> If your microbiome was damaged by evidently useless antibacterial treatments, it could be malpractice.
This is how I would describe the vast majority of applications of antibiotics. I'd like to be more charitable and say the people encouraging the use of antibiotics didn't realize the scale of the damage they were causing.
> Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.
The human virome ~is confirmed~ to be a thing, and includes bacteriophages. This bright biological line conclusively does not exist. Why would humans evolve to coexist with (or include) a large number of benign viral populations?
> Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body.
If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.
> That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.
Global warming is human-induced change. Removing EBV from the entire human population is human-induced change. The bar for causing change should be higher than leaving things as they are. A better analogy would be removing the appendix. There was no evidence this was harmful for 100 years! That doesn't mean it wasn't harmful!
> You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance
In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.
>This bright biological line conclusively does not exist.
It does. Bacteriophages cannot infect human cells. They can only do it by changing our microbiome.
>If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.
EBV causes millions of cancers, and it seems that it is likely to cause millions of cases of autoimmune diseases. It is known to cause vast amounts of harm. By the same logic. Beyond this, a large proportion of viral infections of EBV cause mono, which in and of itself is a great harm. You can't ask that every future intervention prove a negative.
> In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.
Is your theory that for some diets and lifestyles, EBV has beneficial effects? You can certainly design a study to account for this.
This is how I would describe the vast majority of applications of antibiotics. I'd like to be more charitable and say the people encouraging the use of antibiotics didn't realize the scale of the damage they were causing.
> Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.
The human virome ~is confirmed~ to be a thing, and includes bacteriophages. This bright biological line conclusively does not exist. Why would humans evolve to coexist with (or include) a large number of benign viral populations?
> Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body.
If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.
> That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.
Global warming is human-induced change. Removing EBV from the entire human population is human-induced change. The bar for causing change should be higher than leaving things as they are. A better analogy would be removing the appendix. There was no evidence this was harmful for 100 years! That doesn't mean it wasn't harmful!
> You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance
In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.