Peanut allergies have plummeted in children

Common sense thinking wins again. The entire genesis of an allergy is your body treats a benign particle as a pathogen due to not recognizing it. The #1 way to precipitate this is to keep the body from ever encountering this particle until well beyond its initial phases of immune development.

Are there other modern conditions born from the same "zero-tolerance prevention leads to unintended consequences due to failing to provide the body a robust means to develop"?

Maybe drug policy and the opioid crisis?

I don't know that I agree this is the reasoning, here? Seems far more likely, to me, that there are other environmental factors at play.

I'm almost certainly indexing too heavily on the ideas in birch pollen cross reactivity. But I see basically no reason not to think that same process generalizes quite well into a lot of the things we used to gladly pollute into our environments.

And yes, I know we can still get better at pollution management; but I think people should probably acknowledge just how much progress we have made. Especially in the US. Our air quality is amazingly clean today compared to just 60 years ago. Strikingly so.

> The entire genesis of an allergy is your body treats a benign particle as a pathogen due to not recognizing it

And why the body does not recognize it ? Because it is tainted. Putting all kind of pesticides and other substances on plants does modify the "original".

[Citation needed] for a pesticide connection.

Unless you are an insect, most pesticides are harmless for you. And for those that are not, nobody has proved a connection to allergies.

Perhaps those who make assertions based on "common sense" instead of evidence are pests, and thus pesticides are effective against them?

> Common sense thinking wins again.

This is not even remotely common sense. E.g. why can this allergy be desensitized via ingestion but not via skin contact?

Hindsight is 20/20. In this case, it was figured out after a lot of scientific research.

Just because we can understand it now doesn't mean it's "common sense". It's very much the opposite, and you discredit the scientific research this has required.

Where I come from this was a widely held belief by the end of the 2000's: If you raise a child in an overly sterile environment and/or feed them a very limited diet, they are much more likely to develop a bad immune system and allergies. It was also believed that this idea came from science, but I guess not?

Here's an early preview for the next bombshell of this area. Breastfeeding is extremely beneficial. "Infant formula" should not be the main thing a baby is consuming.

To me it discredits science a lot more when things like this are treated as arcane or brand new knowledge. It's good when we can lock in reasoned beliefs as definite fact, instead of just reasoning which is often incomplete or flat out wrong. But when it's right and people act like this about it, it just makes it look like "scientists" know less about the world than my grandma, and that my grandma would make better calls on national health policy than the people currently in charge. Obviously that's not the case but I wouldn't be unjustified in thinking that during times like this.

That's hardly a bombshell since it's common knowledge.

Baby formula ads in the UK are even required to say that "breast is best" type language. I assume it's similar in most countries.

It is important to memorialize and standardize "common knowledge", as without memorialization, knowledge drift can cause a loss of the "commonality" intrinsic to the knowledge.