Why is it that dogs can drink out of mud puddles with impunity but tots cannot? Or maybe we could but just don’t know it. I’m not about to suggest that we perform that experiment, but it does intrigue me that within the past several years there has been a lot of talk about the “hygiene hypothesis.” Since it doesn’t promote the wisdom of “hygiene,” maybe it should be called “antihygiene” or “lowgiene.” We have all observed with fear our little rug-rats wrapping their gums around all kinds of debris they have picked up off the non-hygienically approved floor. Do they survive in spite of—or because of—this activity?
The hygiene hypothesis claims that we are getting all kinds of diseases, such as asthma and Type I diabetes, because we are not training our immune systems adequately. How? By avoiding exposure to all the germs that used to visit us in early childhood before we began bathing in soap and alcohol twenty times a day.
World population was 2 billion when I was born and is now 7 billion. Would the 1918 flu pandemic have gotten off the ground in the absence of crowded military camps containing thousands of potential hosts waiting for the virus to arrive? Probably not.
Pandemics seem to be one of Mother Nature’s favorite strategies for population control. Earth could support several times its current people load if we went to a vegan diet, but does a world population of 20 billion humans sound like fun?
On our present course it seems certain that global warming will produce widespread effects that will not, in general, be desirable. But are we also setting ourselves up for a global pandemic that will prune the population to where it might have been in the first place if we had listened to those who have been warning us for some decades? Or will medical science give us enough vaccines and new antibiotics to shield us from whatever bugs come along?
Given our penchant for not doing anything until it is too late, I suspect that our experiment will continue but with Mother Nature at the controls—population controls. Keep your fingers crossed and your seat belt fastened. It may be a bumpy ride.
Gordon Short, MD
March 2014