Off and on, I have heard the theory that a benefit to a child’s catching whatever sickness is going around is that the immune system is toughened by exposure to and fighting against the attacking germs.
I can see that it would be a plus to go through a one-time illness such as chicken pox in the early years, so as not to disrupt school later on or to have a much more difficult time with it as an adult, but what about, for example, the flu? You can’t catch a particular strain of the flu more than once, but flu viruses mutate so rapidly that you wouldn’t be likely to come across it more than once anyway.
So, what about it? Does getting sick early in life mean that you’ll be less likely to get sick later, thanks to your state-of-the-art immune system? Or are some people just prone to coming down with everything that goes around, from an early age on?
As the son of a physician, I caught every disease known to man. I’m told it’s amazing that I can hear because of all the ear infections alone. I attribute this to the many diseases that pigbacked home and took residence in my system. As an adult, I’d say I get sick MAYBE once a year. And when I do, it’s usually something that makes me look like an extra from the Exorcist (i.e. projectile vomitting, etc.) Normal colds don’t seem to affect me. I’ve asked other kids of doctors this question in the past, but have gotten no consistent answer (i.e. some, like me, are super-immune while others are about normal or worse.) Interestingly enough though, many of us have really freako allergies. I, for example, have really bad hay fever, and have a nearly deadly allergy to blueberries of all things!
There’s apparently some evidence that it does help development of your immune system if you’re exposed to lots of foreign proteins while you’re young. Excessive cleanliness seems to make asthma and other auto-immune disorders more likely.
This is a very interesting question. Obviously, getting a lot of colds when you’re young would lessen your susceptibility to colds when you are older (they mutate a lot, but the possibilities are not infinite; your probability of getting the particular strain going around this year would decrease with the numer of colds you’ve already been through). Over a lifetime you will acumulate immunity to the things you’ve been exposed to; the larger that set, the less you’re likely to get ill.
But does resistance to one disease in any way promote your ability to fight off other diseases? It’s certainly a testable idea, with animal models. I’ll see if I can find anything on it.
By the way, not getting sick as often as an adult than as a kid is common for most people, I think, and not just offspring of physicians.
I rarely get sick as well. I might get a cold once in a year and it rarely bothers me enough that I take anything for it (other than maybe Nyquil on the worst nights). I did have quite a few ear infections as a kid but other than that I was quite healthy then as well. Haven’t vomited in close to a decade (knock on wood) and that one was not due to illness.
I’ve often wondered myself if there might be any correlation between the rise in environmental allergies, asthma, etc. and the decline in smoking. When lots of people smoked, our bodies were constantly fighting the side effects, whether first or second-hand. As with the “Let them eat dirt” theory, perhaps this helped to keep our autoimmune systems in fighting trim. Then when smoking began its decline, and irritants like smoke and scents were phased out of the workplace, environmental sensitivities seemed to come to the fore.
Now I don’t mean to imply that smoking (or perfume, or spitting on the floor) is a good thing, but I wonder if, as so many times in the past, we have made wholesale changes in the way we live without knowing the complete consequences of our decisions. Maybe we need a few irritants in our lives to keep the immune system in tip-top working condition.
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 15 tons.
-Popular Mechanics, 1949
