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I'll be fascinated to see how this plays out for people with autoimmune conditions - generalised heightening of the immune system feels like it would be dangerous for those people. Are any immunologists lurking who might be able to speculate?

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Its often completely normal to use healthy controls in a trial like this, healthy people not getting ill is your target audience and the long term stage 3 will be against healthy people. So many drugs are not tested against obvious groups that might produce a poor result to make the findings as strong as possible but it means in a lot of cases chronically ill people are making judgements on no data at all.

It seems like it could also be quite dangerous for those with food allergies.

But then it is mentioned that the treatment "also seemed to reduce the response to house dust mite allergens".

The treatment also supposedly activates macrophages in the lungs (and thus not elsewhere). Only some small particles and vapor droplets from foods go into the lungs.

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