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.

Discussion: 1 comment so far…

By jasper

3/26/08 at 9:58 p.m.

Suggest removal

I found your editorial on the subject of the hygiene hypothesis a little late to contribute to the dialog it created.

However I thought I would chime in anyway.

There are practical applications of the hygiene hypothesis for those with various autoimmune disorders or immunological conditions that do not fall within the narrow criteria which define an autoimmune disease, like asthma. They are available right now. Probiotics, products like Dannon's line of proprietary probiotic containing yogurts, TSO from Ovamed, etc.

To me, who has spent years now following this area of science and medicine, the hygiene hypothesis and the extraordinary science it has spawned appears to be the most under reported story in medicine.

The work of Weinstock and Summers in the United States, and of Pritchard and Britton in the United Kingdom, to name just a few, may well lead to therapies or a class of drugs as revolutionary as antibiotics were in their day. I am fairly confident that one or more of those gentlemen will one day win or share a Nobel prize for the work they are doing in this field.

There are also anecdotal accounts, like the man who vastly improved the symptoms of his autistic son using TSO by Ovamed. Others that read like something out of Indiana Jones, of people who have traveled to the tropics to self infect with parasites. Check out my story at http://www.asthmahookworm.com for a ripping yarn. I am not being immodest.

I went to Cameroon to walk barefoot in the latrines of tropical west Africa and successfully infected myself with hookworm. Two and a quarter years later I am still asthma and allergy free.

If this were a drug it would be headline news and some company would be worth billions more than otherwise. But because it is a yucky organism that cannot be patented and that almost certainly is years or decades away from approval for therapeutic use it is just a neglected news story.

Thanks for the article,

Jasper Lawrence
President, Autoimmune Therapies

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