This is yet more evidence that living in overly sterile environments isn't good for overall health. We have a bad tendency to focus on specific narrow health goals while missing the big picture.
* Much more sterile environments for fomites. We wash everything including our hands
* Much more sterile environments for water pathogens
* Much less sterile environments for respiratory viruses. We now have indoor sealed buildings that allow aerosols to build up. Ancestral humans would not have had this
It seems to me that we could plausibly use less sterility in terms of stuff we touch, but more sterility in terms of air.
Water seems fine as it is: you see some pretty bad results in places with water borne pathogens.
On what basis can you argue we evolved to have more respiratory pathogens than present, given the lack of indoor environments in the past?
We nowadays live in more sterile conditions, but we also live in a way bigger communities than ever, with significantly more population mobility - which makes us on average potentially exposed to a much wider spectrum of different germs in one's lifetime than it was a case ever before. When modern ppl get in contact with isolated tribes, although they're living whole lives in totally non-sterile conditions, it's almost always the modern people who will make them sick, not the other way around.
Sure, our germs make isolated people sick, but are we healthier because of the respiratory viruses, or are we merely germier?
OP seems to be arguing the hygiene hypothesis applies to respiratory pathogens.
You could make that argument but here it appears it's not a lasting immune response but an ephemeral one which requires an active rhinovirus infection and antigen response to be protective.
It's also not definitive and the article mentions the possibility of cytokine storms.
What this article is saying is that exposure to the cold virus at exactly the right point in time helps the immune system fight Covid. That's a small window that isn't overly helped by general exposure. You could even imagine it would be made worse - if we're all exposed to the cold all the time we've developed more immunity and this mechanism might not happen.
I'm still sceptical of any broad generalization here.
Do you have kids? They're ... pretty good at getting germs, masks/social distancing or not. When they get exposed to a pathogen is largely luck anyway.
Nobody's in a sterile environment here. These kids are touching/licking stuff, picking noses, rubbing eyes, you name it.
Our current measures are blunting the spread of germs but by no means have we managed to hit a 'sterile' environment where there is no spread.
Especially now that we’re seeing that the effect of current vaccines is waining over 6-12 months, it’s time to start thinking more widely as the first people with the vaccine are coming back into risk. Animal reservoir data suggests this choice might be forced anyway - we can’t go vaccinating all the bats.
I'm not disparaging, I'm asking if it actually grants any. Does the body actually learn to fight COVID if it's just throw up defenses for the Cold?
> I’d consider bringing my young kids to a ‘pox party’ to help get things under control, given the latest evidence.
Pox parties only worked because the parents and grandparents were already immune. Instead you're creating your own little super-spreader event that will move through whoever they come in contact with. People wouldn't have done Pox parties if they thought they were going to kill grandma with them. Also, please keep in mind that, like chicken pox, while many children will be OK, some don't, so much so that children's hospitals currently need help[1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
I'm not suggesting we do it willy nilly. This summer could have been a great opportunity to organize camps with immune adults overseeing such events.
412 people under 18 in the US died from COVID, whereas non-covid pnumonia is 924 (both in spite of measures to control respiratory viruses). It's pretty clear that the benefit of such parties on older people would outweigh the cost to the kids, especially when you factor in the exploding teen suicide rate attributable in part to the lockdowns affecting social lives.[1]
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
[1] https://fee.org/articles/cdc-reports-51-increase-in-suicide-...
Depends on the cold, I think. This rhinovirus might just be priming the immune system. There are coronavirus colds that might provide antibodies[0]
[0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/immune-...
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2021/februar...
Nobody’s disparaging natural immunity, they just rightly said “I’m not sure this helps much”.
And it really doesn’t seem to, because all this research says is “if you’re infected with a rhinovirus at the exact right moment immediately before catching COVID, there might be an immune benefit (or it might trigger a cytokine storm). Catch the rhinovirus before or after that point, and there’s no immune benefit whatsoever”
Given the extremely narrow window of opportunity, you’d have to, somehow, carry a rhinovirus with you and dose yourself just before you caught COVID. It’s wildly impractical, and I can’t imagine why or how you would think this “gets us closer to herd immunity”. What the research does not claim is “having caught a cold at any point is protective against COVID”
That isn't what this says. This research looks at one aspect of the immune response (interferons), and concludes there's a benefit to up-regulating interferon response early in SARS-CoV2 infection.
You cannot leap to the conclusion that "there's no benefit whatsoever" in other situations. The research didn't look at other questions.
More like modern recognition of a natural interactive effect between micro-organisms which might have even predated humanity itself.
>“There are hidden interactions between viruses that we don’t quite understand, and these findings are a piece of the puzzle we are just now looking at,” Foxman said.
This could be a very promising area of study and a major step toward understanding not just covid.
Maybe even things like phage therapy where certain viruses attack and kill bacteria.
Plus when you think about it Staph is a deadly bacteria which can sometimes get out-of-control, but there are variants of it too and supposedly a major percentage of the population carries it at all times without apparent ill effect.
What if that Staph is one that fights back against a virus and gives some protection against covid itself? May be far-fetched but one thing's for sure, the collection of the additional data would be nearly frictionless. Especially compared to lots of other data struggles.
You have to figure that micro-organisms have been fighting against each other for a while now, and could very well have had millions of years to refine their tactics before mammals even came along.
If for no other reason than sheer boredom.
Plus things that have survived have been at somewhat of a stalemate for at least a few millennia, penicillin was a natural bacteriotoxin that had been produced by a type of mold the whole time, just waiting to be discovered.
Maybe this is really just our human nature and hubris ultimately doing us in. We focus on trying to resolve short-term, acute situations where the cost-benefit calculations are perhaps more tangible and easier to measure and understand, but as a result we ultimately fail to properly consider the possible longer-term costs of our actions, even if those may turn out to be more damaging (by some measure) in the long term. In the pursuit of an ephemeral benefit today, the negative and possibly persistent effects of our actions get massively discounted, with the burdens of cleaning up after our actions ultimately placed on our descendants. If solving some problem today causes some problems down the road, then we seem so sure today that somebody else will manage to figure it out then, ad infinitum. The ratchet can only tighten things so far before something breaks.
As an example, I'd wager that the rise in childhood asthma/allergies is related to something that was thought to be (and maybe actually is) beneficial for children's health in the short term.
When I was a kid, there were a few people I knew of who had chronic issues with asthma and allergies but it seemed pretty unusual. Today, it seems like half the kids on my kids sport teams have inhalers or epi-pens or both.
For data, you might look at RSV trends compared to usual. (Usual is winter spike).
The best thing for your child is for them to socialise as much as possible with other kids. That means they will get sick. In normal times, 2-3% of babies end up in hospital with respiratory infections at some point. Obviously in the short run it sucks, but long run it's healthy.
How much of a bad thing is a good thing?
In order to make major new advances we'll need to go back and develop a better theoretical understanding of how all the moving pieces fit together through basic research.
Which is exactly what society did for more than a year. Even assisted living places were cut off from outside visitors. It’s cruel and inhumane.