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Human Immune System and Global Warming
Changing conditions cause trouble for human immunity
Date: 12/10/2008 5:31:09 PM ( 16 y ) ... viewed 2695 times
There are new reports every month now about how insects, plants, animals large and small are leaving their traditional territory due to changes in habitat and climate brought on by global warming, and finding new places to live that are more to their liking.
Therefore, various pathogens that live on or in those critters, who are their hosts, are changing territory.
The fact that those displacements are causing trouble for humans, in that we are more susceptible to various diseases now, says something about how the human immunity system works. We did have a nicely developed immunity to many of the pathogens in our world - and there are multitudes of pathogens in this world - but as our envorinment changes, we are being left with a gap in that immunity.
From the time we are born, we start developing immunity to the world around us. Mostly, this occurs in the digestive tract, which is the most "intimate" of ways that we allow the world to touch us. Our skin is a barrier to the world, so it is mostly through our mouth do we let the world inside us - breathing and eating and drinking.
In the digestive tract, we culture many types of "microflora", also called "the friendly bacteria" - a recent report found 5700 DIFFERENT TYPES - that help us deal with all the stuff we toss down the old gullet. Without those microflora we could not form a stool and would have constant diarrhea ; we would not digest food well because they produce enzymes to do that job ; we would also get sick and die because they neutralise most things in our world that are harmfull to us.
Some people, in different parts of the world, have strains of microflora that we might not have, and visa-versa. It depends on what pathogens exist in our area. If our diet changes, the types of microflora will change - it is a highly adaptable system.
So, now that climate change is changing the conditions, and "little critters" are moving around and finding new homes as their old ones become inhospitable to them, humans have to develop new resistances, and that means we need new types of friendly bacteria. We will adapt, as we do with diet changes, but where diseases are concerned it seems we take awhile to make those changes because it is a more complext process, and meanwhile we are likely to see more people get sick.
Sorry, the answer to this problem is not as simple as taking a pill, or some probiotics... because medical science has not put much effort at all into studying our colon and the inhabitants of it.
Hopefully someday we will have a complete atlas of the various types of microflora in our digestive tracts, and that we will know which pathogens will be controlled, or how the toxins that they produce, are neutralised by what type of microflora. And then perhaps we can design a probiotic pill to take care of gaps in our immunity, but for now it remains mostly an unknown world.
Example:
One example of how global warming and species trans-location is affecting human disease is the tic. David Letterman talks of TICs a lot, because he got bit once, but did not seem to get sick unless it affected his mind but nobody noticed...As he points out, there are several types, but it is only the smallest one that causes people any problems. And that small breed has started moving NORTH.
As the TIC moves into a new area, people who had resistance to the tics that were there are now finding that they are getting lyme disease from tics. That is explained by the simply fact that people in those areas do not have resistance to these new tics. [I live in such an area in the Northwest USA/Canada]. It is not known how immunity ["resistance"] is built up to tics - but it very well could be from a type of microflora in our guts... it could also be something to do with our skin, or the scalp where they lay their eggs. All we know is that people who have lived with the same tics for many generations do not seem to get the diseases associated with tics.... and that newcomers DO, or that new tics will cause the people there problems.
In conclusion then, I could say that human immunity has to do with "being one with our environment". It is not just a cliche. Harmonious co-existence means adapting to the world around us by what we have inside us, and hopefully that will happen on its own before we have any problems, or that we will learn about the important factors - such as what we need in our diet - to adapt to a changing world.
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Washington Post Article [2006] on this Topic:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/04/AR20060504019...
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