Immune System Status Quotes

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living in humiliating and disgusting ways, such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with them, eating with them, touching them and certainly marrying them. In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing polluting in caste mixing.3 Purity

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known

As in the "real" world---the adult world---there is a pecking order in a kid's world, as well. It's an unwritten code and pre-existing class system you'll never find recorded in the archives of the school library or indelibly etched into the archway of the administration building. Nonetheless, it is there, perhaps even more real than if it was written down. Those who have mastered its ways achieve a kind of "Jedi-knight" status, and with that comes a certain immunity from it ever "boomeranging" back at them. It's an adolescent adaptation of the old king of the hill game with hundreds continually clamoring toward the top.

While conservatives like to put the focus for health on individual responsibility and “lifestyle,” a term they use as a weapon, Geronimus’s research reminds us of the social, interconnected nature of our bodies and our health, and the way that racism exacts debilitating vigilance from Black bodies. That vigilance has an invisible physical cost. The calamity here is not one of the personal failure but of societal failure: the conditions of insecurity that systemic racism not only perpetuated but actively fosters. The state of a person’s immune system is, among other things, a reflection of that person’s socioeconomic status and their history as a citizen of a flawed polis, I now understood.

As I wrote in my original report, “we have learned the immune system is not static, it changes with age according to environmental toxins, infections, and vaccinations. Vaccines are immunotherapy. That is, they are designed to alter the immune response to an antigen/infection. We have long recognized that the reasons some individuals react badly to immunotherapies, including vaccines, while the majority of people who are treated/vaccinated do not, has much to do with the recipient’s genetics and the status of the recipient’s health and immune system at the time of administration of the immunotherapy/vaccination.”12

He has now completed two books, the first on how investment dealers “fee-farm” over half of the life savings of many clients, and this second book about conditions which allow quiet professional corruption to remain hidden from the public, and ignored by authorities. What drives me? (in the authors words) I hope to have an impact upon the #1 cause of disability, disease, and stress in society today. I believe I have some unique perspectives on this from my experience. For example, the #1 cause of disability, disease, and stress is fear of economic uncertainty. In my experience, the #1 cause of fear of economic uncertainty, is unfairness between those who are protected and enriched within the “lifeboats” of certain professions, corporations or institutions, and those who are not so protected. There are different levels of protection by the law, and immunity from having to adhere to the law, depending upon the wealth, power or status of those involved. Justice systems simply do not often “look upwards” to investigate and prosecute those of great wealth, power and status. These rigged systems of governance, finance, justice etc, cause unfairness, injustice, and repeal the laws of poverty for a few very lucky people, and repeals the chances of prosperity for billions of others. A small few win by corruption, while the rest of society must lose by default. This is a broken system. The unfairness of rigged and/or broken systems, causes imbalances sufficient to destroy entire societies. Societies can literally shake themselves apart with the human vibration of living in an unjust, unfair world. At time of writing this, I am the chairperson of the volunteer Canadian Justice Review Board of Canada, working to better understand one of societies most valuable social systems,

For Europe, as for other civilized lands, infections by familiar epidemic disease surely became more frequent, at least in the major ports and at other foci of communication; but infections that returned at more and more frequent intervals became, by necessity, childhood diseases. Older persons would have acquired suitably high and repeatedly reinforced levels of immunity through prior exposures. Thus by a paradox that is only apparent, the more diseased a community, the less destructive its epidemics become. Even very high rates of infant mortality were relatively easily borne. The costs of giving birth and rearing another child to replace one that had died were slight compared to the losses involved in massive adult mortality of the sort that epidemics attacking a population at infrequent intervals inevitably produce. Consequently, the tighter the communications net binding each part of Europe to the rest of the world, the smaller became the likelihood of really devastating disease encounter. Only genetic mutation of a disease-causing organism, or a new transfer of parasites from some other host to human beings offered the possibility of devastating epidemic when world transport and communications had attained a sufficient intimacy to assure frequent circulation of all established human diseases among the civilized populations of the world. Between 1500 and about 1700 this is what seems in fact to have occurred. Devastating epidemics of the sort that had raged so dramatically in Europe's cities between 1346 and the mid-seventeenth century tapered off toward the status of childhood diseases, or else, as in the case of both plague and malaria, notably reduced the geographic range of their incidence. The result of such systematic lightening of the microparasitic drain upon European populations (especially in northwestern Europe where both plague and malaria had about disappeared by the close of the seventeenth century) was, of course, to unleash the possibility of systematic growth. This was, however, only a possibility, since any substantial local growth quickly brought on new problems: in particular, problems of food supply, water supply, and intensification of other infections in cities that had outgrown older systems of waste disposal. After 1600 these factors began to affect European populations significantly, and their effective solution did not come before the eighteenth century - or later. All the same, the changing pattern of epidemic infection was and remains a fundamental landmark in human ecology that deserves more attention than it has ordinarily received. On the time scale of world history, indeed we should view the 'domestication' of epidemic disease that occurred between 1300 and 1700 as a fundamental breakthrough, directly resulting from the two great transportation revolutions of that age - one by land, initiated by the Mongols, and one by sea, initiated by Europeans.