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Want To Fight Allergies? Get a Dirty Dog
sciencehabit writes "A dog in the house is more than just good company. There's increasing evidence that exposure to dogs and livestock early in life can lessen the chances of infants later developing allergies and asthma. Now, researchers have traced this beneficial health effect to a microbe living in the gut. Their study, in mice, suggests that supplementing an infant's diet with the right mix of bacteria might help prevent allergies — even without a pet pooch."
I've had allergies all my life, dust and pollen. My mother HATED animals and we never had any pets.
Flash forward 20 years -- I get a dog, a little Chihuahua that lives inside my house. I'm sure his hair and dander is all over the place and I breathe it in every day. And.... my allergies are MUCH better now! I can actually breathe with both nostrils, which I never could do most of my life due to sinuses being swollen.
It makes sense. I have always said that keeping your kids in an aseptic environment is not helping them to build resistance for when they get out to the real world at some point.
Do you remember that South Park episode where the parents would get their kids with other sick kids for them to also get sick? Well, there is some truth to it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenpox_(South_Park)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
...caused me to look fondly, once more, at Keks, my dog.C'mon boy, lick my hand !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
the money quote:
"Supplementation of wild-type animals with L. johnsonii protected them against both airway allergen challenge or infection with respiratory syncytial virus."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What TFA suggests is to get a "dirty dog" which pass on some "gut microbes" onto the human babies which, according to TFA, may help the human babies to fight allergies.
This scenario has several implications:
1. How the "gut microbes" being passed from that "dirty dog" to the human infant ?
Shit.
Specifically, dog shit.
Which means, the human infant somehow ingested some of the dog shit which contains the microbes that previously reside inside the dog's guts.
2. The transfer of a microbe from a species (dog) to another (human) may, or may not work.
It may even be very harmful.
If the microbes are of the "benign" kind, yes, it may benefit the human baby, as TFA has suggested.
But if the microbes are of the nasty kind, it may bring on transgenic diseases.
3. There may be a better and more hygienic way of boosting the human baby's immune responses --- Mother's milk.
Human babies who were fed the milk from their mothers are healthier and have better protection from many diseases. This is because, when the baby consume the milk from their mothers, they also consume beneficial microbes that were mixed in with the milk.
In conclusion - it is better to have your human babies to be fed mother's milk than to be fed dog shit.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I already tried this, but all that happened was that Snoop stole my weed and banged my wife. Didn't really help my allergies at all.
Monstar L
To Congress, make haste!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Always had cats, dogs, horses. Plenty of exposure to everything when i was a little kid. Used to spend my days in the woods and fields with a head full of snot.
Still ended up being severely allergic to a ton of stuff.
I'm pretty sure that in my case, it's the massive variety of pollen in the San Francisco Bay Area; there are tons of imported species, particularly a huge variety of trees with the accompanying tree pollen. There are things I used to be exposed to on a daily basis in Tucson, AZ which did not result in allergic reactions, but about 2 and a half years in the Bay Area, and it's allergy city for me.
After the dog result, they tried to study the effect of having a cat on lab mice but it ate them all. Extrapolating to humans the researchers posited hat cats are baby eating monsters and abandoned the study.
I already learned this from George Carlin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo
I'm expecting the next Slashdot headline to read "Will the Sun come up tomorrow? Probably."
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
I will see your lazy knee jerk slashdot cliche and raise you another...
"Anecdote != data"
Speaking of slashdot cliches, you obviously didn't read the article to find out what they actually studied. Hint: it involved isolating the effect of a specific microbe on T cell counts (and symptoms) in the lab - it wasn't "collect some health data on some kids and run it through a stats package looking for some kind of relationship".
A Finnish friend of mine told me when kids there reach the age of 2, during summer holidays, they take them to the countryside and get them to play naked in dirt and mud on purpose, to build up their immune system.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Please.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
My wife was brought up on a farm, they had pet cats and dogs she had horses and now later in life she has developed severe asthma and dogs and cats effect her really badly. She has also developed bad allergies to preservatives in food and now has to carry an epipen in case of anaphylaxis.
ba-doom-ba!
anyone who has a pet cat already knows this.
A lot of research has been done where hookworms are used to treat allergies. The main concept being that a modern immune system is bored without an enemy to attack and then attacks innocent cells.
Say the body is America and the immune system is America's defence force. The immune system is needed when dangerous pathogens appear, in the same way that American troops are needed to defend against enemies. If America is in no war and all its troops are recalled without downsizing the military, these troops will get bored and start identifying innocent people as enemies. It might shoot down a trainee pilot from Canada when entering American air space. This plane falls on a city and damages property or may start a fire in America. In the same way, the immune system may become bored when there are very few pathogen and starts attacking molecules that are not dangerous. Just as the defence force can be trained to identify russian fighter aircraft on a radar, so the immune system can be trained to identify pathogens correctly by means of vaccinations. In the extreme case, the defence force might attack the poor Canadian with an atomic bomb so big it destroys the whole continent. In the same way an allergic reaction can kill the person.
Now in Helminthic Therapy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy, the hookworms are used as a perpetual enemy in the same way that America might used Afghanistan/Vietnam/Iraq. This causes a constant drain of blood, but when controlled, it may improve the health of the body overall.
Dogs are carriers of hookworms and the benefits of hookworms and allergies has been known for a long time, so in my opinion, this article is old news.
We had a dog in the house until I was about 8 or 9, but I had such severe dust and pollen allergies that I once spent a week in an oxygen tent and then went through weekly allergy therapy shots for several years. I had a window air conditioner in my bedroom on recirculate during the warm weather months to keep the air semi-filtered (this was in the early 1970s before the advent of HEPA filtration devices).
We couldn't even have a real Christmas tree or wreath in the house. We had one early on and I was super sick until my parents realized that it made me sick and we had to ditch the tree AND the wreath right before Christmas.
Born and raised a NZ farmers son I have been allergic (pollen) and suffered from asthma (allergic not chronic) all my life. I grew up surrounded by dirty dogs and more sheep and cattle than most people will ever see in a whole lifetime.
Did the fact that precautions were not taken with farm chemicals back then have something to do with the allergy. I have been exposed to DDT, pesticides, feretilizers, you name it.
So OK maybe this works in a city environnement with kids that live in a modern hyper clean envirronment and who eat agro-industry cr@p er sorry food. Didn't work for this farmers son.
realkiwi
I was allergic to cats. I got one. It's much better now. Simple logic. When I was a kid, we traded drinks between 5-6 of us, played in the dirt, went for a whole afternoon without washing our hands. People didn't use hand sanitizers. We weren't always sick either.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Your problem is the cats. Cat evil cancels out dog goodness. Get rid of the cats, or at the very least dress them in little biohazard suits.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Humans and dogs have a symbiotic relationship after +20K of living together.
In Soviet Russia, dogs are allergic to you.
Also in my house.
Recently found out some of the allergens that my constantly irritate my dog, a list which includes cat and human dander.
I am not a crackpot.
Some allergies don't depend on environmental factors.
Take me, for example. A couple of years of my childhood I spent some time after school each day on a farm. That included the occasional playing and jumping in the hay. It didn't happen every day, week, or even every month, but it happened and it was damn fun (but really dangerous). Then comes puberty and figuratively from one day to another I developed "hay-fever" and pollen allergies (mainly for grass).
Anecdotal and small sample size and all that, but I really don't think overexposure to grass was the reason, because I wasn't really exposed to it that much. But the exposure I had certainly didn't help me, I developed allergies to it anyway.
What I'm trying to say is that environmental factors, like having a dog, doesn't always play a roll, sometimes there are other factors that makes you develop allergies (genetics, mostly). While having a dog may help, I would get one (or rather, a couple of cats) more for reason that it's good for my kid for other reasons (learning empathy, the natural cycle of life, not hitting people or animals in the head with a spoon, and a damn good company).
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Eat poop.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Sucks that you were surrounded by smokers growing up. Me too and maybe that is the reason for my severe allergies.
However, read this:
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/07/23/original-aom-comic-2-theodore-roosevelt-ill-make-my-body/
We had three large dogs when our daughter was born. The dogs lived inside and were well socialized, and daughter became just another member of the pack. Although this is only one data point, it's interesting that she has no allergies (I have severe allergies to pollen and cats) and was hardly ever sick. We put it down to her immune system getting exercised at an early age.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> Their study, in mice, suggests that supplementing an infant's diet with the right mix of bacteria might help prevent allergies — even without a pet pooch.
A part of me says don't take pills, go out and get a dog. There are enough of them who need homes. And then there's another part of me that says, if you're getting a dog just to prevent allergies, maybe you should take the pill instead.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So by not living in a hyper clean environment as kids and by developing a proper immune system that is capable of fighting off allergies, bacteria and viruses we might be healthier as adults! This is radical, I can't believe no one put two and two together until now. That isn't to say you should live in a biohazard but honestly it's pretty obvious that we need to introduce children the real world so they can develop a proper immune system to being with.
now I can watch, again, as people pay for nutritional supplements instead of just getting a dog. I love it when people spend hard-earned money specifically to avoid an enjoyable lifestyle. Live it up robot. Enjoy your more productive work life. Again. It's totally wasted on you.
... is that I can tell my wife it would be bad for my health when she asks me to wash our dog? :-D
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Any pet that impinges on your immune system is going to have long term positive influence! ;)
Oh... dirty children fit that bill as well
YMMV