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Comment by ph0rque | Hacker News Reader

Here's a summary if you're in a hurry:

"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."

View on HN

Well... time for anecdotal sample-of-1 "science":

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.

What is the best test and type of specialist to determine if you have metal poisoning?

I'm glad you are feeling better.

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!

Helminthic therapy. I have a friend who did it for his Krohn's with good results.

It might have been Jasper Lawrence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Lawrence), who wrote about his experience on kuro5hin. I think this is the link: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971, but the site is sadly defunct now.

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.

It was just a few weeks ago that it was posted here that Kuro5hin is dead[1]. :(

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609308

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.

What is Plastic?

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!

Look how special, important, and better you are as a result of being 10 years older than a random stranger :)

I would argue that experiencing suck.com, in it's time and element, was a very unique and valuable experience.

Older, yes, but sadly, the wisdom I expected to attend age has not yet appeared. :)

Aw, you people downvoted this? It was the perfect take-down to my damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn comment. Sorry, @josephmx. :(

I'm sure I'll live, thanks though :)

I was on Slashdot for a while, but I assume those were few years older. I also missed out on newsgroups and BBSes, poor me :)

Is it more of a reddit than HN of the time?

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.

It was covered by Radiolab: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91951-an-update-on-hookworms/

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.

Holy moly! Did you end up going back to doctors after actually finding the worms? Did they believe you then?

I'm imagining a great moment where ayooo shoves a cup of worm-laden feces into a doctor's hands.

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 :(

While we are trading anecdotes about worms and allergies, I can report that an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaris_lumbricoides infection made my allergies worse.

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.

Wow. How did you get poisioned if you don't mind me asking? And what was the miracle?

Wait, how the hell did you get heavy metal poisoning?

Possibly mercury from dental amalgum. Those "silver" fillings are approximately 50% mercury:

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.

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.

...Couldn't you just supplement omega 3 pills (fish oil or algae oil) and not eat the contaminated fish?

Fish oil can be contaminated with heavy metals too.

Good point. I'm glad I stick to algae oil.

Thank you for sharing this.

Can you share how you were exposed to apparently toxic levels of heavy-metals?

Likely too much Black Sabbath on his pandora playlist.

There's no such thing as too much Black Sabbath.

You were downvoted for this but I believe that your cause is just.

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.

Did she play a brass instrument by chance? Some mouthpieces are leaded brass. Also some players also have reaction to brass.

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 feel like there are probably similar cotriggers for many chronic illnesses.

The classic example is H. Pylori in stomach problems. I doubt that it's a lone outlier.

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...

The contact lenses cured you?

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.

The prescription drugs for some types of allergies and asthma are a form of steroids.

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.

Grow partly up on a farm. Drunk raw milk. Self made quark and Joghurt. Played with young horses and cows. Played in haystack etc etc.

40 allergies.

Fuck me...

Would heavy mental poisoning not appear in a standard blood test?

no, most standard blood tests are surprisingly limited.

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).

They're also working on a cure for cat allergies, which is currently in Phase 3 trials with results due this quarter. It's 4 treatments over 12 weeks.

http://www.circassia.com/pipeline/product/cat-allergy/

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.

Amalgam aka Mercury fillings?

These explain it quite well.

http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/mercury.ht...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dental_woo

Overblown, perhaps. However, there is not doubt that dentists and patients are exposed to some mercury vapor when inserting "silver" fillings.

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.

How did you develop heavy metal poisoning, and what clued you to it in the first place? Did you develop the sudden allergies after chemical exposure?

"A few years ago I was diagnosed with a case of chronic heavy-metal poisoning."

If you don't mind, I wonder if you could explain how the heavy metal poisoning occurred ? Genuinely interested.

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....

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.

This is journalism 101. Inverted triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

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:

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.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introdu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_poli...

After a few minutes of that article, I scrolled to the bottom and read the paragraphs in reverse order until I got to the actual point. :)

I do this too with these types of articles. So much fluff. A real problem in my opinion.

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.

This is why we'll go extinct. We don't have brains that can handle concepts that take 5 sentences to accurately summarize.

Nope, this is why we thrive.

One can thrive in the short term, but still go extinct in the long term.

Well, it's really a feature about Medzhitov when you were expecting the typical "A New study says!" type of article.

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.

It's a shame the article doesn't have the info on what happens without the allergy response, it needs a follow-up on that one.

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?"

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".

> 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.

More to the point: if a few molecules of something cause your body to asphyxiate itself, it's hard not to call that a biological blunder.

Maybe there's more to the story, but it's not a matter-of-fact simple defense against peanuts.

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 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.

Are you talking about the TSA?

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

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."

I think I'd like to get that framed!

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?

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.

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