Coming up on today’s Right Hook, the news that scientists might have cracked it with a solution to peanut allergies has George finding out more about how allergies affect the world.

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If you happen to be one of the millions of people worldwide who go weepy when the pollen count is up, or for whom selfish means a trip to the doctor, then at least know that your confinement is helping humanity.

While there’s a common belief that allergies are a modern inconvenience and a weakness, the reality is quite the opposite; allergies are actually a direct result of having a particularly active immune system, one which takes its immunosuppressant identity very intensely.

In a normal immune system, whenever foreign bacteria or substances find their way inside the human body, antibodies recognise their presence and bind themselves to white blood cells in order to kill the invaders. Coughing and sneezing, along with a burning fever, are just a few tricks the body had picked up to push the germs back out of the body or kill them inside it – capture them all in phlegm and then eject the whole mess out of the body with an explosive sneeze or hacking cough.

Allergies happen when the body’s policing immune system decides to go a little bit fascist, and attack anything that breaks the norm. Dust or pollen, for instance, and other things which might provoke an immune response. The body senses the same sort of threat as a cold virus, and attacks with all guns blazing.

In 2008, researchers at King’s College London shed some light on the subject of allergies and why the human body is so prone to overreaction. In this study, they suggested that back when mankind was more concerned with hunting and gathering in nomadic tribes bedecked in loincloths, a very virulent and aggressive pathogen was stalking them. In order to survive, primitive men and women started to produce antibodies that were better able to fuse to white blood cells, and kick off a never-before-seen immune response capable of staving off infection.

And we owe these disease-ridden primitive human beings a debt of gratitude, for our entire society and its survival is thanks to their immune systems. But we are paying it off with the antibodies floating around our immune system today, some millennia after the deadly pathogen was wiped out. So now when dust enters the body, the antibody relives his glory days and gears up to save lives – only to be put back in his place by an anti-histamine.

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