Seth's Blog

In 1973, a NIH parasitologist named Eric Ottesen discovered a high rate of worm infection on the tiny island of Mauke. He gave the islanders an anti-parasite drug. Nineteen years later, he did another survey of worm infection.

Compared with 19 years ago, Ottesen found, there was much less filarial infection on Mauke. Only 16 percent of the population harbored the microscopic worms, as opposed to 35 percent on his first visit. The reduction resulted primarily from treating the islanders with the antiparasite drug diethylcarbamazine, which Ottesen had initiated during his earlier visit. And what about allergies? There’s no question that there was a heck of a lot more allergy out there this time, says Ottesen. Nineteen years ago barely 3 percent of the people had allergies. This time it was at least 15 percent. The complaints ranged from eczema to hay fever and asthma to food allergies. What’s more, the dominant problem was one nobody had even heard of 19 years earlier: octopus allergy. It’s the number one offender, says Ottesen. People are breaking out in rashes, hives, swelling of the throat. Yet octopus is nothing new to them–they were eating it when we were there before.

Ottesen believes there is something specific to parasites that makes them protective.  I suspect this is another example of the protective effects of bacteria and bacteria-like chemicals, which I believe may come from both food and parasites. Another possibility is that the antiparasite drug killed bacteria. Nothing is said about obesity; I wonder how their diet changed over the 19 years. A switch from homemade (nonsterile) food to factory (sterile) food may be part of the problem.

When I started to sleep better (due to standing and morning light), my health improved: I stopped getting colds. There was plenty of pre-existing evidence linking better sleep and better immune function; a new study connects the two even more strongly.

When Alex Comb’s son was an infant, he had pretty bad eczema. (Eczema is a reddish dry skin rash.) He also had a nighttime cough, a dry cough that started and stopped throughout the night. The cough lasted months. It turned out he was allergic to carragenen. The cough was mostly, but not entirely, eliminated by avoiding carragenen. Sometimes there were flareups.

When the son was 2 years old, he had a mild case of eczema. Doctors wanted to give him steroids. Alex started researching the causes of eczema and how to alleviate it. He came across research on the hygiene hypothesis. In a forum, he read that some people had tried probiotics for eczema with some success. Research on the subject had had mixed results but it seemed worth a try.

So Alex and his wife gave his son DanActive (a probiotic dairy drink) every day for over a year. After a week or so, he noticed improvement. The nighttime cough completely went away. The eczema went away 95%. This isn’t a use of DanActive I could find on their website.

When his son was 3 yrs old, Alex and his wife stopped the DanActive. They assumed his immune system was better. He had gotten tired of drinking it all the time. He drank it less. His diet got broader too; he started eating yogurt. He never really stopped drinking it, he just drank it less.

A few months ago, the son started a 10-day course of antibiotics for a nasal discharge. A few days later, the nighttime coughing mysteriously resumed. It lasted at least 5 nights, and ended around the same time the antibiotics did. It was an asthmatic cough rather than a respiratory infection cough. An asthmatic cough is much drier and shorter.

A few weeks ago, the son was put on antibiotics for an abscessed tooth. Two or three days after antibiotics started, the asthmatic cough started again. Was it the antibiotics? He had not been drinking the DanActive so Alex and his wife started giving it to him again. They gave him the antibiotics earlier in the day and the DanActive before he went to bed. The very first night they did this the cough went away. They kept doing that and the cough stayed away. He has had no cough since then.

What’s telling is the clarity of the correlations. They support the idea that we have a large need for bacteria-laden foods.

From a new study:

Men who eat salmon and other fish high in omega-3 fatty acids on a regular basis have a decreased risk for developing advanced prostate cancer, new research suggests.

The association was most pronounced among men believed to have a genetic predisposition for developing aggressive prostate cancer.

Men in the study who ate one or more servings of fatty fish a week were found to have a 63% lower risk for developing aggressive prostate cancer than men who reported never eating fish, study co-researcher John S. Witte, PhD, tells WebMD.

The study is not the first to find that men who eat fatty fish have a lower risk for the most deadly forms of prostate cancer. But Witte says clinical trials are needed to show that eating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids actually lower risk of aggressive prostate cancer.

“Needed”? Or is this like a Grammy winner thanking God in his acceptance speech? That is, ritualistic. I prefer this way of making the point:

Roswell Park Cancer Institute President and professor of oncology Donald Trump, MD, tells WebMD that there is enough evidence suggesting a protective role for omega-3 against prostate cancer to justify a large trial studying whether eating a diet rich in omega-3s — or even taking omega-3 supplements — can actually lower risk of prostate cancer.

Someday an astute person will write a paper called “How accurate are clinical trials?”

The protective power of fish oil is supported by the very low rate of prostate cancer in Japan — 15 times lower than in America, according to this.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

A year ago I speculated why Jane Jacobs didn’t like Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Now, rereading The Economy of Cities, I have a better idea. Here’s what Jacobs says on p. 118:

Once a society has developed its economy appreciably, any serious stagnation [of economic development] becomes appallingly destructive to the environment. Common sequels in the past have been deforestation, complete destruction of wild life, loss of soil fertility and lowering of water tables. In the United States, lack of progress in dealing with wastes, and overdependence on automobiles — both evidence of arrested development — are becoming very destructive of water, air, and land.

In other words, Jacobs says that the ecological disasters described in Collapse were due to economic stagnation. In a stagnant economy, problems pile up without being solved. A common problem is too much reliance on one thing. In a healthy economy, new goods and services are constantly produced, often to solve problems created by old goods and services. In a stagnant economy, this doesn’t happen. A rich economy can be just as stagnant as a poor one.

Diamond understood none of this. Not even close. Instead he proposed twelve reasons for the collapses he studied. They included “overhunting,” “overfishing,” and “population growth”; the complete list is here.

Jacobs’s point applies very broadly. Why do Americans pay so much for relatively poor health care? Because the healthcare industry has been stagnant. There is too much reliance on drugs but nothing is being done about it. Non-drug solutions are not being slowly developed. (Alternative medicine, with its religious and dogmatic overtones, is no solution.) The healthcare industry is too resistant to change. Why is the American car industry collapsing? It was stagnant — too resistant to new ways of doing things. The statistician W. Edwards Deming tried to interest American manufacturers in higher-quality ways of making cars, but failed. Then he went to Japan, where he succeeded. The newspaper industry is collapsing because it too has been stagnant. Its current problems started several years before the internet. Instead of trying to solve them, newspaper publishers continued to rake in high profits. Nothing lasts forever, Jacobs was fond of saying.