today), do so loudly, clearly, and with a fallback mode.

Yes, book-style pages are useful. However they're not the convention for HTML navigation.

And users may visit with any of multiple mixes of devices, controls, and/or viewports.

I'm on a mobile device that looks a lot like a desktop in landscape mode but has a keyboard but no mouse or trackpad or trackpoint, nor does it have pageup/pagedown keys.

And it can rapidly convert to a portrait-mode display.

My first impression was that Firefox/Android had frozen its ass as it's wont to do. It took some futzing to realise this was intentional behavior of the site in question.

It's not terribly obvious, but you can change the behavior. Click the "Alt" button at the top, then the "Classic" view.

EDIT: Whoa, my message was missing a word. The not. Sorry about that, that completely changed the tone of it.

NB, I assumed the missing word when I read that. But yes. (Missing) A word can (not) make a difference ;-)

The "old friends" hypothesis is a very interesting point of view regarding the epidemiology of immune system disorders. Of particular importance is the evidence that major depressive disorder falls into this category.

The impact of this is huge. IIRC MDD is the 3rd leading cause of disability world wide. MDD costs the American economy >$200 billion/year according to recent studies.

Quite fascinating to me that the quest of developed nations for hyper-sanitation may well be a cause of rising levels of disability. When I was a kid my mother didn't seem to object when I was "playing in the dirt". Maybe she was on to something, I sure don't have the allergies so many of my contemporaries complain about.

IMO this article is a really excellent review of "old friends", at least it made quite an impression on me when I read it at the time of publication:

Raison CL, Lowry CA, Rook GA Inflammation, sanitation, and consternation: loss of contact with coevolved, tolerogenic microorganisms and the pathophysiology and treatment of major depression. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21135322

I played in a lot of dirt as a kid. LOTS. I have a ton of allergies. I wasn't breast fed, however. I was born in a time when our society thought formula was better for babies than what evolution produced.

My son, who never played in the dirt (that's a problem with high-density cities) and was breast fed, has a ton of allergies.

So probably the allergies have are unrelated to playing in the dirt or breast feeding?

I wonder if it's more related to extensive antibiotic use, both in people and the livestock we eat. I played in the dirt a lot, pretty sure I was at least partially breast fed, but have always had a ton of allergies (as well as asthma) since I was a kid.

I also used to get at least once-yearly (if not more often) sinus, throat, and ear infections, and also received repeated antibiotics for UTIs (that turned out to not actually be infections at all, but muscle spasms related to fibromyalgia). I got scarlet fever when as I was four, and got yearly strep throat until I was well out of college.

As an adult my allergies now include amoxicillin (and penicillin and keflex), which was given to me repeatedly in childhood.

Carlin's take on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnmMNdiCz_s

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