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Overly Sanitized Environments Lead to Poor Health?
bignickel writes "A recently-released study examined the health implications of living in an overly hygienic environment. According to the 'hygiene hypothesis,' living in such an environment early in life can lead to problems with allergies and autoimmune diseases. The study compared lab rodents with rats and mice living in the wild. Time to stop Lysol-bombing the house?"
I'm not a doctor but I couldn't agree with this article more. I grew up picking rock, bailing hay & working with animals. Countless times I'd come home with dust, alfalfa or straw everywhere (eyes, nose, clothes, etc). I worked with a lot of people and every member of the family worked as soon as you were able to lift something. What was odd was that you had entire families and not one of them would have allergies.
Now, I'm sure there are exceptions but I think that it would be an interesting survey to compare people who work in dirty grimy environments with people who work in corporate America. I spent my childhood running through the weeds, pulling wood ticks out of my hair and watching my mom put iodine all over my cuts & scrapes (hurts like a b*tch). Although by some people's standards I grew up in utter squalor, it was a lot of fun.
I have two cousins who moved to Minneapolis and grew up in a house with an air filtration system. The tiniest pollen or cat dander will send them into sneezing fits. Those air filtration systems are more harm than good in my opinion.
To my knowledge, I don't have any allergic reactions or hay fever. Now, this is just my personal experience but when I lived out in the country, I didn't know anyone except my teacher who had hay fever. Once I went to college at age 18, I met tons of people with hay fever. Is this correlation due to the fact that our childhoods were spent in filth or is it simply because people with allergies move away from those areas? I'm not sure but considering that allergies can "develop" later in life, I'm prone to believe that the less you are exposed to tiny particles, the more your body wigs out when your immune system encounters them.
If you're a parent, I would suggest getting your toddler/infant out to the park as often as possible and let them get some fresh air. Yes, it has smog & pollen in it but everyone has to deal with these their entire lives.
There's no analogy to be used here, it's just simply speculation. They've done this study with lab mice, now why don't they do a sampling of populations and ask people whether they work in an office with a controlled air system or outdoors/farm work where they're exposed to plants & animals daily.
The human body is extremely adaptive. Anti-bodies are perfect examples of an immune system being exposed to something and then being able to deal with it later. I speculate that if people aren't exposed to dust, pollen, dander, etc. then their bodies will have a much more difficult time discerning them from actually harmful foreign particles.
My work here is dung.
I've always had this point of view all my life. I'm latin american so it's very easy to contrast fellows from extreme opposite social backgrounds in any main avenue; from what Ive seen, people that grow up in shanty towns, with no vitamins, poor diets and other problems have by average stronger, agile and toughier body types than more fortunate individuals.
Kind of odd, but its not uncommon to read news about a young high profile kid die from an asthma fit. On the other side another one survives from four shots and a head crash in a hold up in some poor neighborhood.
I guess this is called survival of the fittest.
The wild rodents also showed as much as four times higher levels of immunoglobulins related to allergy and autoimmune disease, but didn't get sick.
Isn't this what we call "Vaccine"? The entire study is somewhat misleading. If I wanted to live allergy free, I rather wear a mask or something, not roll around dirt all day in hopes of my immune system picking up where it left off 4000 years ago before the invention of soap.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Evidence and rational thought have very little impact on people who think things like
"the only good germ is a dead germ"
"bright lights deter crime"
"second hand smoke is dangerous"
"criminals prefer machine guns"
in the end, people don't like scary and/or icky things and demand that "something" be done about them, even if "something" makes the problem worse instead of better.
Clear, Dark Skies
And you're not the first one to notice that. There's a significant concern that because Mac users aren't in the habit of virus paranoia that they are setting themselves up for a very, very big fall.
Clear, Dark Skies
The article is about allergies in specific, but is very relavant. A few researchers are claiming that because our environments are so sterile as children these days, more adults have allergies (and illness) as a result of not being exposed to certain elements (good or bad organisms, etc) as a child. Compelling read, I highly recommend it.
There is a difficulty with proving the theory that cleaner houses in your youth make you more suspectible to develop allergies later in your life. Fact is that there is a big genetic factor in allergies, so the reverse theory is just as likely to be true: people who develop allergies have a large likelyhood of having allergic parents who where very keen on keeping the house clean.
Most of the studies that try to find a correlation between growing up in a hygienic environment and developing allergies do just that: finding a correlation. They do not find any evidence for either the first or the second theory, because the research was not set up to look for it. For that you will have to do studies with growing up children whose genetic compound is known, i.e. test the parents before you test the kids.
Another problem is that the correlation between our cleaner environment (in general) and the amount of allergies (in the population) doesn't prove anything either. Lots of sicknesses are on the rise, for instance here in the Netherlands the amount of physical therapy treatments has doubled in ten years. Yet nobody in their right mind will make a connection between the need for these treatments and the cleanliness of our houses.
Secondly, I am not so sure that our hygienic conditions are better now than 20 years ago. I know for sure my parents house was cleaner than mine is, and the same goes for most of my friends. And lots, lots of other things in our environment have changed over that last 20 years: hardly any insecticide residue on our vegetables anymore, no more CFC's in spray cans, more and more cars, more and more overweight people, no more Iodide in the bread... and endless list of correlations can be made, and a lot of these could in theory affect our natural defense system and our suspectibility to allergies.
My wife is 9 months pregnant, due to pop any day now. This is our first, so we've been shopping for day care centers. It seems all they want to tell us about is how everything is desanitized constantly. Shoes are not worn into the rooms. Hands are washed immediately after entering the room. Surfaces are sprayed down every few minutes. Each toy is desanitized immediately after a kid puts it down.
I came out of the first tour and said to my wife, "it was great and the only concern I have is that it's too damn clean. My boy's going to need some dirt and filth." Not only are they hampering the kids' natural defenses, but they're also evolving the next uber-germ.
As we humans advance in medical technology and other pursuits, we are systematically weeding out strains of bacteria harmful to our existence.
By doing so, we also reveal strains that have immunities to our current antibacterial means. They generally arise via mutations (as bacteria have a fast growth and reproduction rate) and become apparent when we try to kill them off with old means.
Trust me, the more we as a species continue to "lysol-bomb" everything we touch and eat off of, we only harm ourselves in the long run. Eventually, more strains that are immune to current antibacterials will appear (not just ones immune to penicillin, which have been around for 50 years) and we will not be prepared for them. Then we will have to develop immunity. Then or now.
Just practice a little common sense, here. There's no need for OCD level sanitation, ever. Except maybe in a hospital or lab setting.
The article doesn't say that exposing you to allergens will guarantee that you do not become allergic. It says that NO exposure WILL make you allergic (or at least increase the probability.) The one does not imply the other. I believe studies have also shown that overexposure to allergens can make you allergic as well.
Damned if you do...
Your attempt at tieing this article to some sort of anti-Western movement goes nicely with your otherwise misinformed position.
Suggesting that "antibodies" inherited from out mother is the same thing as developing our own immune response is well... just totally simplistic.
If I do get sick, at least I'll live. More people die in developing countries from things we can easily remedy than the other way around.
Hopelessly facile argument. The point of the article was that auto-immune disorders (which generally don't kill you outright) are a largely Western affliction because our immune systems have not been properly calibrated. Were you to get Crohn's disease (largely Western) you would live on, sure, but you'd have diarrhea for the rest of your life and some fun stomache pains. People with Crohn's disease have been successfully treated by deliberately giving them pig whipworm eggs.. once the immune system sees a *real* threat (real to the immune system, pig whipworms can't reproduce inside us) it eases up on inflaming the intestines.
Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that kids that grow up with pets, like a dog, have less of a chance of developing allergies then those that don't.
Please get a clue before you start posting drivel like the above. "anti-Western rhetoric" sheesh. paranoid?
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
I don't think it is anti-western rhetoric... they are not advocating a return to 19th century living by the 1st world.
I think this is the reaction to anti-microbial everything for children. Kids aren't allowed to play outside unsupervised in the dirt anymore (many kids aren't allowed to play outside anymore). Soaps, baby toys, etc., all comtain special anti-microbial materials. Super antiseptic sprays are a hot seller... and no-one eats anything raw or unpasterized before.
The over-protective parents who make sure their children are not exposed to anything are probably doing more harm than good!
We do--it's called vaccination.
English is easier said than done.
The entire premise is flawed because there is no such thing as overly hygienic.
No, the premise is not flawed. Antibodies are produced in response to a threat so if there is no threat there are no antibodies. That is why vaccines work by introducing a small amount of threat to your body.
Sure, if you grow up in a sealed bubble, you will likely lack antibodies for certain things. However, you will have antibodies passed onto you from your mother.
If your mother was raised in the same sealed bubble as you she wouldn't develop antibodies to pass onto you.
We already know that every living thing develops certain immunities/resistance in specific environments. People in certain countries develop resistance to many indigenous parasites, while vistors become seriously ill.
If I do get sick, at least I'll live. More people die in developing countries from things we can easily remedy than the other way around.
It depends on what pathogen infects you as to whether or not you will live. Due to the overuse of antibiotics we have created "superbugs" such as MRSA and VRE that are beginning to find there way into the general population.
This article is just more anti-western rhetoric suggesting that the west would be better off if we were dirtier and that we should apologize for being better off than someone else. We've already gone through our development and I'm thankful to have benefitted from it.
The article isn't anti-western, it's anti-shortsightedness. What benefits you today may not benefit the generations that follow you tomorrow.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
So, here's an interesting theory: Pregnant women who are around allergens sometimes pass those allergens through to the developing embryo, which spontaneously aborts if it can't handle it. If this happens within the first few days of pregnancy, it'll never register as a miscarriage - she was just "a few days late".
Thus, people who grow up in less-than-cleanroom conditions are *born* hardier, because natural selection takes out the rest of us before we're born. In ultra-hygenic areas, mothers are exposed to less potential allergens and low-grade toxins, and thus more fetuses with potential immunodeficiencies come to term.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
It seems to be a ubiquitous misconception that "clean" means somehow pure.
What we call "clean" often means, "covered in cleaning chemicals", or perhaps "free from stuff that is alive or was recently alive, like bacteria, house dust, cat hair etc.", or just "free from visible dirt".
I think it's fairly common knowledge (though apparently not on slashdot) that perfumes and other chemicals are a common cause of allergies.
So therefore it is more likely that it is the paranoid housewife's love of agressive chemical cleaners with 'lovely' fragrant perfumes, that causes allergies in those clean city homes.
Regarding the clean room discussion - the term is also misleading: clean rooms are usually a type of laboratory, and so contain all manner of chemicals. They are usually only a low dust (or airborne particle) environment. I myself worked in a clean room, where we used nasty solvents (chloroform, benzene) for cleaning apparatus and dissolving chemicals. It would be no surprise to me if someone entering there had an allergy attack.
My mum thought she had asthma or similar, because she would wheeze when we opened the kitchen window. The she cleared out some cupboards and threw away a load of old household cleaning solvent bottles, and the wheezing went away. The draft from the window had been wafting the solvent vapours over to the kitchen table.
Of course, a subject like this is rarely black and white, and I am sure the argument about exposure to microbes has merit (I myself have had a bout of colitis, and was at one point was tempted by the worms treatment)