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Comment by worldvoyageur | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on a farm. It was common knowledge that when a calf, or a lamb was born they needed to get that first milk from their mom. The first milk looked different and was called colostrum. Colostrum contained a large assortment of antibodies from the mother that were transmitted to the newborn. If there was some health issue, the mother died or the newborn couldn't drink, we had colostrum in the freezer. If we didn't give it, the odds dropped dramatically of the newborn making it more than a few months.

So, yes, mammals, including people, get immunities to germs they have not been exposed to.

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This reminded me of neonatal lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disease where your own antibodies attacks your tissues. In neonatal lupus, the newborn is born with lupus ... because materal autoimmune antibodies are able to cross the placental barrier. So the newborn 'inherits' a lupus condition, which usually self resolves within a month once the maternal antibodies have disappeared. https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/neonatal-lupus/

This is presumably applicable to other maternal antibodies, which may give immunity against germs the infant has never been exposed to. However, this is a 'temporary' immunity, and distinct from the adaptive immune responses associated with 'immune system memory'.

Exactly. They typically give pregnant women a Tdap booster in the 2nd trimester. The mother develops an immune response and she transmits those antibodies to the baby. When the baby is born, they have some temporary protection against those diseases, but as you said, it only last a month or two.

My understanding was that breast milk (at least in humans) gave the baby antibodies, but not the ability to create those antibodies. So, the effect wouldn't last.

But still I would imagine that such antibodies would be exponentially more valuable in the earliest moments of life, where it’s likely that the newborn fist comes into contact with the mother’s fecal material and all of the bacteria living on our skin.

Those are (mostly) good bacteria though.

Some theorize the baby needs the mother's poop, to start it's own digestive microbiome. It works that way in other species, but I don't know if it's more than speculation for humans.

You also need a skin microbiome, but you can get that later.

I have heard reasoning that c-section babies could benefit from having some given to them.

That’s correct - one of the proposed treatments for coronavirus is synthetically generated antibodies for seriously ill patients; it won’t teach the immune system as you said but reduces viral load.

This is what I believe to be the case too - so-called "passive immunity" gained by just having their mother's antibodies from either breastfeeding or even earlier via the placenta (at least for humans - as I understand it not all mammals do it via the placenta?). Eventually I think this protection wears off, but can be topped up with further breastfeeding, or eventually the baby starts to generate their own antibodies

Humans produce colostrum early after birth as well. There's a practice of saving it if the mother produces enough milk in case the newborn later has an illness and could use the antibody boost.

Those are IgA and IgG antibodies that are being transmitted from mother to child. They're effective for a period of time until the child's immune system develops but do not confer lifelong immunity as the child's immune system creates no memory from it.

There might be other forms of immunity conferred as well. Antibodies provide immediate immunity even before the younglings immune system gets up and running. There's definitely some sharing of immune cells in the womb, who's to tell what else happens there with a long-term plan?

Anything might be true, but as far as what's probable, I'm not following your logic.

Colostrum also happens in humans. It's different from a regular milk

Um yes. Was surprised to see colostrum discussed in the context of cows and not just humans in general. Every parent should be aware of this fact.

The antibodies in colostrum don't make the animal or human immune in the usual sense of the word - the body is able to generate an immune response to a foreign substance.

It's more similar to therapeutic use of antibodies. Once the colostrum is gone, so is any protection against infection.

Thanks for sharing this, that got me reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colostrum

and the article from 1961

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1359530/?page=1

which quotes "first noted by Ehrlich in 1892" and "examined in detail by Howe in 1921."

Similar is true of human births: natural vs C-section.

https://health.howstuffworks.com/pregnancy-and-parenting/pre...

https://sciencenordic.com/birth-c-section-children/giant-stu...

Also, if we want to be pedantic about it: way more than half the cells that make up a fertilized zygote are from our mother. Those cells are a living part of her body until the zygote is fertilized. The particular egg might not be fully formed at disease exposure, but it's part of her body just like any other cell.

Apparently, the science backs this up. This paper shows that the mortality of calves decreases if they get colostrum. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26995131

Has anyone tried pooling the first milk from different cow moms?

So it is even more frustrating, that mothers were encuraged for a long time, to not breast feed at all and rather use the artifical, sterile milk, because it is healthier. Fortunately the world moved largely beyond that.

How on earth could millions of years of evolution possibly compete with Nestle et al "science"? Did I only say millions? I meant: hundreds of millions, silly me.

Perhaps evolution needs a better advertising budget.

That's like saying we'll never build a device that moves faster than we can run because evolution produced perfect locomotion for us. Or that we'll never be able to communicate further than we can yell, because evolution produced strong lungs for us.

There are plenty of cases where evolution failed. Allergies for instance... our own immune system reacting quite imperfectly to a harmless substance. That doesn't sound like pinnacle of evolution perfection to me.

There is a time that science wins and a time that natural things win. What if science added those antibodies to the formula? What about people who are unable to breast feed.

When you're thinking that science won sometimes it's nothing else but a sponsored think-tank and a big marketing campaign that made you think so. Just saying.

Sometimes. But planes being faster transportation than peak evolution (even among other species, not just humans) is not just "think tank".

Blanket declaring evolution as the victor all the time because it has had hundreds of millions of years head start is clearly not always true.

You may find the hygiene hypothesis interesting - the theory that the incredibly sharp rise in allergic diseases in developed countries is due to no longer being exposed to the types of bacteria that we had during most of evolution.

One example is that allergy rates in Finnish Karelia are much higher than right across the border with Russia, even though the populations and environment are otherwise very similar.

Allergies are a good example, because as far as I know, they exist mostly in our civilized society and from what I remember, mainly those suffer from it: who were not (enough) breast feeded and were kept in a sterile area as a kid and not in the mud outside.

But in general, yes, we can and could improve with technology on many things. But mostly only things we understand. A car is a very, very simple thing, compared to our bodies, our digestion system, immune system, cell growth ... And our bodies need very complex "material" to grow, as adults not so much, as babies. And mother milk is optimized and can dynamically change to adopt to the need of the baby. It was blind arrogance and yes, profit thinking, to assume a simple formula is better.

I fully agree. My point just being that declaring evolution the victor because "of course, it has had more time" is clearly not always the case.

But even aside from allergies, there are plenty of examples of doing things better than evolution. "I just leave ticks on my body, because hundreds of millions of years of evolution means my body will know how to get rid of them better than I could."

I found, that my body probably has deep instincts to feel, find them and remove them, without even thinking about it.

(there are lots of ticks in my area and I spend increasingly time outside, as a child I was mostly saveguarded from them)

(meaning I scratch myself without thinking or noticing and suddenly have a tick in my hand)

Trains and telecommunications are auxiliary; you walk to the train station and you talk into your phone. For breastfeeding it would be akin to using technology to aid the process, e.g. breast pump, refrigeration.

Allergies are likely an example of our ever evolving physical world, within a few generations the developed world has gone from days spent toiling in the fields to the sterile existence of modern cities, moving from one air filtered compartment to the next.

I get your joke, and it's not advertising but lobbying by the large corporations who make baby formula a recommended thing, eg sponsor a thinktank etc, and it's always 100% profit motive. Maybe we should get them off our backs and be aware that most of their products may be worse for us. And ideally change the mechanisms by which they are controlling the government. It's a tough fight because they are organized and have money and we aren't organized and our efforts need to be tenfold.

Maybe you're right in this instance, but your reasoning is fallacious.[0]

What are your feelings on vaccines, pacemakers, and appendectomies?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

I'm not sure calling me right in this instance is the best start to an authoritative refutation of my thesis.

I am not appealing to nature (please read the article you linked to) I'm appealing to evolution.

I have had my jabs, including malaria, small pox, MMR, and tetanus at least. My Dad has a pacer. The appendix is a funny one because recent research indicates that it might simply act as somewhere for bacteria to accumulate ie a sort of biome generator or refresher, rather than simply being a hangover from something else. Given the way evolution "works" it seems to me that there was an additional useful function that the vestigial appendix carries on doing that means we still have them.

Evolution does not use a drawing board and beautifully rendered isometric drawings and a series of briefings before getting marketing involved. If it works it stays, if it changes a bit and still works and the owner happens to procreate, it might stay. If they die too early it might not stay. Rinse/repeat. Genes (selfish or generous), structures and amalgams and who knows what else, changing and morphing, evolution is a process that should not have a name because it isn't really a process that starts from A and goes to B. It starts from A and might happen to hit L which is quite close to B, which is nice. The biggest problem is that us humans like to slap a tag or a name on things to contain them and then misuse those names rather badly. Hence we get "intelligent design". Evolution is far more fascinating and sophisticated than anything that "intelligent design" could possibly come up with, whilst being far less sophisticated than "ID" - yes I am aware that is a tautology but it seems appropriate. Funnily enough, intermediate steps in eye development have been sighted in the wild.

I'd have added cancer to your list for a proper challenge.

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