Immune to Immunology
I am reading about the Immunity Debt, a new term being coined to explain why people who have been socially distancing during the Pandemic are getting sick with other more common viruses for which they have not been building immunities. I have said for a long time that my sisters and I are more robust and in good health because we grew up eating a lot of emerging markets dirt, compliments of our mother’s preference to work in the less developed parts of the world and drag us along. We took good precautions like boiling our water so that the most obvious bugs couldn’t get us, but you cannot live in the wild and not be exposed to the wild. That meant to me that we had spent our youth testing fate and building immunities that would prove most useful in the modern, highly-infectious world of our adulthood. This was just a theory and I have only one piece of somewhat valid empirical evidence to substantiate my theory.
My mother had five siblings. She was born in 1916 with two older brothers and two older sisters. She added another brother a few years later. Her oldest brother, John, went off to join the Navy at a young age and spent his tours in the Far East, mostly aboard one ship or another through WWII. He came back to live out his years with wife Kitty, doing various menial jobs in San Diego and then died of natural causes at 89 years of age. Her second brother, Pete, stayed locally in the Finger Lakes area and married Louise, but killed himself by the classic suicidal prescription of a gun to his head when he was in his fifties. We know very little about the whys and wherefores of his death, but as an unnatural death, his immunological state is less relevant. The same is true of her older sister, Josephine, who was tragically washed away in a flood in her youth. Her other sister, Aggie, lived in Ithaca her whole life. She married a local man, Art, and the two of them ran a grocery business where they interacted daily with many of the people in town. They lived an active life with bowling in the winter and golf in the summer, all the while spending their spare time gardening in their yard. Aggie died of natural causes at 89 while Art, a very slender and wiry man his whole life, lingered on to age 92, when he too expired from natural causes. My mother’s younger brother, Paul, spent most of his adult life in recreational therapy and then the restaurant business in the Ithaca area and then Arkansas with his wife Maryanne. Maryanne was a roly-poly gal who died of complications of diabetes around age sixty, wherein Paul died of natural causes , like his two older siblings, at age 89.
So, my mother’s sibling reality was that her three surviving brothers and sister all lived out their lives in the first-world Middle America with normal or slightly gregarious social interactions, both urban and small town. They all, coincidentally, lived to the same age of 89 and died of somewhat normal old-age maladies, one in San Diego, one in Ithaca and the last in Arkansas. I go through that reminiscence to contrast it to my mother’s life. She grew up as her siblings did, in the Finger Lakes area of New York and stayed in that area until she was 30. She then went to the wilds of Venezuela and Costa Rica where she worked in the indigenous communities for the better part of fifteen years, exposing herself to every imaginable tropical germ and virus that existed. After about seven years spent amongst the good old germs of America, she moved to Rome, where she exposed herself not only to the Mediterranean varietals of viruses, but also traveled extensively into the less developed parts of the world as a UN development diplomat. She exposed herself globally to virtually every corner of the virus and germ-laden world. SHe lived out her days in the cauldron of Las Vegas, where she spent the last thirty-five years of her life, dying finally of natural and unspecified age-related causes at 100 years old.
My mother outlived her older and younger siblings by eleven years, a 12.3% variation, which I believe represents a meaningful statistical aberration (standard deviation of 4.6). What that all says to me is that eating global and tropical dirt most likely improved her immune system to the point where she lived longer than her siblings in a meaningful way. Whether that means anything or is worth anything is anyone’s guess.
The conundrum of human insistence is that you have to take risks and put yourself in harm’s way in order to build the immunological ability to withstands the rigors of common viruses and germs. The Navy Seals and backyard athletes say that when you are wounded just rub some dirt in it and carry on. That theory hinges mostly on the natural clay base in some dirt to form a natural bandage of sorts to keep out germs and infection. That makes it a bit different than my analogy of eating dirt to build immunities, but may not be quite as far-fetched as all that since both build protective layering for the complex systems of the human body.
A few years ago a friend of mine (name withheld to protect his dignity) fell while doing what I like to call the underwear dance. That’s the dance we all do when we hop around trying to lift our aging joints and place our feet one at a time into the leg holes of our u-trow. This is actually quite a dangerous bit of acrobatics and should not be attempted at home without a wall or structure to which you can grab for balance…and yet we all do it in one form or another several times each and every day. This friend fell and broke his femur and hip, which is the classic traumatic injury for aging adults. It was at that time that I learned that those aging adults who have chosen the “you can’t be too rich or too skinny” path in life, learn that you can, indeed, be too skinny. Being too skinny does not allow your bones to have enough natural resistance to build up adequate calcification to make them as strong as they can be. Being heavier and giving your bones the benefit of more weight-bearing exercise strengthens them. Here is a case for carrying more weight, which is counter-intuitive to aging healthfully. Take risks to avoid risks, I suppose.
I am not sure where this all leaves me in the Immunity Debt question being raised by the spiking of non-COVID-related viral infections spreading around the world in the post-pandemic arena. Vaccines are just controlled exposure such that a small dose of the malady (an antigen) allows your system to produce its own antibodies that can successfully combat the more dreaded and deadly disease. I guess the only answer has to be to get as much knowledge as we can about our own specific human genome and tendencies and then run a Pareto-Opimized analysis of how best to add risk through controlled exposure to reduce more detrimental or lethal exposure later on. Catch a cold to stave off a fever? Eat dirt to avoid disease? Mother Nature is a difficult and fickle master who wants us to have germs to keep ourselves healthy. They say that without insects and bugs of all sorts we could not live. I say, use common sense and the best normal advice available to you and carry on.