Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Babies and hygiene
Whom do you think would be healthier: a baby raised in A "green" family in San Francisco, or a baby raised on a farm in Africa, whose family goats drank from his bathwater and livestock baby-sat him? Melinda Beck writes in today's Wall Street Journal about the "hygiene hypothesis" which looks at the exposure "to a variety of bacteria, viruses and parasitic worms" early in life. If a child is so exposed, does that prime his immune system, much like sensory experiences prime his brain? Well, actually, autoimmune diseases are rare in rural Asia and Africa, but rise sharply when immigrants from those areas come to the developed world. There is a new movie, Babies, which looks at babies from around the world.
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3 comments:
Having read extensively for a college health course on Native Americans and their inability to deal with the diseases the Europeans brought over (unwittingly I might add), I've become convinced all this hygenic stuff is for the birds...we need to mix up a little dirt now and again.
I'm guessing there's a happy medium somewhere in all this. I wouldn't want to go back to having to deal with parasites and germs that shortened lifespans and made things generally miserable for the people so afflicted; I'd rather live with allergies than a tapeworm, for instance. But the current germophobic culture can't be healthy, either.
Speaking for myself, I don't plan on sterilizing everything when the baby gets here, nor do I plan to keep the dogs from licking him (unless they get too vigorous, of course :). I take it as a given that he'll pick up the usual gamut of childhood sniffles and ailments. But he's also getting vaccinated. Life is risky. We should be doing what we can to alleviate the worst, most dangerous afflictions, but there's an awful lot that our immune systems should be allowed to do as well. It's there for a reason. take away that reason, and it's going to attack something...
Julie,
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment! By the way, the WSJ article indicates that children who grow up in a house with pets are much less likely to suffer from allergies as they grow up.
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