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Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?

by dedev5 4y ago

robocat 4y ago
The immune system is fiendishly complex: the technical debt of a system of programming by random mutations. Answer: I don’t think that our immune system would be weaker for novel viruses, because our immune system isn’t trained to work on unknown viruses. The immune system does work on known viruses, however for the virus to be detected, a person needs to have been infected the first time: so by induction it doesn’t matter for one person. Although population effects might matter (herd immunity, societal systems breakdown). Background: The immune system starts with a random generation of attacks. As a foetus the immune system learns to NOT detect its own cells (by removing any self-attacks). The immune system is left with the ability to detect a variety of things that are not its own cells. The immune system also trains to not attack common environmental factors, which prevents allergies, but AFAIK that training stops within a few months of birth (there is a special organ for this). There is a popular theory that if the immune system isn’t given something to attack then it attacks itself (creating auto-immune diseases) so we should “eat dirt” to prevent that. AFAIK there is no scientific consensus about that. Certainly we have counter-examples where viruses cause autoimmune diseases e.g. Epstein-Barr virus causing Multiple Sclerosis. The immune system also trains to be able to quickly attack things it has attacked before. So it provides protection against some variation of some repeat viral infections because new variants might have the same attack point. This works better against repeat bacterial infections, because bacteria have more features to detect, so the immune system is more likely to have some defence against different variants. This part of the eat-dirt theory is a bit better, but still impossible to calculate the costs versus benefits. Personally I don’t try to “eat dirt”, but I mostly make little effort to avoid “dirty” things because the effort seems mentally costly (avoidance that worked would be socially damaging, IMHO).

Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?

by dedev5 4y ago

Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?

robocat 4y ago

The immune system is fiendishly complex: the technical debt of a system of programming by random mutations. Answer: I don’t think that our immune system would be weaker for novel viruses, because our immune system isn’t trained to work on unknown viruses. The immune system does work on known viruses, however for the virus to be detected, a person needs to have been infected the first time: so by induction it doesn’t matter for one person. Although population effects might matter (herd immunity, societal systems breakdown). Background: The immune system starts with a random generation of attacks. As a foetus the immune system learns to NOT detect its own cells (by removing any self-attacks). The immune system is left with the ability to detect a variety of things that are not its own cells. The immune system also trains to not attack common environmental factors, which prevents allergies, but AFAIK that training stops within a few months of birth (there is a special organ for this). There is a popular theory that if the immune system isn’t given something to attack then it attacks itself (creating auto-immune diseases) so we should “eat dirt” to prevent that. AFAIK there is no scientific consensus about that. Certainly we have counter-examples where viruses cause autoimmune diseases e.g. Epstein-Barr virus causing Multiple Sclerosis. The immune system also trains to be able to quickly attack things it has attacked before. So it provides protection against some variation of some repeat viral infections because new variants might have the same attack point. This works better against repeat bacterial infections, because bacteria have more features to detect, so the immune system is more likely to have some defence against different variants. This part of the eat-dirt theory is a bit better, but still impossible to calculate the costs versus benefits. Personally I don’t try to “eat dirt”, but I mostly make little effort to avoid “dirty” things because the effort seems mentally costly (avoidance that worked would be socially damaging, IMHO).