Stopping the autoimmune epidemic in its crib

Here's a bit of medical AH for you all. I don't know if this has been done before but here goes nothing.

How do you prevent the current autoimmune plague that currently feasts upon much of the western world's middle classes (i.e. lupus, MS, T1D, scleroderma, etc.)? I don't really think it's that hard--so long as you don't mind going back to a nastier, more brutish, shorter way of life. :p

--Butterfly away the advent of vaccines somehow. When immune systems are tied up in desperate and often hopeless fights with real foes, they have a lot less capital to spend on rogue missions. Same with pasteurization.

--Make sanitation a far lesser public concern (perhaps by killing the workers' rights movements that came about during the Industrialization)

--Decrease nutrition in general and protein intake in particular. Depleted bodies just can't assemble the T-cells and the like that are needed for any kind of meaningful immune response, good or bad. (Why do you think that the European diseases hit the New World Indians so badly? These were cultures that essentially lived on little besides corn and beans.) Maybe this could be accomplished by a virulent pandemic of a ferocious livestock disease like foot-and-mouth, brucellosis, etc.

--Keep birthrates very high; female bodies that are exhausted by constant pregnancy and childbirth will be less able to construct malevolent antibodies, and with the exception of Wegener's granulomatosis, most all autoimmune diseases are largely diseases of women.

What do you all say?

ArmchairPhilosopher
 
You know I'm pretty sure you can really hurt the whole autoimmune thing by getting rid of the hole 'OMG GERMS' culture. Kids getting exposed to more germs, rather then having their mom's scrub down everything with Lysol, will probably do a lot.
 
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