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?"

Comments

Farm Workers Without Allergies

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Farm Workers Without Allergies

[Gulthek]

Doesn't quite work as reliably as you think. My wife has bad allergies to cat dander, but grew up surrounded by pets and helped work her mother's pet store.

Re:What is overly hygienic? Where is the story?

[lawaetf1]

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?

Re:George Carlin

[hunterx11]

Based on that logic we should be exposing our children to Ebola, Lassa, Malaria, Rabies, Smallpox, and whatever other nasty viruses we can think of to toughen 'em up while they're still young.

We do--it's called vaccination.

Re:Predisposition

[Hentai]

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.