9 ms·

Here's a summary if you're in a hurry: "Why do we get allergies? No one has a firm answer, but what is arguably the leading theory suggests that allergies are

• xufi 10y ago
  Interesting thanks. This definetly reminds me also of how your eye lashes/eyebrows are a defense against dirt and particles that have also served our ancestors for millions of years
• ams6110 10y ago
  Long articles are not bad in the right context, but when publishing online authors need to get to the point right away. They should make their main case in the opening paragraph or two, and then fill in the details. The whole opening anecdote about kicking the hornet nest was useless and should be eliminated.
  • snookca 10y ago
    Not sure why publishing online necessitates getting to the point. It's long form and follows a very common story telling format. The world has room for different ways to tell a story.
  • wmeredith 10y ago
    This is journalism 101. Inverted triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid
  • msl09 10y ago
    I want to take a moment to ask my fellow non-americans, do you also hate the american style of storytelling in news articles? It's obnoxious, useless and recently, counter productive because we are overloaded with information and need to skim quickly over many different news.
    • kristiandupont 10y ago
      ..it doesn't strike me as particularly American? I could easily see a Danish article written in this style. I don't dislike it but I do agree that the point should be at the top. Trying to build a crescendo seems to build on the assumption that your reader is fascinated by your writing already. It might be true if you have a following. Maybe this author does, I am not sure.
    • jessriedel 10y ago
      Not sure it makes sense to say this is American vs non-American. Normal American newspaper stories adhere pretty well to the inverted pyramid structure, and the wiki article even suggests it first became prominent in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid It's really about news vs. human interest pieces, and many outlets (like the NY Times) feature both. Seems possible to me that American outlets produce more of these, but it'd be hard to disentangle this from the general dominance of American outlets on the English-speaking internet, such that non-American pieces are more likely to be directly local and, so, news rather than human interest.
  • jessriedel 10y ago
    The solution to this problem is well known: an abstract. It's clear that many news outlets see their job as entertainment rather than delivery of information, and it's also clear from comment's like snookca's that some people like this. (I hate it, but to each his own.) So this is never going to be solved by complaining to the author or to your fellow readers. What could effectively solve this is if HN attached a short abstract to each article, written and updated by user submission. (The initial version could/should be provided by the submitter.) Maybe minimal GitHub-like version control with pull requests accepted by vote. This could be useful not just to save time, but also to keep article quality higher, if submitters are required to justify the intellectual value of the submission. The abstract would be more valuable than normal comments, so accepted modifications could get extra karma. This would have similarities to summaries on slashdot (which are written by moderators and so not very scalable) and the "submission statement" required in certain subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introducing_submission_statements_for_news_and/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introdu... https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_policy_for_truereddit_submission_statements/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_poli...
    • WalterSear 10y ago
      After a few minutes of that article, I scrolled to the bottom and read the paragraphs in reverse order until I got to the actual point. :)
      • alexandercrohde 10y ago
        I do this too with these types of articles. So much fluff. A real problem in my opinion.
  • mattlutze 10y ago
    The author simply used a rhetorical approach for having an extended conversation about a scientific topic with laymen. Long-form science writing isn't inferior to news briefs or press release-style articles you're looking for; it can be a very effective method for engaging a reader and introducing them to a topic which they don't have detailed knowledge on (or which they just want to read about).
  • fixermark 10y ago
    Recently learned about the 3-30-300 rule of article writing online: "People will read 3 words to decide if the topic is interesting. If they think it's worth their time, you have thirty words to hook them. If they take the hook, you can probably get them to read 300 words unless they have a focused interest in the topic." It is, unfortunately, tied to much evil online (the quick-list ad blog ecosystem is basically application of 3-30-300 writ large), but useful for creating general-consumption articles.
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      This is why we'll go extinct. We don't have brains that can handle concepts that take 5 sentences to accurately summarize.
      • dsego 10y ago
        Nope, this is why we thrive.
        • stcredzero 10y ago
          One can thrive in the short term, but still go extinct in the long term.
  • waylandsmithers 10y ago
    Well, it's really a feature about Medzhitov when you were expecting the typical "A New study says!" type of article.
• zeotroph 10y ago
  and originally (CC licensed, and attributed) with a few nice illustrations from http://mosaicscience.com/story/why-do-we-have-allergies http://mosaicscience.com/story/why-do-we-have-allergies where they even credit a `Fact checker`. And on first glance, that website seems quite good.
• LionessLover 10y ago
  Well... time for anecdotal sample-of-1 "science": About two decades ago I got a huge case of almost-asthma pollen allergy out of nowhere, almost overnight. I got the usual treatment (desensitization + meds) and it got somewhat better over the years. Simultaneously I developed other allergies though, for example, suddenly I was very allergic to cats (I had had cats earlier, so that was new). A few years ago I was diagnosed with a case of chronic heavy-metal poisoning. Now, many treatments with DMPS (the main chelator for mercury) and DMSA later, I have completely lost all allergies (and a long list of other "strange" problems, including a real medical miracle that left the endocrinologist repeating "I'm amazed" over and over after checking his ultrasound results twice, after asking me to lie down again because he did not trust his results). End of anecdote. ------------------------------ EDIT: As someone who has taken hundreds of hours of anatomy, physiology, org. chem, statistics (focus on public health and use in medicine), neuroscience, I am aware that there is not "one path that explains all". There are soooooo many pathways, and different things can affect different parts leading to similar results. So I am NOT saying "this is the one and only way to get an allergy". In fact it is highly unlikely that there is only one possible cause. So if you have found an anecdote that seems to show that something else helped and/or caused it than "heavy metals" that's just fine and normal - and has nothing to do with my anecdote. You can get a flesh wound not just by cutting yourself with a kitchen knife, there are endless possibilities.
  • cylinder 10y ago
    What is the best test and type of specialist to determine if you have metal poisoning? I'm glad you are feeling better.
  • xenophonf 10y ago
    I vaguely recall reading something on Usenet or something that would have made it onto Slashdot or Plastic in the late 90s/early 00s, where someone treated their allergies or asthma or something by deliberately infecting themselves with a parasitic worm---I forget which, maybe hookworm. They actually went to so far as to cultivate the worm in some medium that they could apply to their stomach using a custom-made patch, started pooping oocytes, and then completed the usual treatment course for whatever it was they infected themselves with. I can't recall if it cleared up the condition from which they were suffering, and obviously, this wasn't any kind of controlled trial. Lord knows that such a study would give an IRB six fits, and rightly so!
• raldi 10y ago
  Thanks. I know you didn't write the headline, but it would've been less clickbaity as, "New theory suggests allergies are caused by an essential toxin defense".
• seanalltogether 10y ago
  I found the experiment further down to explain the theory even better. > Some of the mice are ordinary, but others are not: using genetic engineering techniques, Medzhitov’s team has removed the animals’ ability to make IgE. They can’t get allergies. > The animals may be spared the misery of hay fever caused by the ragweed pollen that will inevitably drift into their box on currents of air. But Medzhitov predicts they will be worse off for it. Unable to fight the pollen and other allergens, they will let these toxic molecules pass into their bodies, where they will damage organs and tissues. > “It’s never been done before, so we don’t know what the consequences will be,” says Medzhitov. But if his theory is right, the experiment will reveal the invisible shield that allergies provide us.
  • Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    It's a shame the article doesn't have the info on what happens without the allergy response, it needs a follow-up on that one.
    • smithkl42 10y ago
      Agreed. It really left me wondering, "Am I hurting myself by taking all that Claritin and NasalCort and NasalCrom and all those other anti-allergy meds that have made life livable again?"
• Nilzor 10y ago
  Does he elaborate on what kind of noxious chemicals, and how that explains why allergy has been on the rise in the 20th century? (I skimmed the article but couldn't find it)
  • VLM 10y ago
    chems: No. He makes the semi-funny mistake of listing "gold allergy" and nickel allergy as if they're separate. Nickel is a component of low purity gold and that's why people who are allergic to nickel are allergic to low purity gold. The gold atoms are quite blameless, they're just in a bad neighborhood. Kinda like the gluten free guy isn't allergic to 100 individual types of pasta, he's actually allergic to one specific wheat protein, that happens to be in 100 pastas and breads and beer and who knows what else. Why: Kinda. Paraphrasing the article its a mishmash of the establishment view is it was an evolutionary adaptation that was a net gain until recent civil engineering, and now is a net loss. The mash of the mish is fairly standard inflammation and chronic exposure to a very large and complicated semi-autonomous set of analog systems combined with very close monitoring of a very large populations means all the weird system crashes where balances go haywire will be documented. So something like eating a peanut in 1700 was OK because your fish diet was clean and the person who died from a peanut was not noticed compared to the bodies stacked like cordwood due to cholera and typhoid and the plague and lack of clean water in general and intestinal parasites and food poisoning. But in 2016 dude eats a fish diet which is contaminated by mercury from coal burning power plants and that combined with low level exposure to a zillion things simultaneously that we know are bad at high level which means his immune system is perma-inflamed into being half way to blowing up all the time, and when he eats a peanut and dies people notice because in 2016, at least in the west, civil engineering means people are not dying of plagues all the time, so it gets documented and wondered about. Some aspects of the article are not controversial. Consider the accepted establishment theory of epoxy, urethane, or polyester monomer sensitization. The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system (like physics, or the entire immune system vs the entire planetary industrial era environment) and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications.
• Yhippa 10y ago
  I humbly request "ph0rque as a Service" for all longform articles on the Internet. I read through 60% of this thing and couldn't fully put together what it was about.
  • ph0rque 10y ago
    You flatter me! I humbly suggest a learning algorithm might be a better summarizing service. I've noticed some bots on reddit trying to summarize articles.
• sosborn 10y ago
  > In the industrialized world, where such infections are rare, this system reacts in an exaggerated fashion to harmless targets, making us miserable in the process. Are you talking about the TSA?
• TulliusCicero 10y ago
  > Allergies are not simply a biological blunder. Instead, they’re an essential defense against noxious chemicals–a defence that has served our ancestors for tens of millions of years and continues to do so today. It sounds like they're still a blunder of some sort though, I somehow doubt that people allergic to tree pollen in the spring would actually be harmed if they lost their allergic reaction. I mean, we actually have that, in the form of allergy shots/sublinguals that make people lose that reaction, and those people are fine.
  • jeffdavis 10y ago
    More to the point: if a few molecules of something cause your body to asphyxiate itself, it's hard not to call that a biological blunder. Maybe there's more to the story, but it's not a matter-of-fact simple defense against peanuts.
• kpil 10y ago
  There seems to be other theories similar to this, saying that our immune systems are subjected to too few pathogens in general, not just worms - due to the cleanliness of 'modern' life. There might even be some correlation to increased rates of allergy in countries that raised the living standard and less allergies among farmers (supposedly because they roll around in pigs shit? The reasoning is a bit unclear.) But I can't shake the feeling that there is something wrong with that theory. If you disregard large cities, 150 years ago, most people met very few people. Travelling was complicated and slow. Diseases was spreading of course, but decidedly in a slower pace than today - in most parts of the world. I'm fairly sure that an average person 150 years ago came in contact with less people in a year than I pass by on my daily commute. Heck, the building I work in has 3500 people in it, my kids go to three different schools with a couple of hundred other kids in each and their parents most likely works in other large workplaces, and I eat at restaurants that serves hundreds of meals every day. Is it not possible that an average person today are subjected to many -more- strains and variants of pathogens than ever. Maybe it is the increased load of _different_ pathogens that stresses the immune system? I mean, even if I moved in into the pigsty for good, it's just me and the pig there... The only way to catch a new disease would be from birds and rats, or a random mutation.