Why are allergies on the rise – and how can medicine combat them?

http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3001607.ece

"One of the most extraordinary increases has been in peanut allergy, up 117 per cent between 2001 and 2005. An estimated 25,000 people in England are affected, and many are at risk of a severe reaction if they are exposed to the nuts."

In my opinion, these people are growing in number because they are looked after too well, live to adulthood and go on to mate with other peanut allergy sufferers. The result is a new generation of peanut-allergic sufferers. I have nothing against these people and their offspring some of whom I know to be perfectly nice people, but it seems that in schools the policy is now to forbid other children from bringing in their peanut-butter sandwiches in their packed lunches. To be honest, I find that such over-zealous practices repugnant to my Libertarian and Darwinian instincts.

It seems the medical profession are about to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of taxpayers' money researching the whys and wherefores of this state of affairs before reluctantly coming to exactly this conclusion, ie that our health and political system actively encourages the unproductive to remain unproductive and the physically- and mentally-deficient to flourish at the expense of those who are productive, healthy and normal.

The US government used to require engaged couples to have blood tests before allowing them to marry in order to prevent a generation of mentally or physically-deficient people from becoming a burden on the state.

Perhaps all that is required is the implementation of this very sensible policy to reduce the number of those who are peanut-allergic and likely to further multiply with the predictable medical coddling these research scientists and campaigning doctors will no doubt propose, regardless of cost.

I am certain that the traditional Eskimo policy of abandoning their weak and ailing to the elements while the tribe moved on to richer hunting grounds was rooted in necessity rather than primitive callousness.

Whole tribes of Eskimos must have perished in their attempt to look after their weak before reluctantly coming to accept that those who are weak and ailing must be abandoned to the inevitable if the existence of the tribe itself is not to be sacrificed in the name of the mawkish sentimentality that now passes for compassion.

Perhaps we resemble the Aztecs way in more ways than we would like to think. While it is true that we do not actively and directly use human sacrifice to appease our Sun God, we are certainly actively and directly using the sacrifice of our Liberty to appease our God of Social Welfare while the political classes further indulge in more damaging Liberal do-gooding. (Brown's proposal to give pregnant women as much as £200 to persuade them to eat healthily is yet another example of how much they like using our money to show us how much they care.)

If Conservatives are now to be "compassionate" without the entire Conservative Party rising up in one body to hang, draw and quarter Cameron for refusing to promise lower taxes, or at the very least replace him as leader very soon, then we are all most certainly doomed, and deservedly so.