The article suggests ways to prevent colds from spreading, and those strategies are sound. However, I hold the view that one should not try to prevent the spread of flu viruses. In fact, regarding sicknesses that tend to just annoy, it is best to spread them so that others may hone their bodily defenses. Your body has cells that are specially engineered to combat previously experienced threats, and giving them work is important for adaptation.
In Cecil’s article, “Why did so many Native Americans die of European diseases but not vice versa?” the theory I hold is touched upon,
In fact exposure to disease, in the long run, improves our chances of surviving those diseases. We have to play ball with them anyway, right? I personally do not ever take sick days from work, school, or leisure unless the disease itself actually prevents me from doing so.
While it might be helpful to spread “annoyance” germs around so that people with normally functioning immune systems can take a whiff of the germs, so to speak, and build immunities, your plan would needlessly endanger people with compromised immune systems, such as those on chemotherapy for cancer, or that are HIV positive.
OTOH, there’s been a grassroots movement for a few decades to hold “measles parties” or “pox parties” for kids. It seems odd, but they’re especially popular in Germany, where there’s a cultural distrust of immunizations.
How it works is when one kid in the neighborhood picks up something like measles, chicken pox or mumps, you round up all of the neighborhood kids and keep them in close contact so they all get the disease at an early age. Sound horrible at first glance until you realize how dangerous and devastating some “childhood” diseases can be to adults.
There’s a difference between the cold and the flu. I recently read that vaccinating the young against the flu actually decreases the elderly mortality rate, as it helps prevent the disease spreading so widely.
An individual may improve his or her immune system in respose to a mild or weaker infection, and be better protected thereafter. (A full-scale infection would also improve resistance for the future, but it’s not advantageous in the short term, as you’ll actually have the disease, so the question of whether or not you get benefit only applies to potential future reinfection, not this time).
Historically more important to the question of European resistance, a population may gain resistance by natural selection – its less resistant individuals die off, and the survivors propagate. Since they’ve never been exposed, young children suffer this winnowing process most dramatically. In and of itself, this selection process does nothing at all for either the surviviors or the dead – the dead are dead, of course, but the survivors in this case are resistant purely as a matter of their random genetic mutation. They were already resistant when the disease hit, or they’d be dead now. This selection process did nothing to strengthen their systems. The statistical resistance of the survivng population is better, but individuals are no better off as a result of this second form of resistance except for any immune system response they might have (the entirely separate effect discussed in the previous paragraph).
So spreading pathogens will indeed make the overall population statistically more resistant. A good thing. The cost, inevitably, is a higher proportion of death and misery among the littlest children. That may not be what you want to accomplish.
Of course, I haven’t discussed the Hygiene_hypothesis, which may have some bearing on your point.
