Help! And, social anthropology intersects vaccination debates

[velvetpage]

Wikipedia is failing me, as is google at the moment, and I've had a request to explain a certain term I used a day or so ago in a community.

The term I used is "grandparent factor," though I'm not sure that's the term anthropologists use for the situation I'm thinking of. When I learned about it in anthropology years ago, it was an explanation for menopause, which traditionally happens in middle age; that is, humans become effectively infertile several decades before the end of their expected lifespan. We're the only members of the animal kingdom that experience a loss of fertility so early, so anthropologists proposed that it might be due to the grandparent factor. Less-able elderly people stayed home from the hard work of hunting and gathering, and looked after the small children who were not yet old enough to participate in that hard work, thus freeing up the parents to contribute their strength and youth to the family and community. The explanation posits that menopause is nature's way of creating an available pool of babysitters within the family, people who would have a vested interest in seeing that the children of their lineage were being cared for.

This came up in a discussion of shingles. I just found out (from doc_mystery - it's no end of useful having doctors on one's friends list!) that shingles is not a new infection; it's the chicken-pox virus that has been hiding out in your nervous system ever since you had chicken pox as a child, and it erupts when your immune system is somehow suppressed. The interesting part is that regular exposure to chicken pox during adulthood seems to act as a booster shot, making it less likely that the person will eventually get shingles because their body will be able to fight better, even with a depressed immune system. I see a connection there. Older people who look after young kids are going to come into regular contact with chicken pox, all things being equal, so they're going to get an additional boost to their immune systems every few years. The grandparent factor offers an increase to natural immunity from shingles.

Anyone have any links to prove I'm not pulling this out of thin air?

Comments

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

That's one of my big worries with the chicken-pox vaccine, actually. (And I'm generally pro-vaccine.) It's not ridiculous at all to think that blocking chicken pox as a childhood disease will cause an increase in shingles, which is a much more serious disease.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

But regular booster shots should eliminate that worry as far as it can be eliminated, thus reducing the toll of the disease overall.