Hi Listers, I just read the a fascinating article in Science news which I wanted to share with you. The article suggests that many of the diseases that are currently accelerating in the US may be because of our attempts to eradicate bacteria and other organisms in our environment and in our bodies. I have heard this theory before and it makes a lot of sense to me, but this article took it one step further to include studies which showed that we may need our parasites in order to stay healthy.
Evidently, baffled by the rise of diseases such as athsma, allergies, automimmune diseases, rheumatiod arthritis and diabetes in the developed nations scientist have begun to investigate the possibility that our immune systems need exposure to a certain amount of bacteria and diseases in order to develop. With the combination of early childhood vaccinations, and our care to remove children from dirty or bacteria laden environments -- their immune systems never get the exercise they need and in later life either don't work well or turn on the body itself. I remember reading an earlier article saying that children who ate dirt when they were little had stronger immune systems than those who didn't. And I believe from watching the children of friends and family that unvaccinated children seem to have helthier immune systems, whether it is because the vaccines themselves are dangerous, or because the children got to experience more normal childhood diseases as exercise I don't know. I wonder what the health comparison would be with children in Japan -- most of whom don't get their vaccinations until they are several years old (I think). Anyhow, this article says it has something to do with stimulating the Th1 lymphocyte system which cannot grow unless it has outside stimuli. They cite a bunch of studies ; One of thm shows that children brought up on farms have less allergies than children brought up in non-farm rural environments or than city kids -- the assumption being because they are exposed to more dirt and bacteria. Another shows that children in large families, as well as those who enter day care early have less allergies -- presumably because they are exposed to more germs. Interestingly - the oldest children in large families were not protected from the allergies - since when they were little there were no other kids around. But the most interesting studies were the ones that postulate that inflammatory bowel disease comes about because modern sanitation has largely wiped out parasites in our guts, leaving our immune system to mistakenly attack the lining of the intestines since it doesn't have anything else to battle. They have actually tested this theory by giving six volunteers the eggs of the whipworm , a helminthic parasite which is about 60 millimeters long. All six volunteers showed substantial improvement in the symptoms of their inflammatory bowel disease. Now, that's a small study -- but even so, it raises some interesting questions about whether it is good for us to even try to eliminate all parasites and bacteria from our systems? Don't get me wrong - I definitely intend to continue to try to kill off as much candida and blastocystus as I can -- but it does make me once again come back to thinking that health is a question of balances -- and we don't yet have any idea yet what those balances really are. So I'm not sure if I would do a maintenance dose of CS, just in case, while I will certainly continue to use it to readjust the balance when it gets out of whack. Katarina -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: silver-list-requ...@eskimo.com -or- silver-digest-requ...@eskimo.com with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@id.net>
