Are our immune systems out of practice?
dw.com
dw.com
Eat more dirt. Lick more doorknobs.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/42/eaba2578
At this point, your average (pre-Covid) developed world immune system was already like a home-schooled kid suddenly being thrown into a cocktail party.
The correct advice is to grow up in a farm or a wooded area. Eat everything as soon as you can. Visit Africa as a child and get a worm or two in you.
You're not going to get river blindness from licking a door knob.
I downvoted you because this is an idiotic statement.
You argued that homeschooled children would essentially fail when exposed to a fairly normal social situation. As someone who was homeschooled from pre-k until I went to college and whose social circle 20 years later still includes a huge number of people who were homeschooled I can say that this stereotype doesn't really hold true in my experience. Most homeschooled children get plenty of opportunities to socialize with peers. I certainly knew of a few homeschooled kids who were socially awkward, but I also knew plenty of kids who attended traditional school who were similarly inclined. Two decades after I graduated I can say conclusively that professional outcomes of the homeschooled kids look as good or better than the non-homeschooled children I know.
As to your initial point regarding immune systems, I find that to be a fairly simplistic view as well. While children today may not be exposed to some things as much as they used to, the amount of travel and food transportation likely results in a much more diverse amount of viral and bacterial exposure than a few generations ago. We have some anecdotal evidence (although with lots of confounding factors) that people in countries with a higher percentage of children having grown up around agriculture have suffered worse than rich world countries.
No. I said home-schooled kids would be less proficient at navigating a cocktail party vs their other-schooled peers.
> likely results in a much more diverse amount of viral and bacterial exposure than a few generations ago
Here's a recent study on modern urban microbiome diversity: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00585-7 . Summary, it's complicated.
> We have some anecdotal evidence (although with lots of confounding factors) that people in countries with a higher percentage of children having grown up around agriculture have suffered worse than rich world countries
Do you have a source?
I already do.
I have to self-administer subcutaneous immunoglobulin twice per week due to having a rare immune mediated disease affecting my peripheral nervous system. Subcutaneous inmunoglobulin is a blood product, which is administered under the skin, which contains antibodies from tens of thousands of paid donors, as required by law for the each batch.
I have not gotten a cold in about 5 years because of it. It also helps me recover from illnesses (for example food poisoning this year) quicker.
However, the antibodies being infused does not train my immune system to produce them (applies to everyone) as the memory effect from the administration does not exist.
I suppose the fact that you aren't getting immune cells makes it so any self-reaction wouldn't grow and spread via adaptive immune amplification / proliferation and become a new autoimmune disorder. So at least there's that.
Either way, you are given prescriptions for acetaminophen/paracetamol and Benedryl. I don’t take them at all, nor am I required to.
I also have to keep an Epi-Pen on hand while infusing, but this is a rare side effect and especially so for subcutaneous.
At first, I had mild rashes, but now as my body has gotten used to it, it’s meager lumps from the infusions which disperse over a couple of days.
But, I really have no side effects from the infusions whatsoever.
Roughly 25-50% based on the strain. Hardly “waste of time” territory.
There seems to be some evidence that regular exercise (5ish days per week) reduces the impact of upper respiratory infections (I.e. the common cold) by about that amount, but much less evidence that influenza is similarly affected or affected at all.
So for now, if you are choosing between the flu shot and exercise to reduce influenza, the choice is clear. Of course exercise is awesome for other reasons, just maybe not as awesome as a vaccine for influenza.
I think it will be years, and it will take hundreds of thousands of person/years of research to really assess what we did wrong and what we did right in the pandemic. And it is best to be this way, as any conclusions we come to now are going to be probably contaminated with politics.
I have no faith in major world powers to not use this as a continued power grab and cynical boost to their voting base.
Turns out if you personally avoid people and crowds (social distancing) and if indoor places are closed there's fewer situations to get any virus.
Unless the virus comes on Amazon packages or through the air in the back yard.
Kids have been massively more sheltered too. Either by parents or because schools were literally closed.
It's a good thing that we are reopening the society by Autumn, so we can have a nice wave of colds, flu and COVID by people that didn't catch anything in 1 year. (As in, I worry a bit about what Autumn will bring).
Bubble boy meets bubble society.
For the record, there was nothing special about those after-lockdown-colds compared to regular colds.
Based on my own experience and that of other parents I know, I would say that we've sheltered our kids, but as soon as school was back on it was game over.
LOL
It'll be a while before we know the impact in a data-driven rather than anecdote-driven fashion.
I'm sure a qualified actuary will be able to take this data along with models of expected outcomes and give you (well not you, but an insurance company) a fairly good idea of the consequences in terms of lives lost over the next 5 years or so.
A qualified actuary will likely admit to uncertainty on something unprecedented like the first pandemic in the modern era.
Not sure you need much data when countries like Canada were canceling all elective surgeries during their Covid waves.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-ontario-hosp...
This happened in most countries that were hit hard. We’re talking going from a packed schedule of preventative screenings and elective surgeries to zero.
The backlog will take years to clear.
Even if you know nothing about medicine, just from the fact that the COVID vaccines need booster shots you should be able to induce that the immune system in fact has a time component to it, and therefor any timeframe has an impact on it's ability. With a little more knowledge on the topic you can see that a single year of basically blocking everyhing off from your immune system makes it less powerful. The flu season will be devastating, and the long term effects of blocking kids from training their immune systems will be even worse.
How far the immune system is actually depressed from the lockdowns etc., we will find out. Could also be the other way around, i.e. overreaction. What I have not observed since things are getting back to normal in my part of Europe is that everyone gets a cold etc. as soon as they meet more people.
All that changed is that we've outsourced that direct dependence with indirect dependencies, like supermarkets.
Which would be completely ok, except you never explained how your position has changed nor what it is you are now arguing against.
(To me this is the same observation as that many people first experience schizophrenia at the stage when they are most likely going off to school, the school environment is a change and not obviously more defective for our mental health, those who have crisis might have unhealthy family relationships before hand, etc, etc.)
The amount of people that committed suicide due to depression induced by isolation is several orders of magnitude less.
It’s sad and scary that we still have to have this conversations in well educated forums like HN one and a half years in this pandemic.
> The immune system is 'not a muscle.' All this begs the question: Will kids have more severe infections after the COVID-19 pandemic if their immune systems missed out "training" during winter lockdowns? Carsten Watzl, the secretary general of the German Society for Immunology, says we may see more infections, but not necessarily more severe ones.
TL;DR: Eating dirt won't work out your immune system because it doesn't work like that
Obviously getting more sick isn’t going to make your immune system stronger, but just getting sick is going to make it learn how to make antibodies for specific illnesses.
Side note, even early exposure may not help. I got it twice and the second was rough. It also carries a higher risk of shingles later in life and could impact the nervous system. Please consider vaccinating your kids against chickenpox.
> TL;DR: Eating dirt won't work out your immune system because it doesn't work like that
This isn't a good analogy at all.
The viruses can survive just fine without us.