Now Almost Everyone Has Allergies

Now Almost Everyone Has Allergies
"They’re just allergies."- quote from a Reactine allergy medication commercial

The point of the commercial is that they are not "just allergies." But what are allergies?

Our bodies are set up to fight invasions by foreign bodies that could do them harm. Our immune system does most of the work fighting invaders, though billions of bacteria that live symbiotically with us (primarily on our skin and in our gut) help out considerably.

Generally speaking those good bacteria (we could not live without them) don’t cause us much trouble. They depend on us, we depend on them, and we all get along splendidly. Our own immune systems cause the problems. (Antibiotics kill these good bacteria, by the way.)

Allergies are mostly an affliction of the modern era. In my classroom career teaching young children, which ended a generation ago, I came across only two kids with severe allergies. Both had problems learning because their allergies prevented them from thinking clearly.

One child, that I knew was of at least average intelligence, went through a battery of tests by a psychologist twice in the school year, then was sent the following year to a special education class for children with learning disabilities. I objected strenuously to my principal, but was overruled. I insisted that the tests had been given when the boy suffered most from his allergies, not when he was clear headed. I was not included in the decision. He joined a special class for children who mostly had low intelligence.

The other child, no doubt destined for the same fate, moved out of the community in February. His mother had tears in her eyes when she told me that they had to move, because her son had done so well in my care, but circumstances dictated. I could foresee a similar school track for him.

In those days, severe allergies were rare. A few kids had allergic reactions to pollen, in season, but only a few. One child suffered from asthma--the only student I had who did, and I only discovered it when the class went on an outing that required hiking in a wilderness area.

Today allergies in the classroom are so common that teachers expect them and classmates expect to be inconvenienced by those who require special treatment. Some teachers today need emergency medical training and training in the dispensing of medication for their kids.

Allergies are the body’s overreaction to a stimulus it doesn’t like. Asthma is, fundamentally, an extreme version of an allergy. Something gets into the body and the body reacts violently to get rid of it.

Just over a decade ago I developed an allergy. After extensive tests, my doctor declared that I had a "mild environmental allergy." Nothing that could be identified, thus avoided. I could either begin taking allergy shots or continue using profound quantities of tissues daily. I chose the latter.

Over the past year, my wife has developed the same allergy. To what? We don’t drink city water, so we do not subject our bodies to the 300,000 chemical pollutants that city water treatment plants don’t remove. But we can’t do anything about the half million pollutants factories put in the air that everyone breathes. All things considered, we decided to avoid wearing chemical gas masks all day long.

I also have an allergy to breathing very cold air. When I walk outside in winter, my sinuses go to work and my nose runs. Inconvenient. But, in doing so, the mucus may continue to warm my breathing passage, preventing them from freezing. This might be an adaptation by body has made to protect itself. In this case, is an allergy an adaptation to the environment?

As well, I begin to sneeze when my body senses a temperature change of two degrees or more. This "allergy" likely has the same cause, but is a side effect of the adaptation. It’s an overreaction by natural functions of my body, as all true allergies are.

These days, asthma is common. Allergies are so ubiquitous that almost everyone has one or more. Some have an allergy that is so common to them and that affects them year round that they don’t even know they have it. To them, it’s "just life as I am getting older."

Science and archeology writer Jeff D. Leach believes, as do many people, including health professionals, that kids and adults develop allergies because their homes are so clean that their immune systems have not been challenged enough. He wrote in the New York Times "the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us."

He quotes research that suggests we reintroduce some dirt into our lives to see a reduction in diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, several allergies and other diseases. Our immune systems were built to fight hard and constantly, and if they don’t they redirect their efforts and work against us.

If this has you scratching your head and doubting, more reading on the subject of allergies will relieve that doubt.

One allergy you likely were not aware of has been shown to cause obesity. It’s not the only cause, but it is one that has been identified through scientific tests.

Here are a few other facts you likely don’t know about allergies.

Thanks to advertisers who want us to live in a "clean" environment, our immune system has fewer enemies to fight. In desperation, it fires on relatively innocent targets such as peanuts and cat dander. Our immune system is designed to fight for our survival throughout our life. When it doesn’t have an enemy, it invents one. Allergy symptoms are the results of a one-sided war.

The National Institutes of Health in the USA estimates that over half of Americans have at least one testable allergy. One of them is an allergy to penicillin, which can cause fatal anaphylaxis. Penicillin, when it first became public, was considered a great saviour against disease.

Food allergies are usually to a protein. A team at Trinity College Dublin, in 2004, injected mice with parasites of the kind that mouse immune systems would fight in the wild. It worked. The mice with previously weak immune systems developed healthy ones.

British entrepreneur Jasper Lawrence walked barefoot near some latrines in Cameroon, in 2007, to get infected by hookworms he believed would defeat asthma and seasonal allergies. It worked. For $3000 a person can receive up to 35 hookworm larvae which they put on a bandage and apply to their skin. Mr. Lawrence has not publicly reported the success rate for his business. (NOTE: this therapy is not legal in the USA.)

Between 150 and 200 Americans die each year from allergies to shellfish, nuts, fish, milk, eggs and other foods. They are serious allergies.

Tick bites you could get from walking barefoot in grass could cause your immune system to produce antibodies to alpha-gal, a carbohydrate commonly found in beef, pork and lamb. Resulting allergies to these meats could be fatal.

As many as 40,000 American women may be affected by an allergic sensitivity to male ejaculate (specifically seminal plasma hypersensitivity) which could result in symptoms from local swelling to systemic shock. Another reason for them to insist on the man using a condom.

An allergy to sex seems unfair. However, some women are allergic to their own progesterone, a sex hormone, developing anything from a rash to full shock.

Yes, pets can be allergic to human dander (cast off skin) as well as people can be allergic to pet dander.

Yes, some people are allergic to the sun. And some couples have to separate because they are allergic to each other.

But wait! A few rare individuals can develop aquagenic urticaria, a rash caused when they come in contact with water. Apparently they do not react to the 70 percent of their own body weight that is composed of water.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers.
Learn more about the book at http://billallin.com

[Primary source: Discover, May 2012]

Cause for Rampant Afflictions Our Grandparents Never Had

Cause for Rampant Afflictions Our Grandparents Never Had
"I have never met a parent willing to sacrifice their child for the good of the herd. The vaccines have become more important than the child. It is time to stop allowing our children to be used as pharmaceutical pincushions. It is time to demand transparency in the tight relationship between pharmaceutical profits and government vaccine mandates."
- Allison MacNeil

If you mixed mercury, aluminum phosphate, ammonium sulphate, and formaldehyde, then got a syringe and injected it into your child, you would be arrested and sent to jail for child endangerment and abuse. Then why is it legal for a doctor to do it? And why would you let them [inject your child with a vaccine that contains these elements]?
- Facebook anti-vaccine poster
Almost everyone has opinion about why children need to get so many vaccinations these days--one count says 49 inoculations of 14 different vaccines
in one area, others say more--and those are before a child enters the first grade of school. Most centre around two claims:

(1) Each vaccine prevents a child from getting a disease;

(2) Each vaccine helps the pharmaceutical company that made it increase its annual sales exponentially (customers) and to provide capital to develop more health vaccine safeguards (companies).

In a sense, both are correct. Yet both miss the most important point about childhood vaccines. Vaccines are meant to tweak the immune system, gently, to produce antibodies that will ward off attack by their respective diseases in the future.
In trying to protect our children from having any harm come to them, we overprotect them. We don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Harm happens anyway, but not in ways we expect or understand.

We don’t allow our kids to go out with other children on the streets because we believe it’s too dangerous out there. So we keep them home, give them video games, iPads and television to keep them busy because today’s parents don’t have any more time to devote to playing with their kids than parents of previous generations. In some areas it’s even illegal for kids to play in the street.

We watch them get fat. We don’t see them fail to develop social and emotional skills children always did by playing with other kids. We focus on the intellectual and physical development we know more about.

We see them--some of them--develop autism, allergies their grandparents knew hardly anything about, diseases such as asthma that were extremely rare a couple of generations ago, and put it down to modern life in the city.

Families of some school children have been told to not feed peanuts or peanut butter to the kids in case they touch a child with a dangerous peanut allergy, at school, and that child dies. One news story even had a US school banning kids who have eaten peanut butter in case the child breathes on another child with a peanut allergy.

We don’t understand why our children become obese (about one-third of them), why they don’t have interests we had as kids or why they develop health problems that we rare or almost unknown until recent decades. And why they have more problems getting along with their peers than any previous generation.

One thing that affects each of us every day of our lives is our immune system. Yet we know so little about it. We take the word of our family doctors that we should protect ourselves--flu and other vaccines for adults and dozens of vaccines for our kids--so that we will be protected from terrible diseases.

Setting aside the great debate about whether or not these vaccines do more harm than good, let’s look at one of the fundamentals of our own bodies.

Our immune systems protect us from diseases and help to cure us when we get one. Do we actually protect ourselves by getting needles? Remember, many of us believe those commercials that tell us we should rid our mouths of "germs" (bacteria and other microbes), despite the fact that good bacteria in our mouths are our first line of defence against disease. Does that make sense? We do the same thing with our immune systems.

The whole purpose of a long childhood for humans--far longer than the development periods of most other animals--is to prepare us for adulthood. We need that long to prepare. That includes our immune systems.

Our immune system, like other body systems, is not designed to be eased into adulthood. We don’t gain strength by pushing open swinging doors and pulling on our socks, but by working our muscles, sometimes very hard. We don’t gain intellectual strength by spoon feeding our brain with facts and ideas from television, but by forcing ourselves to think our way through difficult problems.

And we don’t develop a robust immune system by easing it along with regular vaccinations. In the past, our ancestors got sick and their immune systems had to work extremely hard just to help them recover. They did, and in the process they became stronger, more immune to disease attack, and overall healthier.

Yes, some children died. That’s the hook pharmaceutical companies use to get us to buy their vaccines. We don’t want our kids to die, so we administer all sorts of chemicals we know nothing about, hoping to save them. School age kids didn’t die in huge numbers in the past, as we have been misled to believe by Big Pharma.

Immune systems that are fed regularly in childhood with vaccines never have to work very hard. Without thinking about it much, that seems lovely. When we examine it, an easy life for the immune system in childhood means a major body function looking for work has nothing much to find.

So what does it do? For one thing, it develops allergies so it has some work to do. It develops asthma, which is basically a form of allergy. Allergies are, in effect, the body attacking itself. It doesn’t have diseases to fight, so it fights itself. Like a cat chasing its own tail, only the cat knows enough not to bite hard. Our immune system is not allowed to develop enough to learn that.

Our bodies are designed to work hard. When they don’t, they find other ways to work. Muscles that don’t have much physical work to do, as those of our ancestors did, find themselves having to tote around far more body weight than in the past. Some of that comes from increased height, some from more fat.

Young brains that find themselves understimulated by lockstep lessons in school find other forms of stimulation, such as with drugs and video games. They want excitement, which is the brain’s backup plan when other opportunities for stimulation don’t present themselves.

Adults that have relatively safe and anxiety-free daytime lives may have overly exciting dreams. Even the brain needs to work hard, at something useless at night if not something productive or dangerous during the daytime.

While it is certainly true that some children died from childhood diseases in the past, was that not a form of natural selection, the process by which those with certain weaknesses or inability to adapt to certain environmental conditions die out? Yes, that seems harsh, but it may be true.

By feeding young children so many vaccines, we may be condemning them to a lifetime of weak health. Of dependence on doctors and medicines. Yes, medicines made by the very same companies that convinced us and our governments and education systems that it was the healthy thing to do to give our young children vaccines.

By feeding our kids dozens of vaccines, pharmaceutical companies develop lifelong customers. A close examination of the health care industry shows that their plan is working. Today’s parents raise patients, not healthy young children.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children, not mentally and physically health-hampered kids.
Learn more at http://billallin.com