What is it about pollen that makes people sick?
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Human immune systems are meant to be fighting a constant war. Before the modern era, parasites were basically a given. People would have worms and all kinds of nasty things crawling around inside them, feeding off of us.
In our relatively parasite free lives today, we still have immune systems geared up to fight an enemy that isn’t there. Imagine a nasty bar that needed brutal bouncers to keep customers in line, but the bar got rid of the bad customers and kept the bouncers. So you have these massive guys hanging around just waiting to beat the living daylights out of anyone who even looks like they might cause trouble.
That’s pretty much what’s happening with seasonal allergies. An over active immune system is protecting you from a non threat because it doesn’t have anything real to deal with.
There was a guy who had really bad allergies, so he went to Africa, walked around barefoot where people shit on the ground, and infected himself with hook worms. It cured his allergies at the small price of worms living in his intestinal tract and feeding on his blood.
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