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Exposure to Wide Variety of Microbes May Reduce Allergies
sciencehabit writes "A new study reveals that people who grow up in more rural environments are less likely to develop allergies. The reason may be that environments rich with species harbor more friendly microbes, which colonize our bodies and protect against inflammatory disorders."
From the article: "To test whether or not biodiversity does indeed create a shield against such conditions, the team investigated the microbial diversity of 118 teenagers. The study participants, who had lived in the same houses their whole lives, were chosen at random from a 100-by-150-kilometer block in eastern Finland. Some kids lived on rural, isolated farms, while others lived in larger towns. ... surveyed all of the types of plants growing around the adolescents' homes. The participants were part of a separate long-term allergy study, so the researchers took advantage of that data to investigate the connection between biodiversity and allergies. ... Whether there is just something special about Finland's native plants or whether this finding can be applied around the world is still an open question, Hanski says. 'Many research groups worldwide could easily attain these data from their study populations, and then we'd know how general these results might be.'"
Are also less likely to come into contact with carcinogens in their food, air and water.
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
Hardly news, it's been reported many times over the last few years that research indicates our overly sterile environment is causing problems with alergies, asthsma etc. Heck, even our grandparanents knew this with old wives tales about eating dirt to make you healthy. A collegue from India tells me they have a ceremony involving putting some mud or something in a babies mouth to encourage a healthy defence mechanism.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
It has already been shown that the children growing in "dirtier" surroundings develop less allergies: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1868862/ . This study shows that there is a correlation between flora diversity near home and allergy rates with people growing up nearby each other.
Clearly the human body sets strict targets for pathogens identified and the immune system is pushed to find enough pathogens, even finding subversive and insurgents among friendly substances, even in itself, if that is what is required to meet the targets.
We see the same thing in the operation of government and security forces. We see similar bad behaviour as education and health systems struggle to meet centrally set targets and commence a path of undesirable behaviour in order to meet the target and obtain the incentive.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
If you have allergies, it is a sign that your immune system is doing exactly what nature intended.
People with allergies will very likely be less suscebtible to viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa.
I have hayfever (allergy), my gf doesn't. She get's flue infections every year. I havn't had one in 4 years...
http://news.yale.edu/2012/04/25/why-hay-fever-may-be-good-sign
When I was a child, I was spending weekends and summers in the countryside, eating dirt, ants and flowers, and for some "misterious" reason I was the only kid in my classroom who didn't have any allergy! When I had a kid myself, I was also taking him to the countryside regularly and now he's 26 and also 100% allergy-free. Genetics? I doubt it: his mother, raised 100% in city, is allergic to almost any known allergen out there! Also, discussing the matter with several friends, we noticed the same: take your kids to the Great Outdoors regularly, and they'll be allergy-free; keep them in the city, and expect them to spend springs looking like Rudolph, Santa's reindeer.
My sister is a child nurse who visits young families at their homes to give advice and check on the babies. The "lower classes" live of junk food and use cheap stuff, with plenty of cheap perfumes, insecticides and random chemical crap in their household. Their children suffer from obesity, and even vitamin deficiencies. But NEVER allergies. The rich families with cleaning ladies twice a week, bio-detergents and balanced organic diets however...
I used to work for a factory which made a protein you could get allergic to, so the staff was closely monitored. We had lab technicians who did DNA analyses on nanograms of the stuff, and factory operators who were swimming in tons of the crap. Guess where most allergies occured...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
for the reasons cited in other posts, plus the demographics of city dwellers would be different. Could be that urbanites would include poorer (weaker immune systems from lesser pre and post-natal health, poor diets, more crowding/exposure to communicable diseases) people, as well as "nerd" professionals who seem to have a higher incidence of physical limitations (poor eyesight, sedentary jobs, weak constitutions) and thus not really be an element of environmental exposures. Just demographics.
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If only there was some kind of compromise position - let's call it a "happy medium" - between living in hermetic sterility and getting cholera.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's how I cured my cat allergies. I couldn't even stand to see a picture of one. So I got one... It was hell for a couple of weeks. Now, 16 years later, no reaction whatsoever unless she scratches or bites me. Even other cats have almost no effect on me now. If you always sterilize, remove germs and ultra-clean everything, of course your body won't know what to fight.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
The risk/benefit seems to strongly favor water purification, but it seems we are going too far in other things these days. It's likely a natural outcome of the pervasive free floating fear in our culture today.
There is! We call it the big blue room. Some people say it has no ceiling. I scoff at them.
...personally, I vote for mandatory rural daycare, followed by kindergarten in an industrial district, and so on. By retirement you may live in a glass bubble.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Nonsense. We have not had medicine (that works) long enough to see a significant effect from natural selection.
Most of the problems are a result of our culture of fear and wrapping children in a protective cocoon. It is proven, for example that prenatal exposure to peanut proteans helps to prevent peanut allergies. As a result of mothers in the U.K. following bad advice and avoiding all peanut products during their pregnancy, there was an explosion of peanut allergies.
Meanwhile, the strategy of total avoidance of anything that provokes even the slightest reaction has lead to a lot of mild allergies never being desensitized.
Meanwhile, most allergies are of the minor itching or redness sort, not the OMG where is the epi-pen type, but you'd never know it from the media reports.
And yes, I am aware that the plural of anecdote is not data.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Really? Given that infant mortality has gone from several a generation to several generations per occurance in families, are you really sure that we don't see a substantial change in the population? While the gene pool is unlikely to change substantially in a few generations, the number of people who are living with genetic defects in the western world has increased immensely. Start with the extreme examples. People born with Down's syndrome didn't survive very long 100 years ago. People with cystic fibrosis didn't generally survive very long 100 years ago. Babies with GI troubles "failed to thrive" and died. Just because no major "evolution" has occured doesn't mean that the population is ithe same as a century ago.
If I only had mod points. Anyone that thinks we haven't had more significant changes over the past 5-8 generations than the last 30000 years with the exception of a few major plagues is smoking something.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I was allergic to all kinds of nuts. I have lived all over Africa and no doubt been exposed to countless microbes, I am now allergy free. Pistachios used to be the worst, I couldn't even lick them or my throat would swell up. I now eat them by the bag. There is truth to this, our immune systems were not meant to be exposed to an environment soaked in bleach and disinfectant.
I think a lot of this is "provable" with anecdotal evidence, but I think there is something about allowing people to get sick or exposed to germs...we live in a world where people are afraid of germs and sickness and want to drop an antibiotic at the first sign of illness, bacterial or not. I currently live in a country where antibiotics can be gotten at pharmacies without a prescription. When people start to cough or otherwise display symptoms of being sick the first recourse is an antibiotic; doctors even will prescribe antibiotics when the symptoms point towards virus, just to make induce a placebo effect and make sure their patient feels cared for.
Anecdotal evidence...I grew up in the country and was exposed to a lot of "pathogens". My mother was a school nurse (likely bringing some of her work home with her) and just being outside in the woods, going to the bathroom, climbing trees, swimming, stick fighting, making forts, etc...all without washing hands. I never had allergies as a child and the only time I get sick in Beirut is when I am exposed to an extreme amount of pollution or the strange pollen from the pine trees here that plagues nearly everyone about once a year. I am even tolerant of something called the spring worm (caterpillar) that has feces and body hairs that are extremely irritating.
Our bodies are stronger than we give them credit for and we need to stop being a nation/world of hypochondriacs. Its nice that there seems to be some serious study on this issue. From personal experience I seem to see that the people who are the sickest are those that were sheltered the most growing up.
--- b2b.mallaidh.org | www.mallaidh.org | www.kidsalive.org/article/kahlil-pfaff/
I used to have hay fever, pollen fever, even pollen from trees - kleenex wasn't enough - I'd go through rolls of paper towels, gobs of dristdan nasal spray, lots of anti-histamines, unable to sleep because I couldn't breathe ... nothing really worked.
I was also allergic to dogs and cats - so I got a dog. Two months of absolute hell, 24/7, because he went with me everywhere ... then one day, it all just stopped. It's been almost two decades with no allergies to dogs, most cats (there was one who could stillmake my eyes water, for some reason) ... no hay fever or pollen allergies whatsoever ...
Our systems evolved in an environment where they have to distinguish between pathogens that can harm you, and the innocuous stuff like pollen. They aren't all that good at doing the job when there aren't any nasties to "train" against.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
These observational studies did not establish the direction of causation (assuming it is causal). It could be that people who do not have allergies are attracted to (or remain) in farming, while those who are allergic take jobs in the city. I did a report on this in grad school.
AH! The dreaded phobophobia. We've tried to study that for years, but every time we attempt to recruit a patient they run away. Well, there was that one guy who quacked like a duck, but it turns out he was choking on a kazoo.