Slashdot Mirror
Early Exposure To Germs Has Lasting Benefits
ananyo writes "Exposure to germs in childhood is thought to help strengthen the immune system and protect children from developing allergies and asthma, but the pathways by which this occurs have been unclear. Now, researchers have identified a mechanism in mice that may explain the role of exposure to microbes in the development of asthma and ulcerative colitis, a common form of inflammatory bowel disease. The researchers show that in mice, exposure to microbes in early life can reduce the body's inventory of invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells, which help to fight infection but can also turn on the body, causing a range of disorders such as asthma or inflammatory bowel disease (abstract). The study supports the 'hygiene hypothesis,' which contends that such auto-immune diseases are more common in the developed world where the prevalence of antibiotics and antibacterials reduce children's exposure to microbes."
All those bullies sticking my head in the toilet were just trying to help expose me to germs. I should send them a thank you note.
Humanity (or human like creatures) survived for several hundred thousand years without modern medicine. If the body was not capable of developing defenses to disease we wouldn't still be here.
Finding this hard to swallow personally. I was born with pneumonia and had chronic infections early in life. In my 20s I am still plagued by allergies, asthma and generally poor health despite generally good habits as far as diet, exercise, and hygiene. I cringe when I think about what kind of state I'd be in if I didn't.
It's a good one, but there are several competing theories out there too. One of the best I've seen is the correlation between acetaminophen use in children and the development of asthma in children. It just so happens that clean, microbe-adverse developed nations have much more access to acetaminophen than dirty, unsanitized third world countries....
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
... are due to not eating enough dirt as a kid. Well, I tried, but you know what mothers are like.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This isn't a question of if the body can defend itself, but if it is better to let it do so or not. For example you can also heal from a broken bone, however it is better to not have to. Near as we can tell it is all downsides, no upsides to breaking bones. When you are young there are usually little long term downsides (at least if it isn't major) but still no upsides.
What these studies indicate is that is not the case with illness. It is actually better to get sick at an early age than not to. It looks like it is even more of a matter than it helps develop your defenses, but that they may actually be more likely to turn against you if they aren't used.
That is not at all obvious, and rather interesting research.
And breast-feed, which we already knew. Some immune components are transferred with that milk.
What it doesn't say is give up on sanitation, homogenization, etc. The other side of that would be a high infant mortality. We don't really want to be putting intense evolutionary selection pressure on our own kids.
Bruce Perens.
...I was sick as hell as a kid, and grew up to develop an autoimmune issue. I always assumed that the illnesses I went through as a kid gave me a ninja immune system. This would kind of imply the opposite. Most research I've seen suggests that being sick when young does in fact build the immune system.
Long term changes in gene expression possible depending on the age timing of individual immune system loading. Why this sounds familiar - ah, the individual clinical immunology vs. population wide epidemiological benefits fight again. So, any funding to long term research on synapse remodeling connected to induced immune responses in humans (like 10-15 years) or just continue to let the complement cascade to eat the toddlers bit stupid?
Third world is not a proof because, unfortunately, non surviving children unbalances the sample. There are no adult asthma cases when they died at three. There where no Alzheimer cases when life expectancy was shorter than today.
All those nutcases throwing around how our produced-foods society is causing all these new illnesses.
Is it hell. It is because we are being stupidly over-clean.
Biology never evolved in a sterile laboratory, it evolved with constant bombardments of infection that helps the body calibrate sensitivity, in exactly the same way that your skins touch sensors adapt to air pressure, your eyes adapt to light and countless others. Why should it have been any different to the immune systems sensitivity?
In fact, there is a partial truth to the produced-foods part, and that is more of a case that the food is too clean rather than microbe-filled.
We have been taught that all possible microbes in food are terrible, but are they?
Only a few select sources of food are overly-infected with nasty things, specifically beef supplies (which are just horrible for you in general)
Most other things are completely safe eaten raw. That includes milk, which has been blasted as dangerous to drink raw, but actually aids people with autoimmune. (now if only there was an actual full-on study for it since the sporadic cases of it all around are promising)
Fact is, if there is any sort of food source infection, the odds of you even getting it are as likely as you getting madcow disease or some other rare illness from eating, simply due to all the safeguards we have in taking care of animals, tracking food all across the world, etc.
Overly-cooked foods are of course bad for you, since burned foods contain carcinogens. But good luck getting anyone off that, some people like their food charred a little. You'll never be able to stop the grill lovers either.
As a person with crohns, it pleases me more is being found out about the intestinal tract and how the immune system functions there.
There was a recent huge discovery on how the immune functions were expressed there to prevent it from attacking vital resources and nutrients.
As an illness that is claiming so many more people due to this clean-freakishness that has become of society in recent years, it is about time people start to realize that clean isn't all there is to being healthy.
The study supports the 'hygiene hypothesis,' which contends that such auto-immune diseases are more common in the developed world where the prevalence of antibiotics and antibacterials reduce children's exposure to microbes."
Not to mention soap, bleach, clean water for washing, floor coverings, indoor heating and cooling, etc.
In the 11th century, Maimonides wrote about asthma -- in the children of the nobility of Spain, where they actually washed and generally kept house before the Christians reconquered the Iberian Peninsula and made handwashing (etc.) cause for you to be hauled off by the Inquisition. The children of the poor, on the other hand, had dirt floors and crawled around in the dirt with dogs, chickens, goats, etc.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
What made (past tense) you stronger is the stuff that killed half of each generation of your ancestors' competition.
What doesn't kill you delays the inevitable, but if it doesn't keep you from reproducing it improves the quality of your children's mates and thus makes your grandchildren stronger.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You mean George Carlin was right?
"Wouldn't want some guy goin to hell and be sick!" - George Carlin
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Main difference in modern life is that most of us live long enough to see our grand-children and usually our great-grand children - human like creatures 10,000+ years ago probably didn't.
Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors were very much like us today. You'd have a hard time telling us apart assuming similar childhood environments.
As for grandchildren -- it doesn't take a long lifespan when girls are mothers at 15. And bear in mind that humans evolved menopause. It didn't just happen, it's a complex process that has evolutionary costs and so must have significant evolutionary benefits. Which means that our very distant ancestors must have lived until their 50s often enough to make a difference. Hunter/gatherers today (and a hundred years ago) do, so it's hardly surprising.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
What these studies indicate is that is not the case with illness. It is actually better to get sick at an early age than not to.
s/sick/exposed to some bacteria/ There's a big difference between being exposed to common bacteria of the soil and animal digestive tracts and coming down with smallpox, meningitis, etc. From the articles I've read, the protective effect is seen with completely harmless bacteria, so there's no reason to claim benefits from exposure to pathogens. Especially when you consider that infant diarrhea accounted for the majority of that 50% infant mortality.
With some exceptions. If your lifetime chances of avoiding a pathogen are slim, it may be better to be esposed in infancy while getting lots of maternal antibodies with every meal, assuming that Mama also gets exposed often enough to maintain a high antibody titre. That process is why polio was less of a threat in the 17th century, where the stuff was in the water supply all over the world, than in the 20th where we were actually doing things that blocked routine fecal-oral transmission.
All in all, with pathogens I prefer vaccination where possible.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That is why I try to play The Germs for the kids at least once a month.
Getting immune to "stuff" is good for you (as a species). News at a 11 - maybe a film at 1. Patently obvious frankly.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
THAT was the problem in the 90's. Small children would get a sniffle...helicopter parents run them off to the doctor
for "a pill". Some do anything they can to keep from getting sick. Getting sick and letting your body heal itself
(within reason), will make you less likely to get sick the next time because the ANTIBODIES will build up in your system.
The other thing is to eat raw veggies. Cooked ones or processed ones take all the "good stuff" out of them.
No. It's no longer a hypothesis if you've found the underlying mechanism. This is now officially a theory.
Maybe menopause is just the design life of the equipment. They didn't live to reach it before, probably fertile throughout their normal life, and they do reach it now because we have increased life span but didn't do diddly about increasing MTBF for certain components. Just like schizoid dementia or alzheimers or prostate cancer happen at certain ages - it doesn't mean that we "evolved" these but simply started living past the age where they start showing up.
soil to the wound was a typical street recommendation 40 years ago on my street.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Am I the only one who gets a titch annoyed with people who carry antibac-hand-gel everywhere to use at the SLIGHTEST of exposure to the world? I'm not talking people who use it when going to the doc's or at the grocery store if they're touching meat and stuff, but every. damned. time they touch any-thing at all. They're not even germaphobic, it just seems the 'in-thing'. Every time I've used it, I feel like I've taken a dive into an six-foot deep alcohol pool, and it burns.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Assume this study is 100% true.
I'll still take auto-immune diseases over dysentery or pneumonia in children: the two biggest killers of children in the world. Caused by germs.
When I used to take my kids around to see their grandparents, they'd rush outside to play with the dog in the dirt. My mother used to just smile and say, "Dirt is an essential nutrient for toddlers."
How does this affect the home schooled children who do not have the microbial benefit of socializing with the other rug-rat microbe incubators in a classroom environment?
Talk about buggy environments, that was the mother lode right there.
Short form of a crash prompt in a DOS shell:
Abort, Retry, Fail?
Long form:
Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
Typical reminder above Windows 3.1 developers' desks:
SS != DS
The short lifetimes of our distant ancestors mostly came from accident and infectious disease -- and up until 60 or so, your odds against both actually improve the older you get. Maybe fewer of them made it to those ages, but once they got out of childhood a fair number did. After that, their teeth were more likely to give out before their hearts did or before cancer got them (etc.)
As for the aging effects of modern lifestyles, I think if you research it you'll find that a reasonably active modern American is much more likely to be in good health than our ancestors were. There was a study published a couple of years ago (IIRC) that did a statistical workup of the average American of 150 years ago, and it wasn't a happy one. No question they were tough, because they had to be to make it through the week with their bodies in the shape they were: poorly-healed fractures and joint injuries, rheumatic heart disease, tuberculosis, endocarditis, rotten teeth, you name it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
actually dont dismiss this study. asthma is frequently multicausal and the human immune system is complex.
Acetaminophen would deplete the liver of _glutathione_ which is a major antioxidant. i believe a genetic susceptibility to lower glutathione combined with over cooked nutrient poor food deficent in critical aminoacids could do it, there are lots of connecting factors. consider the luketrine inhibitors developed these days, all this medical research and suffering and cruelty over a lifestyle and nutrient driven disease. and i saw this as an asthmatic that uses corticosteriods and several different bronchodialators . i also find the hygiene hypothese sad because asthma im my case developed when i was 15, previously i'd spent years swimming, i loved it underwater and would spend many days at pools and rivers or the beach in my youth, suddenly i lost the ability to fill or empty my lungs without several times more effort and delay, making everything more difficult when you can get your breath at all. i was born in india, and south africa. i didnt even see a toilet that wasnt simply a hole in the ground until i'd come to a "western" country after age 10. i had malaria when i was very young, there are theories relating that and igE too. i had lots of infections when i was young and because i lived in institutions i was given antibiotics although there was very poor control of infections achieved in the school. then 10years later i suddenly develop asthma, and its not as if it was an instant diagnosis, my mother refused to allow me steriods until i was old enough to consent for myself so for that time i lived on bronchodialators. during high school i would go to my room during recess and have a nebuliser with the lights out listening to music. now i can get by with a bit of dietary modification, keeping a very clean dust free, carpet free house and a minimum of steriods. but i still cant breath as effortlessly as i remember when i was in my early teens, unless ive taken huge amount of bronchodialators, to the point of being undesireable because of the side effects and long term health implications.
when i discovered glutathione it was life changing. i can reduce the medication i use. together with coQ10 i can sleep without needing medication to be able to breath in the night to get back to sleep.
I thought doctors had dogs lick head wounds to cure them.
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
. . . so throw in some exposure to Guns and Steel, and your children should be all set for life.
Note that in the case of Guns, polarity is important. Exposure to the wrong side of the Gun may have the exact opposite effect.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
has gone almost as well as the war on drugs.
I'm interested in whether this would apply for bacteria only or if it goes for viruses as well. You see, bowel disorders (specifically inflammatory bowel disease) are a lot more prevalent in children with autism than in children without. I'm probably going to be flamed to hell for this, but this study would suggest that there might yet be a possible link between vaccines and autism. Studies so far have focused on the heavy metals in the vaccines.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Invariant Natural Killer T? Sounds like a rapper.
My mother worried when I *didn't* come home caked in mud after playing out with my friends all day... saying that, I have never had a cold, flu, chest infection or anything. Never had a day off school or work through illness either.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Time out. Sorry, I hate subject lines that say "Occam's Razor". It is not "simpler" to speculate that accident and disease were more causal than diet. You can make that case in the body of your comment, that the death from bad diet would show up as hospitals eliminated disease and accident. But diet, e.g. starvation and malnutrition, does suffice quite well in establishing shorter lifespans in nations with the lowest of such, and is not less "Occamish". Applyng lex parsimoniae to select between two competing theories makes sense AFTER you have made your case, not in your subject line, unless it's really blatantly obvious to the point of being funny. Now I'm not defending the social commentary appended to the post you criticize - that modern western diets are bad. The more one can avoid simple dangers in early life, whether accidents or starvation, the more one can face problems one would not otherwise have lived to see, such as menopause, hearing loss, and serial cliches.
Gently reply
The thesis there is that current lifespans are shortened by bad diet, not that starvation was not a factor in the distant past. If I were reubtting that, I'd be pointing to archaeological evidence that until the advent of agriculture starvation was not a dominant factor in mortality. As it is, disease and accident for our distant hunter/gatherer ancestors were sufficient to account for most mortality.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=439616
anecdotal evidence shows my ancestors graveyards scattered with little headstones, some named, some not. Lines up with this data.
'intelligent agenda' (tongue-in-cheek) i think the show on a specific station was called. someone actually listen to the talk radio in gta4 beside me?
they talked about exactly this. a 3-way 'discussion' involving an uber-naturalist hippie, a huge-titted pharmaceutical rep, and a condescending health insurance rep.
the hippie said his mom left him to fester in his old filth to build up his immune system. now he licks mens room bathrooms for money or something. point is, he was super vocal about the benefits of exposing yourself to germs as a kid.
yeah.