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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.
If you did, you'd see why I haven't been sick in 15 years.
"In my neighborhood no one ever got polio. No one, ever. You know why? 'Cause we swam in the East River. We swam in raw sewage! It strengthened our immune systems. The polio never had a prayer; we were tempered in raw shit!"
A good reason to give my fiancee for NOT cleaning my house every weekend... I'll tell her it's good for you!
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
My mother was stricken with Polio in the early 50's, just a few years before the vaccine was approved.
Although I've never seen any literature that support this, she says Polio was known as a Middle-class disease, since the middle-class were more likely to have cleaner houses (thus not exposing babies to as many germs and developing healthy immune systems). The fact that her mother was a clean-freak before and after my mother was born may be coincidental to her contracting Polio, but I like to think they're related.
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2B1ASK1
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I'm presuming that in eight years time some other publication will 'discover' this again and maybe someone will link to me instead of Susan Taylor...
I often work inside a clean room, and once I saw a colleague of mine have a severe hay fever attack in there. Tears streamed from his eyes etc. He had to sit down for a while to recover. He told me it's the change of environment (in this case from dirty to clean air) that did it for him. Very strange.
-- Cheers!
Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
"A totally sanitised environment is no problem to be raised in as long you are going to continue living in it forever"
Untrue. There are more problems with an untrained immune system than just the fact that it won't strengthen. At the low end of the scale are allergies, where you develop an immunoresponse to things that aren't actually dangerous, and have to start avoiding certain foods that you'd otherwise be able to eat. At the other end of the scale are autoimmune problems; where the immune system starts to attack you itself. I recall a case of a guy who's immune system was attacking his own intestines. They countered this by (yeah, I know) giving him *worms*, so that his immune system would turn against them instead, and, being occupied, allow his intestines to heal.
You immune system also fights many other things other than just outside invaders, such as cancer, which is a lot more common than you might think, but most of the time the immune system can take care of it and so it's not a problem.
So no, proper immuno development is essential, even if you can live in a sterilised environment all your life.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
No, that would make her Spider-Woman, and my embryo would split into about a thousand embryos, and she would lay us in sack in the corner until we hatched. Then I would be one of a thousand Spider-Men. Let's see Doc Oc or the Green Goblin fight off THAT.
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
It could also be that those with allergies tend to move away from the farms. I wouldn't last a week on a farm without some Zyrtec.
My sister and I grew up in the same environment. We lived in air conditioning, but spent most of our childhood playing outdoors in suburbs of Minneapolis. I have severe pollen-based allergies. If I do not have air conditioning or medication, I can wake up with my eyes glued shut from secretions, my throat can hurt like the worst strep throat you ever had, and my eyes and ears itch constantly. I am also mildly allergic to pretty much every food. My sister has no allergies of any kind.
My family was on the farm two generations ago, and one generation ago they still worked on the farm during the summer. Some of them have allergies, some don't.
My daughter's skin has reacted to certain foods since she was a baby.
So, I think there are probably genetic predispositions to allergies. However, I think there may be a role for environment in those who are less severely predisposed to allergies than the members of my family.
Reminds me of the Carlin bit:
"The Hudson River was loaded with raw sewage. That's right, we swam in raw sewage. You know, to cool off. And back then the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids every year were dying of polio. But you know what, in my neighborhood, nobody ever got polio. No one. Ever. You know why? BECAUSE WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE. It strengthened our immune system. The polio never had a chance. We were tempered in raw shit.
What are you going to do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit? I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're gonna get sick and you're gonna die and you're gonna deserve it because you're fuckin' weak and you have a fuckin' weak immune system."
Im nearly immune to the posion ivy/oaks families too. I can see it on my skin if ive been exposed, but they dont itch or bother me. Ill ask my mom if she was ever exposed to poison Ivy while preggers.
if your theory is correct, then I wish I could go back in time and surround my mom with stupid people, because I am deathly allergic to them now.
Intuitive: I figure your immune system is like anything else in your body -- if it doesn't get a regular workout it becomes less efficient and when you stress it, it may behave unpredictably.
Anecdotal: I grew up playing outside a lot. My favorite thing to do was hydraulic engineering on mud-puddles. I built dams, canals, locks with gates, stirred up mud to see how it behaved, etc. I was out in the woods a fair bit, got the occasional tick (this was before Lyme disease was such a concern, and as long as you caught the ticks the same day, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever was nothing to worry about). We had cats, our relatives had dogs, etc. To this day I have relatively little issue with allergies or illnesses of any kind. Yes, dust makes me sneeze, but it honestly puzzles me why people stampede to get flu shots every year -- I've had the flu maybe twice in my life, it sucked, it lasted about three days each time, and I got over it. People look at me like I'm nuts -- "You're not getting a flu shot? WHY NOT???"
On the other hand, just about all the people I know with allergies, constant colds, etc. are the ones with a horror of anything that might be less than perfectly fresh and germ-free. I drink milk that's a few days past the sell-by, I eat stuff that's been in the fridge a couple days, I have lunch at greasy spoons where the kitchen staff maybe doesn't wash their hands every time they touch their own face. I don't go out of my way to find "dangerous" food or items, but neither do I avoid things that may have tiny amounts of "harmful" stuff on them like my life is at risk every time I eat a sandwich.
Logical: I won't use antibacterial soaps unless there's no alternative. Why? Because using them indiscriminately breeds resistant bacteria. This is just logic backed up by known scientific observation of microbial evolution. It's the reason your doctor won't (or at least, shouldn't) prescribe you antibiotics every time you have a fever -- if it's not bacterial, the drugs wouldn't do you any good and would breed resistance in bacteria that aren't causing you any issues yet. Then those resistant strains would take over and now you have a problem, and it's a tough problem because the doctor has to give you massive doses, or use a different antibiotic -- and there are only so many antibiotics out there. Trying to sterilize the environment is the same thing on a grander scale.
If more parents let their kids go ahead and, for example, chew on the cat's tail, the kid's immune system would get exposed to a few new agents (and learn to deal with them), and the cat would swat the kid who would then learn "don't chew on kitty, it hurts". That's two problems solved. Don't let them play in raw sewage, but don't keep them in a plastic bubble either.
-- Old Man Kensey
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"
Your friend probably has colitis. This is a disease that is quite common in the Western world, but does not exist at all in the "developing" world. The theory is that if your immune system is never exposed to parasites, it forgets what it is supposed to be attacking and goes after your large intestine. This will cause constant internal bleeding, mucus, and diarrhea. If it gets bad enough, you will die of malnutrition and dehydration. It usually starts happening, right out of nowhere, when you are in your 20s.
Because nobody likes to talk about digestion, there have been very few studies of colitis or attempts to find cures. People love to raise awareness and money to fight cancer and other disease, but ignore this one because intestine problems are not polite to discuss. It's a damn shame.
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