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Dirty Farm Air May Ward Off Asthma In Children
sciencehabit writes: For researchers trying to untangle the roots of the current epidemic of asthma, one observation is especially intriguing: Children who grow up on dairy farms are much less likely than the average child to develop the respiratory disease. Now, a European team studying mice has homed in on a possible explanation: Bits of bacteria found in farm dust trigger an inflammatory response in the animals' lungs that later protects them from asthma. An enzyme involved in this defense is sometimes disabled in people with asthma, suggesting that treatments inspired by this molecule could ward off the condition in people.
Gonna breathe some of that dairy air!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When you consider that the small pox vaccine originated from cow pox and current society's obsession with anti-bacterial everything.
And stay out of the silo!
...or computerized spell-check.... you idiot.
The researcher interviewed on the NPR story said <paraphrase>living on a farm during the first year of life reduced the likelihood of having allergies later in life</paraphrase>
He went on to say that living on a farm later in life did nothing, it had to be in the first year.
When I was young, I was very social, and I got sick about twice a year.
Then, in my 30s, I got frustrated with dating and several of my friends moved away, so I lived a single and solitary life for a good decade (online games became our new social outlet, since they span the miles). I got sick exactly twice during that ten year period, once when I broke my rules and made-out with a single mom, and once when I ate at a crowded restaurant while a cold was going around.
So, at least in my case, the more sterile environment kept me from getting sick, and greater exposure got me sick.
I have new friends now and kind of want to date again, so I am gearing up for the twice-a-year consequences.
I would gasp in surprise, but I was raised on a farm so I'll just breathe normally.
-Styopa
it's really just car smog folks. This isn't that hard. I had to move to Phoenix for a job and I can see the effect it has. It's always funny to me to see folks trying to come up with a hundred reasons why something is something except the one they don't want it to be. Kinda like that Onion story about Americans wondering when mass shootings will end while it points out the rest of the world doesn't have this problem...
For a start ban fast food drive throughs. Silly as it sounds card idling there are a large part of the smog problem. Then start cracking down on SUVs. People use 'em like cars, stop letting them get by with a Trucks fuel and emission standards. Discuss among yourselves the rest of the crap we can do to reduce city emissions (public transit would be nice).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I hear being gored by a bull cures hiccups.
-1 WTF
Table-ized A.I.
It's not the "dirty farm air" that makes you have asthma.. It's the air pollution in the city. Second hand smoke, car exhaust and pollution from the factories... All of that, while you're in the womb... and then in the first few years of your life... It's bad for your lungs.
There's next to none of that on a farm. The "dirty farm air" is just air that smells like sh*t, it's not actually "dirty", unlike the city's air.
People today has a really weird notion - that if they can live in a totally germ-free environment they will enjoy good health
Professionals - even some DOCTORS - believe that
I do not know if that is the result of a total breakdown in communication, or people are simply stupid in nature
Entrepreneurs, listen up!
Here's a guaranteed way to make big bucks !
All you need to do is to Sell our marvellous ""Farm Dust (TM)"
Parents with new born babies will pay anything for you to supply our "Farm Dust (TM)"
Don't wait - call 1-800-FARMDST now!
Some Indians (particularly some Hindus) consider Cow urine as having medicinal properties - according to Vedas. So they use cow urine in some ritualistic drinks. :).
Sounds funny, but it may have some basis though it may not have written scientific reasoning. The western "rationalized drug discovery" is relatively new compared to other drug-discovery-by-just-observation.
I can't agree more with this. Countryside air is a lot easier to deal with than city air. The biggest mistake I ever made was moving back to the city. I should've stayed on the coast, where the offshore wind was clean and crisp, onshore blew over a dairy farm and while it smelled like a cow's bum, at least I could sleep through the night without bolting upright at Dark O'clock for a blast on the salbutamol..
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
and George Carlin said it.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Asthma is treated by administering derivatives of adrenaline and cortisol. Those are stress hormones. Did it ever occur to any genius scientist that asthma may be stress-related?
Of course not, because the health of our body has nothing to do with what's going on psychologically, right?
The cause of asthma is stress. Children of stressed parents are stressed. Children are so stressed that the production of their stress hormones becomes exhausted, and they must be administered adrenaline and cortisol externally.
Kids who grow up in a stressful environment are usually stressed for the rest of their lives. They don't even know they're stressed, because it's always been that way for them.
Farms may be a less stressful environment. It has nothing to do with the air. What a ridiculous piece of crap research, as always with medical science.
Hindus do use cow urine, but only for the dead !!!
They 'purify' the dead by wiping cow urine on the corpse
How I know? I asked my Hindu friends
One time I saw bottled cow urine on the shelves in an Indian shop - and those bottled cow urine were certainly *NOT* freish urine, which prompted me to ask several of my Hindu friends about cow urine
I grew up on a farm and I have asthma. I would have put it down to the consumption of raw, unpasteurised milk by farmers and their families. :-/
A farm raised child eats much more unprocessed food and is exposed to much higher levels of bacteria.
The theory that asthma is a modern disease caused by living in a world that's too clean makes a lot of sense.
We've descended from people who survived due to their strong immune defence.
This inherited army needs a fight and when it has nothing better to do it attacks it's own.
Maybe this theory is correct and the farm dust that prevents asthma.
It didn't help me as dust isn't something you see much of when you grow up on a farm in Scotland where it rains 351 days of the year.
An old Italian tradition was to take babies to farms to smell the air. Occasionally old people with an ailment would do it too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
instead of spending their time in front of a TV/computer are more healthy. Who would have thunk it?
We used to play outside, eat mud, get covered in dirt and our bodies built up an immunity to a lot of things. Nowadays kids spend their time glued to a TV, laptop or games console and their parents have houses with higher than hospital levels of cleanliness so the resistance to stuff we built up as kids never happens. When they're then exposed to the outside world they then catch all kinds of nasty stuff.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Nice to know. If in the future, somebody asks me: "Have you been raised in a barn?" when I failed to close the door, I can say: "Yes, that's why I don't have any Asthma."
Well done, you've figured out something we all knew about from anecdotal as well as scientific evidence.
There seems to be a slew of "well duh we already knew that" research going on at the moment, perhaps purely for profit.
Or their ancestors decided not to be farmers if they had asthma. A genetic defect preventing the creation of a certain response usually isn't environmentally caused, it's solely genetic.
Average intelligence of people worldwide today is higher than it was.
1) Better nutrition
2) Better medical care
3) Reduced disease burden
4) Elimination of environmental toxins (lead for one!)
So no, it's actually not impossible AT ALL to make people smarter, though it may be impossible to make an individual such as yourself smarter..... But who knows, in a few years there might be a pill.
--PM
Still possible that farmers with asthma just don't hold up to reproduce as often - that selection would probably take less than a few hundred years.
I grew up on a farm, and experienced the various smells there. Now I work in another area with mostly "non-farm" types, and I'm surprised at how delicate some of them are. They're constantly sneezing, slathering their hands with anti-bacterial gel, suffering allergies, wheezing, calling in sick, and are generally sort of weak. "Here, help me pick up this desk, it's almost 50 pounds!" The ones from rural areas (farms or not) seem generally stouter.
See subject: Or rather a forrest, you gain higher immune response http://www.bing.com/search?q=f...
Since your system's under "attack" from pollens etc. - so, this *MAY* make some sense also, albeit, not for exactly the same reasons but other "colloidally suspended" particles in the air due to farming/animals (like possibly their dander etc. - et al).
* I grew up right next to a farm as a boy (birth to 13) & KNOW the terrible smells of a CHICKEN COOP being cleaned (it's nasty, doesn't smell like cow dung, that's perfume by comparison)... wouldn't surprise me if germs feel the SAME way about it (it's nauseating) & they run too!
APK
P.S.=> Anyhow - I thought I'd share that part about being near a forrest/wood allegedly boosting your immune system as well... apk
Instead of going to farms.
How about you find the genes where not being exposed to dirty farm air does not cause asthma while keeping other benefits of dirty farm air exposure.
Then make gene therapy for adding those genes too people!
Better than having to go to farms and smell the pig butts!
It has been established that children that consume clean raw milk have much lower rates of asthma than the general population. The explanation given is that the active microbes in raw milk help build the body's immune system which has much more to do with gut flora than previously known.
I know this has no scientific experience but I know that since I have been drinking raw milk, starting 10 years ago at age 49, I get sick much less often than I used to.
Remember that this study is european, so they're talking about real dairy farms (or something like that), not The Meatrix...
Typical example of the way our industry works. While the problem was found with the way of life and the fact that we isolate ourselves from nature. Instead finding the way to bring nature back into our life, the solution is to take this part of nature, put it into a pill form and monetize the hell out of it. What else is new...
Send all your kids to farms where they can catch Farmer's Lung: http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/farmers_lung.html