It hits on an earlier suspected, and that is that our domesticated animals are also experiencing immune problems that their wild counterparts don't experience and that's a valuable lesson.
For clarification, although there are helminths which are directly infective from person to person, the helminths which had been most common in the now "developed" areas had eggs which had to spend several weeks in warm, moist soil before becoming infective and running water and the flush toilet eliminated that essential aspect of their life cycle.SA wrote:Many intestinal parasites are passed from person to person when microscopic amounts of human feces get on our fingers, or when we walk barefoot on contaminated soil. Sewage treatment and running water prevent parasites from passing from one person to the next, Parker explains. But it wasn’t always this way.
In that light it's interesting to consider that maybe the "alarming" increased incidence of modern immune dysfunction in America followed the places, times and rates that America became electrified and installed flush toilets, and when you view a map of increasing MS incidence they do align.
It's always seemed interesting that because of that alignment, researchers have been inclined to consider MS incidence associated with the industrial revolution when maybe the industrial revolution provided the first electrified areas and a workforce that desired to and could afford to electrify their houses?