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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
We also administer adrenaline when your heart stops.
Has nobody thought that the cause of heart disease might be stress?
Fucking idiot. You can't work backwards from a treatment to work out the cause like that without doing a lot of research, and that will tell you the real cause.
Asthma is a lung condition. The "treatment" is to induce a panic in the body (without a panic in the patient, hopefully) to open up the airways, increase the bloodflow and let them breathe and get oxygen where it's needed because the lungs can't do it enough on their own. It's literally about allowing them to live through the attack, not curing the cause.
Asthma is also entirely linked to environmental causes, with air particulates and quality being one of the main factors implicated (i.e. sterility and/or pollutants - air fresheners and aerosols are highly implicated too). It's almost certainly an immune response to that environment too.
Children today are no more stressed than for the centuries they were shoved up chimneys to clean them, "to be seen and not heard" or just plain abused as a matter of course. A prescribed education in a child-safe environment for 18-20 years followed by 40 hours a day of work is fucking NOTHING compared to previous generations - especially pre-industrialisation - and they had significantly less asthma even adjusted for lifespan.
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
Additionally, smelly farm air is exactly what our noses and lungs have dealt with for millions of years. Excrement, grass, mud, soil, etc.
Now we have things much finer, much more damaging, non-degrading, synthetic, toxic, etc. and shockingly our lungs can't cope with it. Even household dust no longer has anywhere near the same make-up as it used to.
"Dirt", "grass", "mud", etc. on the floor isn't what will kill your kid. It'll be the "clean air" they live in 24 hours a day next to the road, inside their double-glazing, with no filter between them and the cars and shit outside, and those fucking anti-bacterial wipes.
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."
Choice # 2.
Hindus do use cow urine, but only for the dead !!!
Not true. If you watch the TV show Bizarre Foods, the host has been served cow urine at least once in India under the guise of "medicine"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
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...
Farms may be a less stressful environment.
You have obviously never worked or lived on a farm. Farming is hard work, and frequently highly stressful. Regularly working 90 or 100 hour weeks is stressful in itself, and this is not uncommon during busy periods on a farm.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
40 hours a day of work is fucking NOTHING compared to previous generations
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I will also agree with the second answer.