Appendix: What Next?

The implications of this project are vital to human health and to finding the balance between an over and under saturation of pathogens in the environment of a child. In the future, children may even be injected with certain pathogens in order to make them sick, so that their immune systems are able to repress autoimmune diseases and allergies.

The results of this project imply that there is a need for change. Western society has eliminated the vast majority of pathogens from its environment, but the repercussions of this have only come to light recently. However, these repercussions are severe, and if they go unnoticed (as more and more countries in the world become developed and less unsanitary), the numbers of people with life threatening autoimmune diseases and asthma will increase. Consequently, the death rate from these diseases will also increase, particularly for areas that cannot afford to have everyone tested and treated for certain diseases.

It must be taken into account that no one wants to revert to living, once more, in unsanitary environments. This includes those people who recognize that overly sanitary environments may be hazardous to the health of children. However, this is not the intent of such research; doing so would simply destroy centuries worth of the work done by physicians in order to make our environments safer. The intent is simply to isolate the key components of pathogen-saturated environments that prime the immune system, so that these in turn can be replicated in a laboratory and administered to all children. This will give the same benefits as living in a pathogen-saturated environment, while eliminating the risk of death.

The cause for this occurrence must quickly be isolated so that this vaccine of sorts can be used to prevent autoimmune diseases and allergies, and hence, to save the lives of many people. Future experiments that could be carried out in order to determine this exact cause would be invaluable, and a possible future spinoff for this project.

Other spinoffs of this project would investigate what could be done for people who have grown up in sterile environments, or those who have autoimmune diseases, in order to either prevent the autoimmune diseases, or to cure them. This is very likely tied to finding the cause of the high rate of autoimmune diseases in people who, as children, grew up in sterile environments, but no one is sure.

Another future spinoff would investigate the effect of passive vs. active immunity on the rate of autoimmune diseases and allergies.