Adaptive chronic infection, structured stress, and medical magic bullets: do reductionist cures select for holistic diseases?

With a generalized language-of-thought argument for immune cognition, we model how population-directed, structured, psychosocial stress can impose an image of itself on the coevolutionary conflict between a highly adaptive chronic infection and the immune response. As population-level structured stress appears a fundamental part of the biology of disease, we raise the possibility that simplistic individual-oriented magic-bullet drug treatments, vaccines, and risk-reduction programs that do not address the fundamental living and working conditions which underlie disease ecology will fail to control many current epidemics. In addition, such reductionist interventions may go so far as to select for more holistic pathogens characterized by processes operating at multiple levels of biocultural organization. The complications are representative of the concerns of cultural immunology, a new field of study.