In short - viruses can actually harm your immune system and lead to long term problems. OTOH, we co-evolved with certain parasites that can help us.
Airborne pathogens are not likely to be the helpful type we’ve co-evolved with — they’re much more likely to be the type we’ve only had to deal with since the creation of higher density living and rapid long distance travel. Therefore air filters are likely to help children’s health both short and long term.
To sort of complement what you are saying, the 'hygiene hypothesis' also ends up being a an excuse for not looking at other factors. (very similar to blaming genes alone for health issues)
What you've written is unproven, and I see two facets of confusion:
First, there's a huge difference between "strong" immune responses and "good" immune responses.
Triggering the adaptive immune system is dangerous, like unleashing Skynet robots against a zombie apocalypse. You don't nuke a city at the first police report of one person biting another. Your body has a ton of cascading safety interlocks to try to avoid triggering more than is absolutely necessary.
Second, there's a difference between "we need dangerous exposure to actual pathogens" versus "we need calibration against a mileu of benign species we co-evolved with."
There's no evidence our immune systems are somehow "weaker" than our ancestors', but they do seem to be miscalibrated and trigger-happy.
No, it's the vagina itself which is heavily colonized with bacteria (lactofermenting bacteria and friends). With a C-section you're removing the baby directly from the amniotic sac into the world.
Practically 100% of children will have "dangerous exposure to actual pathogens" multiple times before they turn 20.
If parents only get a choice as to when, I think nearly all would choose for them to be exposed younger and before the critical high school/college years, when the stakes are much higher.
When a disease is dangerous depends a lot on the specific disease. Measles for an adult is mostly a non-issue. Measles for a child carries a high risk of deafness and blindness. Chickenpox for an infant can be deadly, for a child is normal, and for an adult man can cause sterility.
There's no blanket "best time" to get sick with an infectious disease. And some diseases, like chickenpox, later surface as painful shingles (which in the worst case can result in permanent nerve damage).
The best thing to do is vaccination. It's safe for the vast majority of the population and sidesteps complications completely. Get your flu shot.
It’s funny on how we can be on a site where people spend all day working on how to account for things like dynamic conditionals, but immediately become absurdly reductive and incapable of applying the same logic to anything outside software. Real life also has a lot of if statements!
Life is a bunch of statistics and probabilities and we humans have a strong tendency to want to simplify those away. We are further very naturally bad at stats (probably due to our amazing pattern finding abilities).
Heck, I think what makes a programmer good is something that can easily get in the way of fields like medicine. Good programmers like to create abstractions to put things into neat boxes. Programming is an exercise in generalization and specialization and, unfortunately, that can drive people to thinking "Oh, these diseases are alike so lets put them in the same box". That particularly gets in the way because MOST people won't experience complications from illness. Consider measles blindness, 30 million people get measles a year, 60,000 will get blindness. That's a 0.2% chance of developing blindness as a result of measles (1 in 500). That can lead to unfounded skepticism because your observed reality "I don't know anyone that's been blinded by measles!" might make you think that the risks are lower than they are.
And, heck, as a programmer if you have a method that fails at 1 in 500 cases you might even be justified in punting fixing that thing.
> And, heck, as a programmer if you have a method that fails at 1 in 500 cases you might even be justified in punting fixing that thing.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but if I intentionally ignored a fix to a method that resulted in a service-level equivalent of a user going blind every 1 in 500 times it ran, I’d get fired pretty quickly. But then again, I have also met many programmers who, when presented with such cases, pretend they do not exist.
This is what they were talking about, exposure __does not require__ you get sick. You can still be exposed, but you don't need to let the concentrations of pathogens to build up in stale air over the course of a school day.
The results aren't in yet, and of course will be subject to reproduction/duplicatation, but I suspect that's what we're seeing here. People (children) are still getting sick, just less so, presumably because they're getting exposed to lower concentrations of pathogens. The article doesn't make it clear (or I missed it) if the reduction is in severity (time spent recovering from being sick), frequency (number of times one gets sick), or a combination thereof. If I'm right, I'd expect it to be a reduction stemming from both reduced frequency/severity.
Most low-level infections probably go unnoticed, and won't show up in the study at all.
Some days the kids are just a bit off, and taking their temperature shows slightly elevated temperature (37.2°C in ear). I'm pretty sure they are fighting some mild infection, but they aren't really ill.
The other poster made a statement about the strength of the immune system. I don't think there's much evidence that exposure to virus A ends up contributing to a robust response to virus Z. There's some benefit if the infections are somewhat related, but not if they are dissimilar. So sure, exposure to a particular infection is likely to make your immune system more responsive to that infection, but it's probably not reasonable to say that it has gotten stronger.
There is a lot of evidence that exposure to Covid induces long term permanent damage to tissue and the ability of the immune system to fight off other infections.
> There’s a lot of evidence that exposure is required for immunity
Think about - immune system evolved over millions of years, is it plausible that it needed wild tribes of hunter gatherers to huddle in a nearly airtight box for 8 hours and infect each other to work
In the extreme there is evidence that no exposure to pathogens might weaken immunity, but that is not going to be a problem unless someone is living in a bubble or on a space station.
In your hypothetical of it only costing a few dollars a year the economic savings just by not having children be sick even once would easily outweigh any downsides. Also, we already have this for many diseases. They’re proven and they work just fine. Nobody reasonable is advocating you avoid the flu shot just because “everyone now has the same immunities”.
Silly question: how does an immune system get “trained”? I imagine some of it is through familial transmission but getting sick seems to kick it into high gear.
So this is an extremely simplified answer but essentially some pathogen gets into the body. If they find a cell first, they generally get to do their job and try to kill the cell and replicate. But if a macrophage (a type of white blood cell) finds them first betfore they've intruded upon a cell, the macrophage eats it and disassembles it into little tiny pieces.
The macrophage then hands over some of the important pieces to undifferentiated T cells. Those T cells then "differentiate" into one of two forms.
The first are "Helper T cells" which carry the "design" for antibodies (immunoglobulins, i.e. proteins that bind to pathogens directly. These then share those antibody designs with B-Cells.
The other type are "Killer T cells" which carry the "design" for T-cell-receptors that can detect "sick" cells for this specific pathogen or defect. They go hunt after the specific cell and essentially cause them to explode with the power of hydrogen peroxide. Then the macrophages eat up the dead infected cell and all the pathogens inside it and start the process anew.
Now those B-Cells get the "design" for antibodies from the helper T cells and differentiate into two types.
The first is essentially a factory that mass produces the antibodies and dumps them into the body. Those antibody proteins then bind to the pathogens and the macrophages can then directly attack the pathogens (because they have a bunch of big flags/alarms on them).
The other type of B-Cell that they can differentiate into are memory B-cells. These keep the designs stored inside them and keep detectors for the pathogen on their cell membrane. Then they "go to sleep" until their detectors are activated by the pathogen. They live out their lives and replicate as needed to continue their lineage. When a pathogen shows up, they bind to either the pathogen directly or to some of the proteins it produces and they turn their factories on at full speed and start mass producing antibodies to start the immune response as fast as possible locally before the pathogen can do damage. They get depleted in this effort of course but if things go okay, the following immune response should trigger the creation of more memory B cells. (and when they don't you get stuff like immune amnesia).
There are also "memory T-cells" but how they come about and how exactly they work is fuzzy and not super well understood. It's similar to memory B-cells but it's way more complicated and a bit "magic".
But yeah eventually then your body beats the infection and things go back to normal with the memory cells hanging out in the body.
Now the important thing with intensity of infection is that a mild infection will generally guarantee your body learns a sane, moderate response but a major infection can send your body into a panic and put the immune system into overdrive. That can train a response that attacks the pathogen but also attacks a lot of other stuff in the process (auto-immune response).
You can think of this kind of like an analog version of machine learning on proteins (the training input). A bad fit can end up mischaracterizing healthy cells and bodily structures as "pathogens" and cause long term issues or even just severe reactions when you get a reinfection.
Now for getting "trained" from the parent, this happens during pregnancy by diffusion of a subset of the antibodies from the mother to the fetus (not all types can but many do). Those stick around for a good while and eventually the child gets minor exposure to various pathogens and those shared antibodies kickstart the child's immune response enough to build up its own memory.
I think measles parties are hold over from before the advent of the measles vaccine (early 1970s). Now that we have a vaccine for it, the vaccine is vastly superior for many reasons.
They would not disagree with you after, say, a measles infections, which thoroughly destroys the immune system at many levels.
It’s not a good idea to confuse the impacts of vaccines and infections. Vaccines are carefully developed specifically to help the immune system. Viruses evolve to hurt it.
