Slashdot Mirror
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.
I let my kids play in the dirt when they were very young, very rarely do they ever get sick. Then I see people trying to live in a sterile environment, and guess what? Always sick.
Don't attach too much but don't downplay their contribution either. Remember Jim FIxx the author of The Complete Book of Running. Heart attack while jogging at 52. Genetics and microbial exposure are part of your health makup.
.
I wouldn't call the farm air dirty, it's still cleaner than the city air we have.
The difference is that air on farms have a wider variety of bacteria (most of them harmless to humans with a working immune system), and asthma is an auto-immune disease caused by the immune system not being busy enough working on real threats and instead starts to react on all kinds of things that it shouldn't.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.