An Epidemic of Absence
A controversial, revisionist approach to autoimmune and allergic disorders considers the perspective that the human immune system has been disabled by twentieth-century hygiene and medical practices.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
15mentions
8people
2013–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The book An Epidemic of Absence presents a pretty compelling case, I recommend it.
- I am reading An Epidemic of Absence (http://www.moisesvm.com/) which explores the hypothesis and it presents a plethora of cases and studies that support it. I have not searched for counter points but it seems pretty solid to me. I can recommend the book by the way.
- Auto-immune diseases and their link to gut bacteria is not new. The relationship between MS and gut bacteria alone goes back to at least 2006 [1].
To learn more about auto-immune diseases and gut bacteria, I highly recommend the book An Epidemic of Absence [2]. It's an impressively well researched book that doesn't skimp on the science.
I managed to get my eczema under control by learning about the relationship between gut, food, inflammation, and auto-immunity.
[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=multiple+sclerosis+gut+...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allerg...
- I read "Epidemic of Absence", a science journalist's survey of the research, telling of individual stories, and speculation about where the field could go. Super interesting.
My takeaway was that there's clearly stuff happening here, but the research is still very much in its infancy, so it's hard to be too confident about any one claim.
http://smile.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Aller...
- This is not surprising to me at all. Pathogenic bacteria linked to diseases such as Crohn's and IBS are only pathogenic if we get them later in life. When we get these bacteria in childhood, before the age of 7, they grow symbiotically with us and help ward off disease. Check out the book An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Valesquez-Manoff [1] if you guys want to learn more about this stuff. It's a fascinating account of a man who experiments with altering his gut biome to overcome Alopecia areata (total hair loss). The book is loaded with science and references a lot of other studies dealing with the gut biome.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergi...
- I find the arguments for Hygiene Theory being the cause of the increase in autoimmune diseases and allergies much more credible, and it seems to have more science behind it.
There was a good discussion of "An Epidemic of Absence", a recent book on the topic, on EconTalk this week. The basic premise is that these disorders may be caused by a lack of microbes and parasites in the modern Western world. The lack of those microbes and parasites causes our immune systems to be overly aggressive towards harmless outside substances (peanut allergies, celiac disease) or mistakenly aggressive towards our own bodies (Crohn's disease, type I diabetes, etc.)
Sounds very plausible to me, but it lacks a villain, which I think makes it an unsatisfactory explanation for some.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/velasquez-manof.htm...
