Is fido good for johny jr?
Posted by jonathan - 06/05/08 at 06:05:14 amMy wife and I have long believed that the anti-bacterial germaphobed American masses have lost touch with the natural cycle of life. Ashes to ashes dust to dust is lost on the control-freak, ocd culture of Americans. I am a firm believer in “the Hygiene Hypothesis, formulated by the epidemiologist David Strachan about 20 years ago, argued that children’s immune systems were not being sufficiently challenged - because of falling family size and increasingly sterile homes - to learn how to fend off diseases. The result was that once harmless invaders, such as cat hair, triggered immune overreactions (this is what constitutes an allergy). In the late Nineties, the evidence for Strachan’s hunch was snowballing: kids in daycare showed lower rates of asthma than infants kept at home, suggesting that immunity might be conferred by early contact with other children.”
In the latest news, scientists now believe that my dog, melba, helps the immune system of my baby, emma. Just one more reason why dog is mans best friend!
Last week our news pages quoted a study from the National Research Centre for Environmental Health in Munich saying that children lessen their risk of being sensitive to allergens if they grow up with a dog. Professor Joachim Heinrich and colleagues found that children raised with a dog had fewer allergy markers, such as antibodies to pollen, house-dust mites, cat and dog dander and mould spores. He told the European Respiratory Journal that a dog’s presence in early childhood encourages the immune system to develop less sensitivity to allergies such as asthma, eczema and hay fever.
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