I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly good observer of people and I also enjoy interacting with and talking to them about their problems, life, etc. It seems like more and more people that I speak with either know someone or are personally afflicted with the different diseases or disorders that are believed to be tied to the hygiene hypothesis. Obviously anecdotal but the scientific studies I have read seem to back me up that there are vastly increasing rates of Allergies, asthma, autoimmune disorders, inflammatory skin disorders, autism etc.
In places like the United States and in Europe the rates are booming while not affecting the third with nearly the same tenacity. The Hygiene Hypothesis seems to me the theory that makes the most sense as to why these things are happening although obviously its probably multi-factorial. I included Autism because although it is a spectrum disorder with different environmental and genetic causes from what I have read 25% of cases are Maternal Auto-Antibody Related in which mothers that have these autoimmune disorders have antibodies that attack the developing fetal brain.
So is there an end in sight an we will all die in sterile bubbles because of our cleanliness or will things only get so bad and inevitably nature will adapt without necessary action or intervention on the part of humanity?
OP, you could start by providing citations and evidence for your claims. You make a variety of tall, fairly vague claims and I’m not sure what to think of any of them because you cite nothing.
The relationship between the immune system and development has produced a lot of exciting work in the past few years. Be careful not to get caught up in the excitement. When something is a “hot topic” in research, it becomes the hypothesis that explains everything. Only a subset of the claims will stand the test of time and replication. Most of those that survive will be radically altered by the data from further studies.
So no, not worried about a pandemic. Especially since a pandemic refers to infectious disease.
I include this in the above warning. Maybe you should separate out this autism stuff into a separate debate for people to have. What you posted is highly speculative and threatens to derail the debate you wish to have.
Well Inbred Mm domesticus it is a fact that the rates of these diseases/disorders are in fact on the rise I could provide a cite if you really need me to but I’m sure you could at least agree with that.
Pandemic can be used as an adjective to describe something that is widespread or universal, I agree that technically I used it incorrectly, very pedantic of you but hey we are supposed to be fighting ignorance.
I apologize for my lazy posting and not providing cites to anything I am talking about.
Usually I’m the one who brings up the Hygiene Hypothesis in a thread in order to point out how it might explain various things. Now I’m going to downplay it. You assume that we can create an environment for people that will be vastly more antiseptic than the one we live in now (in first-world countries) and that this will happen so quickly that we won’t notice that certain disorders are increasing so fast that they will kill off huge numbers of people.
Several things are unlikely in this scenario. It’s unlikely that we will create an environment that’s that much more antiseptic than the one that average first-world people live in now. Far too many people in that environment spend time interacting with nature. People visit national parks. They roll around on lawns with pets. They work on farms. The sort of environment for most people that’s completely separate from the rest of the organic world is impossible or at least so far in the future as to not be worth thinking about.
Since we already have begun thinking about the Hygiene Hypothesis, the chance that we would continue to work toward such a completely sterile world even as the amount of diseases that you list increases that horredously fast seems improbable. We would simply quit making the environment more sterile before that happened. We would notice what was happening.
Furthermore, it’s hard to see how we could ever create such a sterile environment. It would take far more energy and material than we can extract from the planet to sustain that environment for the current world population. We could kill off virtually all the world’s population and rebuild civilization with a much tinier population, I suppose. Do you really think humanity would kill off nearly everyone in some manner, build a completly antiseptic world, and then fall victim to a Hygiene-Hypothesis-type apocalypse?
Perhaps though the damage is already significantly done. I’m not saying we were going to keep getting progressively cleaner from today’s standards but if these rates of various disorders/conditions are rising already and getting higher every year it suggests to me that we may just be getting started and that the rates may keep climbing for quite some time. The cleanliness of our current environment is radically different than the one that man evolved in and doesn’t only involve the lack of different bacteria and viruses but also parasites that people are no longer exposed to that could actually play a role in the development of our immune system.
Ok I was making use of hyperbole, I don’t really see this as the apocalypse but I think the numbers of Auto-immune related disorders and the like could in fact reach high enough to create a crisis.
If the human environment (at least within the first world) doesn’t get any more sterile, then there’s no reason to expect that the effects of the Hygiene Hypothesis will get worse. What we will have is a world like we have now, one in which people will get more things apparently caused by the cleanliness we have now than they did, say, a century ago, but we shouldn’t expect that it will get worse. If the Hygiene Hypothesis is correct, a given amount of cleanliness means a given amount of allergies, etc. There’s no reason think that today’s amount of cleanliness will cause a never-ending explosion in allergies, etc. that will quickly kill everyone off. If it did start killing people off (instead of inconveniencing them, which is what it does now), we could start making the world dirtier.
There are many variations on the hygeine hypothesis. The initial suspected mechanism focused on balances of different sorts of white blood cells called T-cells, now more roll in the increasingly less diverse groups of bacteria in our guts and on our skins and the place of those bacteria in controlling inflamation (and both metabolism and appetite as well).
That said there is no particular reason to believe that there would be any sort of linear relationship between the either decrease in exposure to germs or the lack of microbiome diversity and various illnesses. Biological systems tend not to behave in such linear fashions.
I don’t think this is true. A population’s response to a specific environmental stressor hinges on that population’s genetics and other environmental factors/stressors (like nutrition or the kinds of allergens that we have access to). We may hit a upper limit on how “clean” we can be, but those other things are always changing.
The environment can have effects that cascade through multiple generations. If a person isn’t exposed to a critical allergen during a critical period for a critical duration, is it possible that not only will this person have a certain health profile, but their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren will too? We don’t know, but it is a possibility. Which means it’s possible that long after we hit “maximum cleaniness”, we could still see an explosion of diseases/disorders that can be blamed (at least in part) on that cleaniness.
Or, alternatively it is equally possible that the amount of dysfunction from decreased exposure is maxxed out.
By the way, I do not believe that there is any evidence that humans are exposed to many fewer bacteria (or other germs except perhaps the parasites including worms). Culture that keyboard you are sitting and and you will grow lots. Our attempts at “home cleanliness” do not create anything close to a sterile environment; they create less diverse ones that still have sizable populations. The issue is more that we are exposed to and harbor a much less diverse population.
Even germ-free mice have increased rates of allergic and autoimmune diseases but not infinitely more. It is not linearly increased.
More on the concept that it isn’t whether or not we are exposed to germs but whether or not we have the right sorts of germs.
Some bacteria may protect from disease … even just one sort of bacteria by itself. And then again another single sort can, by itself, be the trigger of disease.
This very much ties into our other antibiotic thread … systemic overuse of antibiotics, in the food industry and in medicine (correlated with a decrease in infectious diseases), not only selects for resistant organisms, it results in a less diverse bacterial human microbiome and immediate human environment, with significant consequences. We still get exposed to “dirt”, just not the right sort of dirt.