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Chronic Disease and the Germ Theory
Given our modern understanding of the immune system, the ways in which anthropogens affect it could be revealing. Human immune responses are either innate or developed through exposure to unfamiliar stimuli over an extended time. Nontoxic antigens with which humans have evolved over thousands of years ("good germs") are likely to cause little immune response, whereas anthropogens — man-made, novel, and recently introduced — are more likely to cause a response, albeit a low-level one, in a not-immediately-life-threatening situation. If exposure persists, the response may become chronic. A discussion of the possible mechanisms for this response is beyond the scope of this article, but the mechanisms may be related to genetic or epigenetic influences on chemical receptors, such as through nutritional factors. Because such a response is undifferentiated, it is likely to be systemic rather than localized.
What does the immune response tell us about the inducers identified in this article? It seems the human immune system is reacting to new, man-made environments and lifestyles (anthropogens), to which it has been exposed for a brief period (ie, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, approximately 1800 CE) and to which the immune system has not had time to develop. To characterize this reaction as lifestyle-based offers only part of the explanation. For the last 30 to 40 years, in particular, we have experienced the emergence of a sedentary, nutritionally engineered, consumption-driven, security-conscious, screen-focused environment, the likes of which have never before been experienced by humans. The fact that most chronic diseases have also risen to prominence during this time (albeit along with an aging population and its genetic propensities) would point to the modern industrial and postindustrial environment as a distal "cause of the cause" of modern chronic diseases.
These ideas are not meant to imply that such a modern-day environment has not benefitted human health. It has been primarily responsible for the decline in infectious diseases during the last 1 or 2 centuries. The rise in chronic diseases is a recent aberration and probably reflects an inevitable point of diminishing returns in a system of exponential economic growth, which is being reflected in our physiologic systems. Anthropogen-induced metaflammation could offer a generic etiology for chronic diseases of similar import, albeit slightly different in scope, to that of the germ theory for infectious diseases.
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