Homo Sapiens first evolved some 300,000 years ago, yet crowd infections are believed to have only developed in the last 12,000 years, a small blip in human history. Humans living in dense cities is a relatively recent development.

Seems to me that a big "elephant in the room" about this is animal agriculture, which also evolved in this "small blip" of human history and has clearly been a major factor these "crowd" diseases have leveraged along with air travel etc.

If vaccines etc are necessary to compensate for our immune system's short comings to modern problems, it seems reasonable that scaling down animal farming and consumption is also a necessary compensatory mechanism.

🙄 yeah maybe yours isn’t, but I’m hitting the gym every day (to lick doorknobs) 💪

IgE is the antibody for allergies, it's also the one we use for worms/parasites/big multi cellular disease organisms. I can see why intentional infection with parasitic worms can help with autoimmune/severe allergies, it's an interesting subject of research.

Anyway, yeah, people definitely took the wrong lessons about natural immunity after acquiring a disease. The comparison to cartilage damage is really apt. Cause, yeah, sometimes it just makes everything worse if you get a disease. So like if you could avoid it by getting a shot, you think it'd be obvious to get the shot providing a person isn't allergic to the ingredients or immunocompromised in the first place

A part of this I suspect is that the immune system is just a generally misunderstood thing.

I've spent a good amount of time around academic biology (I'm a former science grad student) ... and I got a pretty clear impression that the immune system and immunology was just one of those things most didn't bother learning about unless they were committed to it. Probably because it's discrete enough that you can ignore it in most other fields. Also, IMO, because it's subtle and idiosyncratic enough that it's not easy to get a good grip on it through superficial study or understanding. And, I imagine, compared to things like genetics, pharmacology and neuroscience or well known diseases like cancer or MS etc, it has never attained a "sexy" appeal.

The only video game I play is Plague Inc. because it's the only game where you get to play as a true hero struggling against a 100% unquestionably evil villain.

Thanks for sharing! This was short and to the point, so it feels like something I could actually share with the next person who says this to me.

NGL I used to believe this most of my life. I would be happy that I got a cold, I'd imagine that I'd get immune and resistant ASAP. I used to avoid antibiotics for bacterial stuff as I imagined that I'd get better immunity that way.

Ya I was wrong as feck