4 ms·

I am curious if the ambience air can be too "sterile", that we will come to find out there are some good microbes in the air that is beneficial to our health.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Our body would have evolved to keep whatever these 'good' microbes are in and near our lungs, much like it does for our intestines and digestive system. The lack of this system, and the evolution of things like hair and mucous in our nose to filter and trap foreign objects is a pretty good hint that our body doesn't want anything except our clean atmosphere in our lungs.
- malfist 4y ago
  Fair, but your body also does away with things it's not using. An inactive immune system for too sterile environments may result in not being able to protect yourself in less sterile environments, or the immune system finding uses for itself, i.e. an autoimmune disease like allergies.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    The immune system is not a muscle--you don't need to keep exposing yourself to pathogens. Think how ridiculous that sounds--are you going to go get rabies, ebola, HIV, brain eating bacteria, etc. to be 'healthy'?
    - mr_toad 4y ago
      The whole point of a vaccine is to expose the immune system to an antigen.
      - qbasic_forever 4y ago
        No, you're exposing a harmless or safe part of an antigen to stimulate memory B and T cell immune response in the future. Rawdogging unfiltered air with true COVID or other bad virons will expose you to a potentially harmful virus--millions of people have been killed and many more disabled from it so far. You have no way of knowing if you will join their fate and are just rolling the dice.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Would you, by the same logic, suggest that we filter drinking water less?
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      That's a good example of training the immune system actually.. Go to southeast Asia where drinking water isn't so great. Drink it as a tourist and you'll spend a few days running to the toilet. But a native will drink it just fine as they're exposed to it all the time and their immune system has learned to deal with it. Low level exposure is good for that, you will find germs everywhere, not enough to make you sick but enough to give your immune system a heads-up for when it does come across a high level source of them like a contagious carrier.
      - Eisenstein 4y ago
        They also do end up getting serious diseases. There is no way to filter 'just a little to get enough of the bad stuff out but keep a tiny bit in' and ensure safety. If you really believed this you would tell your surgeon not to bother wearing gloves or wash hands because you want to ensure your immune system is functioning ideally,
        wkat4242 4y ago
        No, this is because a surgeon actually works with carriers of infectious diseases. So a direct source of these, rather than a passing encounter. And vulnerable patients (open wounds etc) of course. When the surgeon goes home on the metro he doesn't wear gloves either. Or a mask in many cases. Of course living in a sterile environment works but the problem is that you will then have to do it all the time everywhere. Otherwise the first time you're out of that environment your immune system will have to catch up on everything. And there's a whole spectrum in between. Perfect "safety" is not possible while having an actual life. The question is, does the covid pandemic indicate we should move towards the more sterile side of that spectrum? I personally don't think so, on the contrary. If you see the isolationist tactic employed by China it has been far less effective at getting the situation over with than our approach in the west. We were enjoying our lives for a year while the Chinese were still brutally locked up. In the case of Southeast Asia, just getting used to the water is far more easily achieved than fixing it everywhere due to the high cost of a good water system. Some people get ill but life always carries risk. And for foreigners there's always bottled water. In our case we make a different tradeoff. But training the immune system against common threats by exposing it to low level sources is really a thing. If it couldn't do that we would have been extinct millennia ago :) Because threats appear much faster than evolution can cope with them.
Auracle 4y ago
Well, keep in mind humans didn’t evolve to live in big cities and children in daycare and schools. I would think that the past 500 years or so the amount of illness each person suffers has gone up exponentially. Viruses are also linked to all sorts of nasty outcomes like Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. I doubt we’ll have any means to knock transmission back a ton anytime soon but it’d be nice to do what we can.
- eutectic 4y ago
  I think it's extremely unlikely that rates of illness have gone up.
  - jwuphysics 4y ago
    As someone who is unaware of any relevant literature on the subject, I'd love to hone my intuitions a bit. Could you say more about your line of reasoning?
    - mrtesthah 4y ago
      Well, because we have things like clean water and sanitary preparation of food, we can avoid things like typhoid fever, cholera, ecoli, and all manner of parasites.
      - qbasic_forever 4y ago
        We also have jets and international air travel that can take a patient zero anywhere in the world and around any people in a matter of hours (well before they're too sick to know not to be traveling). With the Spanish flu in 1918 it took months for it to get around, mostly through rail and steam ships. With COVID-19 we saw some variants explode around the entire globe in a matter of _weeks_.
  - seszett 4y ago
    I think at least the profile of illnesses must have changed. I spent a year on a rather isolated base on an island, with about 50 other people. Hygiene was certainly not as good as it is here in the civilised world as we often didn't have running water, ate wild meat that had simply been stored in the cold outside for days, food products with an expiration date a few years in the past, etc, and we just didn't get sick. We got sick when the supply ship came, though. It wasn't Antarctica either, the conditions are mostly similar to Northern Europe, not so different from Brittany. I think the situation is quite similar to how humans lived for a long time, in small groups with only occasional contact with strangers, and in these conditions I'm sure infectious disease was much less common than it is now. Of course disease did exist, but I think it would mostly have been diseases brought by insects or other vectors, not as much things like the flu or the common cold.

qbasic_forever 4y ago

Our body would have evolved to keep whatever these 'good' microbes are in and near our lungs, much like it does for our intestines and digestive system. The lack of this system, and the evolution of things like hair and mucous in our nose to filter and trap foreign objects is a pretty good hint that our body doesn't want anything except our clean atmosphere in our lungs.

malfist 4y ago
Fair, but your body also does away with things it's not using. An inactive immune system for too sterile environments may result in not being able to protect yourself in less sterile environments, or the immune system finding uses for itself, i.e. an autoimmune disease like allergies.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  The immune system is not a muscle--you don't need to keep exposing yourself to pathogens. Think how ridiculous that sounds--are you going to go get rabies, ebola, HIV, brain eating bacteria, etc. to be 'healthy'?
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    The whole point of a vaccine is to expose the immune system to an antigen.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      No, you're exposing a harmless or safe part of an antigen to stimulate memory B and T cell immune response in the future. Rawdogging unfiltered air with true COVID or other bad virons will expose you to a potentially harmful virus--millions of people have been killed and many more disabled from it so far. You have no way of knowing if you will join their fate and are just rolling the dice.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Would you, by the same logic, suggest that we filter drinking water less?
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That's a good example of training the immune system actually.. Go to southeast Asia where drinking water isn't so great. Drink it as a tourist and you'll spend a few days running to the toilet. But a native will drink it just fine as they're exposed to it all the time and their immune system has learned to deal with it. Low level exposure is good for that, you will find germs everywhere, not enough to make you sick but enough to give your immune system a heads-up for when it does come across a high level source of them like a contagious carrier.
    - Eisenstein 4y ago
      They also do end up getting serious diseases. There is no way to filter 'just a little to get enough of the bad stuff out but keep a tiny bit in' and ensure safety. If you really believed this you would tell your surgeon not to bother wearing gloves or wash hands because you want to ensure your immune system is functioning ideally,
      - wkat4242 4y ago
        No, this is because a surgeon actually works with carriers of infectious diseases. So a direct source of these, rather than a passing encounter. And vulnerable patients (open wounds etc) of course. When the surgeon goes home on the metro he doesn't wear gloves either. Or a mask in many cases. Of course living in a sterile environment works but the problem is that you will then have to do it all the time everywhere. Otherwise the first time you're out of that environment your immune system will have to catch up on everything. And there's a whole spectrum in between. Perfect "safety" is not possible while having an actual life. The question is, does the covid pandemic indicate we should move towards the more sterile side of that spectrum? I personally don't think so, on the contrary. If you see the isolationist tactic employed by China it has been far less effective at getting the situation over with than our approach in the west. We were enjoying our lives for a year while the Chinese were still brutally locked up. In the case of Southeast Asia, just getting used to the water is far more easily achieved than fixing it everywhere due to the high cost of a good water system. Some people get ill but life always carries risk. And for foreigners there's always bottled water. In our case we make a different tradeoff. But training the immune system against common threats by exposing it to low level sources is really a thing. If it couldn't do that we would have been extinct millennia ago :) Because threats appear much faster than evolution can cope with them.

Auracle 4y ago

Well, keep in mind humans didn’t evolve to live in big cities and children in daycare and schools. I would think that the past 500 years or so the amount of illness each person suffers has gone up exponentially. Viruses are also linked to all sorts of nasty outcomes like Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. I doubt we’ll have any means to knock transmission back a ton anytime soon but it’d be nice to do what we can.

eutectic 4y ago
I think it's extremely unlikely that rates of illness have gone up.
- jwuphysics 4y ago
  As someone who is unaware of any relevant literature on the subject, I'd love to hone my intuitions a bit. Could you say more about your line of reasoning?
  - mrtesthah 4y ago
    Well, because we have things like clean water and sanitary preparation of food, we can avoid things like typhoid fever, cholera, ecoli, and all manner of parasites.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      We also have jets and international air travel that can take a patient zero anywhere in the world and around any people in a matter of hours (well before they're too sick to know not to be traveling). With the Spanish flu in 1918 it took months for it to get around, mostly through rail and steam ships. With COVID-19 we saw some variants explode around the entire globe in a matter of _weeks_.
- seszett 4y ago
  I think at least the profile of illnesses must have changed. I spent a year on a rather isolated base on an island, with about 50 other people. Hygiene was certainly not as good as it is here in the civilised world as we often didn't have running water, ate wild meat that had simply been stored in the cold outside for days, food products with an expiration date a few years in the past, etc, and we just didn't get sick. We got sick when the supply ship came, though. It wasn't Antarctica either, the conditions are mostly similar to Northern Europe, not so different from Brittany. I think the situation is quite similar to how humans lived for a long time, in small groups with only occasional contact with strangers, and in these conditions I'm sure infectious disease was much less common than it is now. Of course disease did exist, but I think it would mostly have been diseases brought by insects or other vectors, not as much things like the flu or the common cold.