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Peanut allergies have plummeted in children

(www.nytimes.com)
178 points JumpCrisscross | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 18:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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atleastoptimal ◴[20 Oct 25 21:22 UTC] No.45649551[source]▶
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"?

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1. taeric ◴[20 Oct 25 22:33 UTC] No.45650274[source]▶
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.