Perhaps we need a happy medium- as long as we have control of our parasite load and which ones they are, perhaps it’d be for the best.

The Old friends thesis is certainly interesting. I’m only dimly aware of it. But down the last few decades I had wondered which of the emergent major health concerns of the age were:

a) actually new
b) growing in prominence because people were no longer killed faster by other stuff
c) just finally getting attention but formerly just subsumed in eons of things like unexplained premature death, mutation, or regarded as madness.

Many I still don’t know- autoimmune diseases seem to be a bit of a at least in terms of their new scale and frequency, and a bit of b. I guess that includes food allergies too, as well as asthma, both of which seemed to have been increasing rapidly since my 70s childhood.

I even wonder, from a different category, where autism fits in. There are many areas where removing parasites from our lives is reported to have improved everything including mental function. But I suppose that doesn’t have to be a universal truth.