Modernity has made us allergic
A lot of people take their allergies for granted, but real treatments for allergies are available and they work. I am on allergy shots and my severe cat allergies are effectively cured, along with my lifelong hay fever. My son is doing sublingual immunotherapy for several food allergies including peanut and he is now able to eat several whole peanuts. Before he would react to milligrams; in a couple of years I expect him to be able to eat a PB&J. Luckily his eczema is gone now but if it wasn't we'd be trying Dupixent which is a wonder drug for a lot of people, and treating eczema in infancy is believed to stop the later development of other allergies and asthma as well.<p>It hasn't been understood until recently (and still isn't known by many practitioners) that these allergy treatments are <i>dramatically</i> more effective <i>and</i> safer when started in the first months or years of life. It makes sense that treating allergies would be easier while the immune system is developing rather than afterward. I suspect that in twenty years it will be standard to start infants on sublingual immunotherapy for all the common allergens (literally putting a tiny, strictly controlled amount of the allergens under the tongue once a day, simple as that) as a prophylactic starting around four months of age, and that will essentially eliminate all of the common allergies in the population. We need more research to get there, but that's the trend I see.<p>Another strong possibility is we'll finally discover the factors our immune systems are missing in modern life and reintroduce them, possibly in the form of probiotics, and stop most allergies from developing that way. Either way, I hope this is the last generation that suffers from high rates of allergies.