Personally, I'd like a vaccine for the common cold, much like the annual flu shot.
Even if it doesn't cure it, but reduces symptoms and duration, I'd be happy.
Even if it doesn't cure it, but reduces symptoms and duration, I'd be happy.
What if... the common cold is like a folk tradition of viruses that do us little harm and keep our immune system on its toes, and that as such a "cure for the common cold" is the wrong thing to want?
To be clear I am no kind of biologist and I have no reason to believe this is anything other than a silly idea, but I still like it.
The common cold is a low level respiratory infection caused by a known suite of virus candidates. If we made ourselves permanently immune to those without going through the mucus and sore throat part there would be no negative consequences.
The flip side: what if... the common cold causes small amounts of permanent damage, or damage that doesn't show up until much later in life? What if all viruses are this way, and preventing infection/bad infection in the first place is an enormous net benefit?
1) Parasites
2) Generic (as opposed to human) bacteria
3) Mild, latent infections which co-evolved with humans
The problem is that most diseases like colds, flus, smallpox, measles, etc. are relatively recent in evolutionary terms. They rose with the rise of civilizations. In hunter-gatherer times, things like colds didn't exist.
I am not saying that your claim definitely is wrong, but it does sound a lot like other claims that many people believe are not valid. So my initial reaction is "extreme skepticism".
Even if these viruses didn't exist before modern civilization, how do we know that they aren't at all relevant for immune system "fitness" in modern humans?
I understand we can slip into the naturalistic fallacy easily, but at the same time I appreciate the line of reasoning as a first approximation because of how complicated the human body and nutrition is, and how messed up our public health situation is thanks to the modern diet. Even though I acknowledge this situation is attributable to processed foods and sugars, and not to whole grain consumption which I think is fine/good for most people, it is still the delta between modernity and how our bodies evolved that is the culprit.
Let's put it this way. The Paleo community is probably totally wrong about whole grains, but right about a lot of things.
And it has to be said that we do appear in fact to know with a good degree of certainty that at least one of the common cold viruses is very, very new in humans.
OC43 (a coronavirus) almost certainly arrived in humans in the 1890s (and is now thought to be what caused the deadly "Russian Flu" pandemic).
And we have another one to add now.
It has a whole chapter on the hygiene hypothesis, which parts have been debunked, which parts have weak scientific evidence, and which parts have strong scientific evidence.
I don't think I wrote anything out-of-line with mainstream science. It might be wrong -- scientific knowledge progresses, and we're still learning a lot -- but it's not "paleo diet" junk science.
The key mistake you're making is to assume the immune system benefits from some form of "fitness;" it doesn't. It's not a muscle to be exercised. Diseases harm you and getting sick is not good.
There are exceptions.
The key thing to remember is that the immune system does most of the damage to your body in most diseases; viruses and bacteria rarely kill you, since collateral damage from your immune system fighting them usually kills you first. There's a fine balance of how active the immune system ought to be. Parasites dampen your immune system. We co-evolved with parasites, and without them, your immune system is a little bit overactive (which may contribute to the massive recent rise of autoimmune diseases, allergies, etc.).
We know that modern diseases aren't helpful because at this point, we understand how they work. Modern viruses and bacteria -- which evolved with civilization -- are incredibly specific to humans. They "spoof" signals your body uses, for example to modulate the immune system's response. Historically, we'd have diseases which attacked many types of animals, and didn't do that; those were very different.
To give an analogy to defending a city, there's a difference between a broad attack and a targeted attack. Classic diseases are a bit like invaders at the city walls. Modern diseases are a little bit like spies and saboteurs.
Can you please provide links to any evidence that it's false? I'm curious.