All diseases* that I know of hurt you somehow. Are there any that give you benefits? I would guess that there are some that cause some slight changes that some might describe as beneficial, but I’m sure that they are only slight. I’m really looking for conditions that don’t make you sick or injure you, but only leave you with positive side-effects-- what these might be, I’m not sure. It seems sort of unfair, but I suppose understandable, that contagions always worsen your condition. Anyone know of anything?
“Disease” is a word that is usually defined as a condition that causes damage, but I’m using it to mean a condition that is either ‘caught’ somehow, developed, or transferred from person to person.
Most vaccinations are designed to create a mild response by the immune system that builds immunity. So by that criterion, a vaccination can be a mild form of the disease.
And while I can’t provide a cite, sickle-cell anemia is supposed to provide some defense against malaria. It’s not contagious, but it is genetic.
This may not be exactly what you mean, but children who get chicken pox at at early age gain immunity and are generally spared getting it later in life when it could be more dangerous.
Also, I think that getting the sickle-cell gene from one parent gives the malaria advantage, but getting it from both parents causes anemia, which is a serious thing.
Possible closer to what you are looking for is the growth of benign bacteria in an infants gut after birth. They are contagious, but benign, more or less.
I remember an ancedote about a case of syphilis ( from one of Oliver Sack’s books IIRC ). A prostitute contracted the disease and was treated with sulfa drugs ( before penicillin ). However, this suppressed the disease without curing it. Many, many years later, it flared up again, and started to damage her brain. She realized what was happening but avoided treatment for some time because she thought the resulting personality changes were an improvement. She had always been inhibited, and the disease destroyed those inhibitions. She only sought treatment when it started to go to far.
In more general terms - we are covered and filled with harmless and/or beneficial organisms. Even the harmless ones are useful, because they compete with space with more dangerous organisms, and therefore protect you.
Also, there’s a theory I came across recently. It says that germ theory and modern sanitation have not actually eliminated disease, but transformed it. In a primitive, ignorant society, the most successful diseases are those which spread the fastest. In a more modern society, such disease are typically stopped fast; we simply don’t let them spread. More subtle, less harmful diseases can spread more easily, and outcompete the nastier versions. If you don’t even notice it, you won’t try to avoid spreading it or go to a doctor.
I heard or read once that cerebral palsy (I think) protects against bubonic plague. Something about the two conditions affecting cell walls in exactly the opposite way. One condition does its harm by greatly reducing a body cell’s abiltity to perform osmosis - move fluids through the cell wall, and that counteracts the other, which makes cell walls too porous and causes them to collapse.
If I remember correctly, this information was part of an explanation for why cerebral palsy (or whichever condition they said, if I’m not remembering correctly) was more common in certain European countries than in other places in the world. The people carrying the CP genes or suffering from the condition survived the plague and were thus able to continue passing on the genes that cause the condition.
This scenario was borrowed for an episode of House – a middle-aged woman became a sex machine due to long dormant syphilis affecting her brain. The happy ending was that the treatment killed the spirochetes, but left her brain damage intact.
Bingo. That’s the real winner here. There are countless organisms that we contract and become a part of pour normal microflora that have massive beficial effects in primining our immune systems, preventing disease, aiding digestion and so forth. These are truly beneficial infections. Even in industrialised humans life would be very diffcicult without them but amongst most animals life would be brief and painful without such ‘infections’.
The problem with the question is that we divide infections into ‘normal’ and ‘disease’ infections dependent on whether they do more harm or good. As a result by default we can never have a beneficial disease. However by the standard used by the OP there are countless ‘diseases’ that are transferred, usually from mother to child, that are all but essential for survival.
I think you may have the diseases confused. Cystic fibrosis carriers are though to have some protection against cholera, and Tach-Sachs carriers protection against tuberculosis. But these are genetic conditions, so they are not what the OP is asking about.
I have heard anecdotes of people contracting roundworms and having their allergies go away; some doctors theorize that the immune system evolved to be constantly fighting against parasites, and in the absence of them, will turn on harmles substances for lack of anything else to do.
Much the same thing can happen with epilepsy. People who developed epilepsy in adulthood, especially of the types that don’t cause full-blown seizures but instead offer up hallucinations without the usual psychotic thinking patterns, often described incredible religious experiences which they wouldn’t trade for the world.
I don’t know if you’d call synaesthesia a disease, but I’m sure its effects are more beneficial than harmful. Many well-known writers and composers were synaesthetic.
There’s some evidence that allergy and asthma are on the increase because immune systems don’t have as much real infectious disease to work on. The idea IIRC is that the immune system is going to work at least somewhat hard even if it doesn’t have an appropriate target. So minor infectious diseases prevent it from more damaging misbehavior.
Lots of propensities cause different problems at different ends of the spectrum. If your blood clots too easily, you don’t bleed to death, but you get strokes and heart attacks. If you have too much appetite, you don’t starve during the first small famine, but you die of overweight. If you are too active, you get more goods for yourself and your offspring, but you are liklier to have a heart attack.
I think you mean cystic fibrosis - that is a genetic disease that affects the body’s cell’s ability to secrete. Diseases that “turn on” the secretory mechansims - such as cholora are supposed to affect cystic fibrosis carriers to a lesser extent.
Cerebral palsy is a problem with a portion of the brain and doesn’t have much to do with fluid balance.
Along those same lines- doctors are treating people with Krohn’s disease with parasites (pig roundworms to be exact). It is supposed to “focus” the body’s immune response so that it doesn’t damage the normal intestine.
Didn’t they have a “fever therapy” for a while where to kill your syphilis they gave you a dangerously high fever? I recall reading some article about it some time ago - it really did work, but of course it was dangerous and so when better therapies came along it went out of style.