D. Jay Newman wrote:

>> 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.

I don't really buy that. I can't find any of the texts I read about the
differences between USA and other similarly developed countries, but
independently of that, most of the allergies show a significant increase
over the last decade. For all I know, the infectious diseases did not
decline so substantially over that period -- their decline happened
earlier.

Besides that, the common cold and the flu and similar infectious diseases
seem to be out there, just the same. The market for stuff like Tylenol
doesn't seem to be small, or doesn't seem to have decreased significantly. 


Fact is that medicine is not a science in the more restricted sense we
generally use this word. Not even its objective is clearly defined: what is
a disease? what is health? what constitutes a cure? Pretty much everybody
has a different view of the matter. For some, something like Tylenol is the
model for the perfect cure, for others it's something that makes matters
worse. 

We know very little about the more complex interactions in our body, in
part due to the high complexity and long timeframes (compared to a
lifetime), in part due to the restrictions on actual experimenting. For
example, do the (or some, or some combinations of) vaccines cause an
increase in allergies? Or does the increased exposure to increased numbers
of substances that are increasingly different from anything our immune
system has seen through the past millennia cause an increase in allergies?
We don't know, and we have no way of telling; we very rarely can prove or
disprove anything medical with any scientific (in the more restricted
sense) certainty. 


Which then comes back to the GM question. There are so little hard facts
about interactions of different influences in our body, and anybody who
believes otherwise doesn't really think science has any grounds. If we
think the type of experimenting we do with semiconductors to gather
information about how they behave makes sense and really tells us
something, we have to admit that most of the type of knowledge we know
about semiconductors we don't know about our body -- (at least) because of
the lack of proper experimenting. (Just think of what experiments you would
create if you could experiment with humans like you can with
semiconductors, in order to answer some of the questions. Then take those
experiments away... and all that's left are some mostly subjective
observations and arbitrary statistical correlations.) Which then makes the
pseudo-scientific nature of the marketing speak of the ones who claim to
know pretty obvious.

Medicine and the concept of health is not a scientific subject. Science is
one of the languages of medicine, in a way similar to mathematics being one
of the languages of science -- but neither is science mathematics, nor is
medicine science. To treat either as if it were is misinterpreting the
results. And the question about GM is about health, too.

Gerhard

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist