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Comment by knome | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it fairly probable that nobody remembers folks with as many deadly or serious reactions simply because kids just died of them?

Like the WWI "helmets cause more head injuries" kind of thing, where it's true head injuries go up, but that's because without the helmet they would all have simply been fatal shots.

What are the odds we're just keeping more kids with more problems alive better than previous generations did, and so the rates of these problems are going up as the kids aren't dying off before they hit five?

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Allergy rates are significantly higher in urban areas compared to rural areas.

That wouldn't be compatible with your suggested explanation, unless you think rural kids are currently dying of allergies at a disproportionately higher rate -- which I don't think there's any evidence for.

We moved from downtown in a city to an hour from the nearest store, in the middle of a 20,000 acre expanse of national forest. My life long allergies disappeared inside of a year

I moved from Los Angeles to downtown Dallas and my lifelong early summer hay fever disappeared. Sometimes, the specific plants that bother you just don't grow everywhere.

It can take ~3 years for you to sensitive and become allergic to new locations' allegens. This is what my doctor others around me have said.

Why do you think that is related to antibiotic use in infancy? Are urban kids more likely to receive medical treatment as infants? Seemingly, bad air and water quality and exposure to industrial contaminants explains some of why urban people would have poorer autoimmune health than rural. Asthma especially has very straightforwardly tracked automobile emissions.

We do know that kids used to die a lot more, so that is quite possible. But also, it is even more likely that combination of factors is in play - that allergies rates are influenced by environment and also that kids with allergies are diagnozed now.

This also makes me reluctant to get too mad at antibiotics. If you're taking them needlessly, fine, but given I caught pneumonia and missed four months of school in kindergarten, I think I'd have probably died if I'd been born before their invention. I guess this was luckily well after the age at which it seems likely to have any meaningful lifetime impact as postulated in this article.

And for what it's worth, my wife did have an infection as an infant. Whether this is causally related is seemingly impossible to know, but she did end up with all kinds of allergies. Eczema, gluten, allergies to most antibiotics. But she is also hard of hearing because of that infection. Without treatment, she'd be at best completely deaf, and at worst it spreads to her brain and kills her in her crib. While a lifetime with allergies isn't great, it's better than no lifetime at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

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