So there's a chance that the cold is a feature and not a 'bug'? That those that weren't vulnerable to it died off from other diseases like cancer so evolution went the other way?
Not likely. Cancer only gets serious after most of reproduction and child rearing and nurturing has been done. Whereas cold is pretty serious for infants for example.
Do note that evolution started to optimize when the conditions were a lot harsher. (Warm clean rooms with food and clean water, clean clothes, NSAIDs, etc.)
My point was that if getting a cold made a significant difference in the likelihood of some cancer then you may be substantially undercounting the risk of that cancer to children in the counterfactual where there is no susceptibility to colds.
(To be clear, I don't think the parent's speculation is likely accurate. I do think it's interesting.)
That's a very important point, and you are of course right. (Your original comment wasn't very clear and I misinterpreted it, sorry.)
Do kids (and people in general) get substantially less colds in warmer climates? Because then we can check cancer rates there. (And spend a lot of effort on controlling for other differences.)
> Your original comment wasn't very clear and I misinterpreted it, sorry.
Yeah, there's some tension between risk of being seen as condescending and making sure everything is sufficiently clear. In a low-stakes context like this (and outside of clarifications or responses to ELI5 requests) I try not to fill in all the gaps - when it goes well it leaves us all feeling a little smarter and when it goes wrong it occasionally leads somewhere interesting. The increased risk of misinterpretation was made even worse here by the priming of several other people making the point I wasn't.
Well, hold on there: natural selection is not always so simple. Older adults take care of their own as well as the extended family's offspring, providing a mechanism for selection.
Sure, my comment is generally obvious, except I felt it needed to be said as arkades's comment seemed dismissive of the risks to infants with his response of "Colds are not the flu. Children tolerate colds just fine."
Flu are truly scary causing deaths throughout childhood with increased survival around two years and then again around five years. My youngest turns five this month. Before she was two she was hospitalized with croup and she has had a rougher ride with illness than my other kids along the way too.
Exactly, newborns are regularly put in danger as people do not appreciate the seriousness of the most likely disease new borns could encounter, the common cold.
I appreciate you being complete here, though your opening also reads like you are doubling down on your previous response.
Your comment about croup is also bizarre, as the paragraph I included mention of it in is not about colds. Context matters.
My reply was narrowly addressing a mistake repeated across a couple comments. It was not intended to undermine the argument as a whole.
Your comment seems, by implication, to make a similar mistake: it doesn't matter much how long we were in a different situation - what matters is whether we've had enough of a chance to adapt to the new one. It doesn't take (k)X years to "undo" adaptations that took X years to find.
And yes, the 100 years you give are clearly not enough generations to do much adapting. Some of the items mentioned in the earlier comment (clothes, fire, shelter) are things humans have had for substantially longer than 100 years. But I don't know enough about the relevant time scales for anything to be clear to me about how much we've probably adapted to having them, which is why I didn't speak to that.
Fair enough: evolution works via both drift selection mechanisms, the latter which may quite suddenly imposed.
My view is that the past century or so may be an increased period of both driftband (through geographic contact) remixing, possibly to be followed by a selection process, whether by civilisation collapse, singularity, or other mechanisms.
In particular, it seems that the dramatic reductions of, e.g., early childhood mortality, represent the lifting of an immense amount of selection. To what end becomes an interesting quesstion.
I think having invented shelter, food, clothes vs reliably having clean clothes and warm shelter and food is a big difference.
Similarly how we have the surplus resources to keep people alive and well (and thus productive) with seriously adaptive-maladaptive trait groups, eg. Stephen Hawking and other famous physicists of the 20th century. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
Got any evidence to back up those bold claims? People die from high fevers. People with compromised immune systems can get killed by the common cold. People die without food or protein. And what even is acid-forming food?
The original commenter is encountering a lot of negative reaction because of his reliance on new age language to make his points in this community that hews strenuously to a concept of scientific methodology, but nonetheless he is correct that fever is mostly a protective adaptation that decreases infection mortality rates. Obviously there are temps above which fever can be damaging, so a complete abdication of intervention is not the way, but allowing fever for the most part to do its thing is helpful according to decades of mainstream medical research since the 80s.
I haven’t investigated those claims so have no opinion of their merit. Even science begins with the urge to look where we have not yet thought to do so. To dismiss another with vitriol is anti scientific, even if their intent is not scientific.
I'm not about to just be neutral on everything until they are proven false - if there is a claim for which I have no personal evidence and no evidence is provided, and my understanding of the world, based upon previous evidence, suggests that those items are wrong, I'm rejecting that assumption with extreme prejudice until sufficient evidence is provided. And as always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Your cultural expression of truth is not justification to socially lash out at others. Whether in the name of science, god, or some other ideal, the act is violent.
That's stretching the definition of violence to uselessness - by utilizing the term as such you're basically watering it mean very little, and to hold no weight in the accusation.
Yes, fevers can be beneficial as long as they don't get too high. I'm not aware of any evidence that "getting a cold is a great thing" though, unless maybe you have bladder cancer...
I think the commenter was conflating the symptoms and the infection. They were saying that the symptoms are the beneficial signs of the body actively fighting infection.
There's this fad diet, known as the pH diet, that's based in the assumption that people's bodies have a certain pH level and most ills are caused by this pH level being out of whack. So, naturally, it follows that acid = bad and alkaline = good (don't ask.)
That so bizarre - our bodies literally regulate ourselves to within 0.1 pH, and have 3 different mechanisms of maintaining it - why would we need or want to have a diet to adjust that? I know, you're just the messenger, and don't believe in it.
It started with the (vaguely somewhat plausible) notion of the acid ash hypothesis. Foods when fully oxidized can have a more acidic or basic ash, depending on the constituent elements. Phosphor and sulfur oxidize to the phosphate and sulfate anions, which are acidic, while calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium cations form hydroxides/carbonates. The theory goes that to maintain buffered pH, the body has to cations from somewhere, leaching it from bones.
Nowadays we know that most pH regulation is done with carbonate/bicarbonate via respiration, with ion transport managing electrolytes.
The alkaline diet has devolved to just throwing "bad" foods in the acidic bucket and "good" foods in basic, irrespective of chemistry:
Please provide scientific proof in the form of peer reviewed research or delete your comment. There is no room for these kinds of wild and ridiculous statements without proof.
> Please provide scientific proof in the form of peer reviewed research or delete your comment.
I want to caution against this kind of gatekeeping on a forum like Hacker News.
We all adore the scientific method; nobody wants to dispute its worth and value to the species.
However,
1) As we've seen again and again in a wide array of fields, many of the systems of peer-review have failed to guarantee (or in some cases even provide reasonable assurance) that the results are robust and true. There is an ongoing replicability crisis in a number of fields, including health-related fields.
2) There is still value in logical assertions made without scientific proof; there is nothing wrong with taking personal observation and applying inductive reasoning as part of the toolchain of decision making.
> There is no room for these kinds of wild and ridiculous statements without proof.
I don't find anything wild or ridiculous inherent in the suggestion that the human body is capable of basic self-maintenance, nor that exposure to pathogens or other undesirables is a causal factor in the building of immunity and other defenses.
People can point to epistemology all they want, but from a practical perspective bunk is bunk and if you insist on rigorously refuting every crackpot you come across, your community will be overloaded by bunk.
Our bodies are, but you're going to have to tell us why it's a great thing. Cold medicines just suppress the symptoms your body would use to deal with it normally, so it can last even longer! Sounds like, if it's a good thing to have a cold, that cold medicine helps.
Our bodies are not perfect, you know? That's why cutting out a mostly useless part of it, the appendix, can actually save someone's life. Our bodies overreact and take bad decisions all the time.
There aren’t any other medications that we give for the cold. I think you are thinking of antivirals given to people with early stage influenza. Different disease, with different treatments.
Mostly bullshit. A couple of studies on multivitamins that include zinc in developing nations showed a very small reduction in the incidence of an upper respiratory infections-approximately 8%. In studies of zinc supplementation and the zinc nasal spray in first world countries the effects of zinc have largely been disproven. It’s just marketing crap.
Its not bullshit. Taking vitamin C + zinc is much more then anecdotal, there is planty of evidence in medical journals, some people for some reason like to cherry pick negative ones (that is, there are no negative ones, even 8% is still better, given that treatment is chepaer then watter).
Those supplements work, they changed life of my entire family. I personally find it ridiculous for people to object. Yes, some may not get full blown effect just like with anything but in majority of cases they work. Personally, they changed my life and I didn't measure on a one year sample.
I don't know. I've noticed that if I take zinc pills along with vitamin C pills on the first or second day of the cold I start feeling better within two or three days and within a week the cold is almost gone. If I do not then the cold can easily last a couple of weeks.
I’ve often thought about this argument. However, you have no way of knowing how long that particular case of the cold would have lasted if you hadn’t taken pills. Plus placebos are an amazing thing.
It gets biased because a single positive feeling is enough to get the human mind to think there is a causal connection between the pill and the "cure".
There are hundreds of variants of the common cold virus, and you are at any time more or less immune to a subset of them, so many times after you're exposed you just feel ill for half a day. If you pair one of those occurances with your magic pill intake, you'll truly believe the pill caused you to get better, and then you'll keep buying that pill every time you feel a cold coming up for the rest of your life.
A real medical study is 10,000-100,000 patients, it's not possible to draw any conclusions from a single human's observation in this regard... but people keep trying, it's due to the nature of the human mind and its analysis of causality :)
Not in my case. I can suffer for an entire month with a runny nose, cough or sore throat. Of course, this is all anecdotal and it could all just be the placebo effect.
Oh god. That's a good question / thought experiment (edit: okay, maybe not exactly as stated), but how long will it be before the headline "Vaccines cause cancer" starts making the rounds on Facebook?
Might it be possible that there could be one vaccine who's risks outweigh its benefits? Or are all vaccines completely safe and effective and that's the end of the story forever?
No, but we have many other vaccines and some crackpot could make up some fake data claiming that vaccines cause cancer and that we never had all this cancer back in the "good old days" before vaccines were invented.
You're thinking much too logically; these people will either deny basic facts or base their opinion on something completely disproven, in order to cling to their opinion.
Cancer is a fairly modern disease. You can even see from the accounts of encounters with native tribes, cancer is virtually unknown until they start consuming western food.
Yes Egyptians started the "modern" diet of consuming grain/wheat etc. They also have records from those eating that type of food poor dental hygiene.
The hunter gathers tribes we all encounter have very low (if non existent) rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other western diseases. Once they start consuming a modern diet of flour, sugar etc these diseases are now at extremely high rates. You can see this in the aborigines of Australia for example. The inuit of Canada, and so forth.
Your links about dinosaur cancers said they found cancers only one type of dinosaur. I would say that's a genetic thing more than an environmental. Then the other animal cancers mentioned underneath seem to have a human component involved.
You forget that life expectancy for native populations aren't due to them to not living long lives, but more due to the fact they have more deaths at childhood (due to stuff like bacteria infections and other diseases we now prevent). So you have a big chunk of population dying young. Also these cultures can be more violent and often have wars killing a big chunk. But past that bump it's not as short as the average (it's far larger). For example the Native Americans if one of them lived to 40, he could expect to live to round 70. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12o4py/what_...
So yeah the not living long enough doesn't really hold water. Also juvenile cancers weren't really a thing at all until the modern world (more likely bacterial infections until we discovered penicillin were more likely for juvenile deaths).
Cancer increases with age, but also with smoking, drinking, pollution, bad diet, obesity, lack of exercise, and exposure to viruses. I wouldn’t be surprised if people living in a tribal society had lower cancer rates even if you corrected for age. On the other hand, if they did get cancer, survival rates would be much lower.
No, the Atlantians engineered the virus to combat all cancers. But it mutated after their disappearance and now only stops bladder cancer, while causing some really annoying symptoms.
To be fair, the idea of ancient advanced civilizations is slightly more believable than ancient aliens, simply due to the difficulties associated with traversing star systems.
Even worse, both of these ideas, while obvious "crackpot" territory, are much more believable and less fantastical than the claims of most of our current religions, which most people in the world still believe. So as long as we continue to respect peoples' religious beliefs, I have a hard time with dismissing these ancient aliens/advanced civilizations claims out-of-hand.
First, if you have the ability to engineer a bioweapon like this and spread it around to eliminate cancer in humans, why wouldn't you just genetically engineer the humans to not have cancer (i.e., just bake the ability into people, instead of having an airborne agent which will have much less efficacy since not everyone will catch it)? And secondly, why would you want to give people the suffering that comes with colds?
So, that leaves 2 possibilities:
1) Cold viruses were engineered, but they evolved to their present state where they're actually a big nuisance rather than a big help, or
2) Cold viruses were just a natural evolutionary outcome.
Either way involves cold viruses getting to their present state through evolution (both ways being undesirable to humans), not engineering, and #2 satisfies Occam's Razor better because of what I wrote at the top (i.e., engineering contagious viruses to fix a problem in human biology is a Rube Goldberg-esque solution).
I guess if you really want to get wacky, you could postulate that in this ancient society, they had some sort of religion or philosophy that humans shouldn't be biologically "tampered with", so either most people or at least the authorities would have rejected a straightforward medical solution, so some rogue person or group came up with the virus scheme (somewhat similar to how we can't get everyone to actually update their software to fix security vulnerabilities).
Threads like this made me with HN had a 'verification' system for certain (opt in by poster) posts a la /r/AskHistorians/. If you are not familiar, therein any comment not made by a verified user or not following extremely strict citation guidelines gets deleted.
As long as everyone keep it civilised and learn from each-other I don't really see the point.
When someone posts obvious misinformation he's downvoted to oblivion fairly quickly, and when someone makes an honest mistake he's corrected by people who know better and hopefully update his views adequately.
"What if somebody honestly posts compelling, non-obvious misinformation? How confident are you that would be corrected?"
My hopeful attitude is that none of us are so fragile and gratuitously impressionable that this would be dangerous.
My further hope is that anyone that might be so impacted would incorporate the digestion and (eventual) repudiation of this information as part of their intellectual maturation process.
My final hope is that we all learn how dangerous and stifling it is to hand over defining and legitemising "truth" to others. You need to learn and grow as an intellectual being and that doesn't come in a hothouse protected from all perturbations.
That would be some super interesting co-evolution. My guess is "no", but only for armchair reasons - way outside my area of expertise.
My understanding is that mouth and throat cancers are realy uncommon before middle age, so the moderate but ubiquitous fitness loss from the cold is probably worse, evolutionarily speaking, than the substantial but infrequent fitness loss from dying of cancer later in life.
It seems plausible, however, that the mutations which make cells cancerous might also impair their response to viral infection.
In general you'd think that viruses are good to avoid if you don't want cancer. Once they invade a cell they're basically just bits of RNA floating around waiting to fuck up your DNA.
So if this ends up being found true it's entirely possible that some other viruses that don't kill you, make you sterile or cripple you might actually make you stronger. I'd be interested to see more of this type of research on other less-deadly conditions like chicken pox, measles, flu, etc.
Why do you think the strongest of the strong bacteria are found in hospitals? Because they do a lot of cleaning and disinfecting. The weak are purged, the few who remain don't have to compete with the weak on other axes, thus they can concentrate on developing resistance.
In your home, where you don't clean as strongly and as frequently, there is a wide variety of bacteria who compete against each other, and can't spend too much on developing resistance.
> Why do you think the strongest of the strong bacteria are found in hospitals?
I presume you mean strong against antibiotics and sterilisation. The evolved bacteria are likely weaker along other dimensions (that are less important for survival in a hospital setting). Some evolution is compromises, improving X has cost Y.
Aside: the mega-plate video is an unbelievably good demonstration of bacterial evolution: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 especially note the tree at the end showing how many different mutations evolved.
Applying the precautionary principal would mean only getting vaccinated for potentially life-changing viruses like polio, mumps, etc. and skipping vaccinations for the inconvenient viruses like flu/measles/chickenpox/etc. It's interesting that the popular opinion on vaccines is binary with anti-vax and all-vax, I haven't heard anyone outside of my dog's vet advocate getting as few vaccinations as possible.
10+ years ago I saw a medical news report that said that people who hadn't had a cold for N years (where N is perhaps between 5-7, but is otherwise forgotten) were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer. I wish I'd saved that article; I've think about it whenever I have a cold, but don't have the pubmed skilz to dig it up.
The only thing I’m familiar with is using BCG vaccine vs. Superficial bladder cancer. And that is an immuno therapy. A PTEN mutation allows mycobacterium to enter cancer cells preferentially, and then invites an immune response that the cancer cells themselves had evaded. PTEN is a common mutation and bladder cancer, but is not seen in healthy bladder urothelium.
Edit: I should have read the article before commenting. The virus in the article also does not attack the bladder cancer, it has exactly the same mechanism as BCG. Although hopefully it is reliant on a different targeting mechanism than the PTEN mutation.
This is probably still an improvement, though. I haven't seen it happen often, but I've certainly seen cases of BCG instillation backtrack into the central circulation (my first case of this actually seeded his bone marrow with it), and then you've got a case of TB. If there's less morbidity if that happens here, and I presume there is, that's still better.
Is it true that people who rarely show common-cold symptoms have weaker or under-active immune systems? Are the differences meaningful beyond just the common cold? In other words, is it true that chronically sick people are actually healthier in some sense?
Bladder cancer is sometimes treated by immunotherapy with an attenuated form of tuberculosis (BCG), so I wonder how revolutionary this is. Maybe the side effects aren't as bad? Maybe it's safer?
This kind of thing is totally expected. I am surprised by so many negative comments and that shows that many HN folks are still on mainstream dogma and suffer the tunnel vision provided by the authority with its own agenda.
This is basically form of immunotherapy - most important thing for cancer is to evade immune system. Anything that triggers it in vacinity can have cleaning effect. In Japan you can get colly vaccine for example (intentional bacterial infection). In history, there are number of example of remissions after serious infective disease (in this case not so serious).
Its so obvious that it hurts me that people fail to see it. What is not obvious is what agent will do this.
It also makes one wonder weather certain vaccines actually promote cancer given that those vaccinated quickly clear future disease so infective agent doesn't have time any more to trigger the appropriate immune response (I am not in antivac camp, this is only logical)
Does the cold virus target cancer on its own or is this a treatment where outside help is needed to get the virus in the same place as the cancer. Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1217:_Cells
In this study, 15 patients with the disease were given the cancer-killing coxsackievirus (CVA21) through a catheter one week before surgery to remove their tumours.
