> Any clue why the USA, being one of the richest nations on earth, supposedly 
> having one of the highest living standards, has one the highest indices of 
> allergies? That's quite possibly one of the difficult to imagine effects 
> that only appear in the distant future and usually are not easily linked to 
> a single cause.

My allergist is told me it is because we are *too* healthy. Since there
are very few parasitical infections here the antibodies that fight
parasites have nothing to do. So the immune system starts attacking
the next most dangerous things, like pollen and dust mite crap.

> That may be, but now we're about to work our ways around the checks and
> balances. A pathogen that killed everything around it couldn't have spread
> very far, in nature's scheme; it would have killed everything (in a local
> environment) and then died. Now we can create it and spread it around
> before we realize that it does this. Nature works with long "local tests",
> we don't. 

It used to do this. Unfortuantely with modern transportation things can
move around quite easily. And unlike GM products there are no testing
requirements.
-- 
D. Jay Newman           ! _Linux Robotics: Building Smarter Robots_
jay@sprucegrove.com     ! To be released soon to unsuspecting bookstores
http://enerd.ws/robots/ ! everywhere.
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