Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

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>We thought there were no serious consequences of antibiotics for a century.

That's not true. We knew there were serious consequences and that microbiome was important from before antibiotics were even a thing.

>The body also doesn't have a way of spontaneously ejecting the appendix. I would describe this as the body being happy to let it stay there.

It has a way of doing so over evolutionary timescales, which is not true for EBV.

>A few days ago there was an article where a virus was used to fight a bacterial infection [1].

That is a bacteriophage. It is a virus that does not infect human cells, but only bacteria. We've known about them for decades.

> How can you earnestly say it's impossible that any virus that makes its home in the immune system could play a role in the immune response? Proving negatives is really hard.

I don't need to prove a negative, you have the burden of proof. It's absolutely certain that has an impact on immune response, we know that, it's just that every single effect we have seen so far has been negative.

> The problem with statistical medical studies is that in general samples are non-random (as you note in another comment) and cannot easily control for any of the 1M (lower bound) confounding variables.

There aren't 1 million confounding variables as far as sampling for EBV. You could feasibly account for all remaining variance, or enough of it to know that it doesn't have a sufficient impact.

> We knew there were serious consequences ...

We had some minor inklings of the microbiome, but we were not aware of serious consequences. Unless you are accusing the all the governments and medical bodies of the world of gross malpractice.

> It has a way of doing so over evolutionary timescales, which is not true for EBV.

Do you have evidence for this claim?

> That is a bacteriophage.

Do you really think nature has drawn a bright line between viruses than can affect humans and viruses that can affect bacteria? I'm not sure this lines up with reality. People are even seriously starting to talk about the "Human Virome" [1]

> I don't need to prove a negative, you have the burden of proof.

This is what they said about tobacco causing cancer and pesticides killing bees and carbon emissions causing global warming. How did that work out? I'd prefer a more proactive scientific framework than a reactive one. Maybe we could stop the next crisis before it happens.

> There aren't 1 million confounding variables as far as sampling for EBV.

There are 1M confounding factors in sampling outcomes. Not controlling for confounding variables is a great way to get weak conclusions.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/viruses-can-help-...

> We had some minor inklings of the microbiome, but we were not aware of serious consequences. Unless you are accusing the all the governments and medical bodies of the world of gross malpractice.

That is not true. Microbiome treatments were proposed at the beginning of the 20th century.

I don't see how it would be malpractice. Pathogenic bacteria are a much worse problem than damage to microbiome in most cases. If your microbiome was damaged by evidently useless antibacterial treatments, it could be malpractice.

> Do you really think nature has drawn a bright line between viruses than can affect humans and viruses that can affect bacteria? I'm not sure this lines up with reality. People are even seriously starting to talk about the "Human Virome"

Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.

> This is what they said about tobacco causing cancer and pesticides killing bees and carbon emissions causing global warming. How did that work out? I'd prefer a more proactive scientific framework than a reactive one.

Certainly not. Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body. Insecticides killing bees (insects) is also the default position. Global warming was theorized and predicted since the late 19th century, see Arrhenius, so yes energy companies had the burden of proof.

We already have the priors of EBV causing massive damage to the human body. You're saying that we must prove the negative that it causes nothing beneficial at all. That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.

> There are 1M confounding factors in sampling outcomes. Not controlling for confounding variables is a great way to get weak conclusions.

That isn't how statistics work. You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance, and from then on you can know if you have controlled enough confounders or not. If you have 999,990 factors that alltogether account for 0.1% of variance, and 10 members that account for 99.9% of variance, you know it's enough.

> If your microbiome was damaged by evidently useless antibacterial treatments, it could be malpractice.

This is how I would describe the vast majority of applications of antibiotics. I'd like to be more charitable and say the people encouraging the use of antibiotics didn't realize the scale of the damage they were causing.

> Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.

The human virome ~is confirmed~ to be a thing, and includes bacteriophages. This bright biological line conclusively does not exist. Why would humans evolve to coexist with (or include) a large number of benign viral populations?

> Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body.

If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.

> That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.

Global warming is human-induced change. Removing EBV from the entire human population is human-induced change. The bar for causing change should be higher than leaving things as they are. A better analogy would be removing the appendix. There was no evidence this was harmful for 100 years! That doesn't mean it wasn't harmful!

> You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance

In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.

>This bright biological line conclusively does not exist.

It does. Bacteriophages cannot infect human cells. They can only do it by changing our microbiome.

>If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.

EBV causes millions of cancers, and it seems that it is likely to cause millions of cases of autoimmune diseases. It is known to cause vast amounts of harm. By the same logic. Beyond this, a large proportion of viral infections of EBV cause mono, which in and of itself is a great harm. You can't ask that every future intervention prove a negative.

> In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.

Is your theory that for some diets and lifestyles, EBV has beneficial effects? You can certainly design a study to account for this.

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