Las Vegas Sun

February 13, 2012

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SUN EDITORIAL:

We’re too clean?

Researchers say allergy increases suggest cleanliness might be next to sneeziness

Saturday, March 8, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Research suggests that increases in immune system disorders such as allergies are occurring for an unlikely reason: Modern households are too clean.

In a Washington Post story earlier this week, medical and scientific researchers said they were studying what they call the “hygiene hypothesis” along with diets, air pollution and increasingly sedentary lifestyles as reasons why incidents of immune system disorders have doubled or even quadrupled in recent decades.

Studies show that more than half of the U.S. population suffers from some form of allergy, the Post reports. Researchers also have noted increases in the rates of more serious immune disorders, such as lupus.

Many Americans would have little trouble blaming such increases on chemicals in processed food, environmental pollutions or the fact that most of us sit inside too much. But being too clean? That’s counterintuitive.

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time that disease was linked to increased cleanliness. David M. Oshinsky, a University of Texas history professor and expert on American culture, wrote in his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Polio: An American Story,” that improved sanitation was one reason the disease spread so rapidly in the mid-20th century.

Oshinsky noted that polio had been around for hundreds of years, but relatively few children contracted it because they were exposed to it when they were very young and had built up immunity. That exposure decreased as households became more focused on being clean in the early 20th century, Oshinsky said. As a result, children were more susceptible to polio when exposed through contact with other people.

As one Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher told the Post, the hygiene theory “is clearly not the whole story.” But, as one Duke University researcher said, it still is true that people who aren’t exposed to health threats early in life have fewer of the T cells that control the immune system.

So what do we do? Wait for the studies to bear out these theories, researchers say. For it isn’t likely just cleanliness but a combination of factors that makes us sicker. Still, it might not hurt if we allowed the dust to sit on the furniture a little longer and spent more time outside.

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