I watched this 60 Minutes piece on swine flu. Of course nothing was said about boosting immunity as a defense. “The best way to reduce your chances of one of those terrible outcomes [hospitalization, death] is to be vaccinated,” said Anne Schuchat, who has a very high position at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is just part of a bigger delusion. The story centers on a football player who gets seriously sick after a football game. Schuchat said this:
This is one of the tragic parts of this epidemic. That people who are in the prime of their life, totally healthy, can suddenly become so sick.
Totally healthy. This is the bigger delusion: That the average American who appears healthy is healthy. I believe that practically all Americans have grossly-impaired immunity. Their immune systems work much worse than they could. The poor performance is due to suboptimal sleep and far too little bacteria in their diet. The football player was near death because he had two out-of-control infections. That’s how poorly his immune system was working. And a top CDC official called him “totally healthy”! Apparently she has no idea that people’s immune systems can vary in how well they work. This is even worse than the UCLA medical school prof specializing in infectious disease who also failed to understand this. Schuchat is one of the top public health officials in America! Public health is about prevention. According to Wikipedia, Schuchat “has emphasized prevention of infectious diseases in children.”
Most of the people killed by the Spanish flu were those whose immune systems responded most vigorously.
The immune system is, first and foremost, a system — that is, a machine based on a model of its environment, and programmed with responses that have worked just well enough in the past to keep enough of a population reproducing that there is a next generation, without costing too much, metabolically. No model, and no set of programmed responses is perfect, for all possible environments, and pathogens are continually testing the limits of both. There can be no rational reason to believe that any treatment of the immune system, not even with a brilliantly designed program of bacterial exposure, can change that fundamental fact.
No amount of yogurt can protect you from HIV, or from HPV, or from HSV, or from certain flus. The immune system isn’t magic, and yogurt isn’t magic.
Here’s a good talk about the hygiene hypothesis, the current literature on the subject, and ongoing studies. “Dr. Michael Cabana explores which conditions are benefited by the use of probiotics and what the future holds.”
Seth,
Regarding suboptimal sleep and the immune system, I know that sleep deprivation makes one more vulnerable to colds, and in more severe forms has induced diabetic type symptoms in healthy young people. Do we have longitudinal, correlational research showing that people who sleep poorly get more sick and die younger? This research would not be hard to do. Every year, you simply ask people to report on how they have been sleeping for the past year, how many hours, how often they wake up, when they sleep etc…
I would assume that longitidunal studies would have already covered this, but I’ve never seen it reported. I think you are right but I’d want to see basic correlation between poor sleep and sickness before I would begin to be confident about it…