My Support Forums - View Single Post - Is there some sort of disorder for this??

eskielover · Jun 15, 2010, 03:48 PM

Found some good internet sites on how important good hygiene for our health. Not to scare her into the opposite extreme, but better she knows what she's leaving herself open for rather than going on blindly not knowing the real effect lack of good hygiene has on her.

http://www.scientificpsychic.com/spacer.gif

I tried to get the URL for this article, but couldn't seem to come up with it so will provide the highlight information here (the person who you are talking about surly has no lack of being exposed to germs....some of that good, & some not so good):

Quote:

So what is the truth? There is an idea called the “Hygiene Theory”, or “Hygiene Hypothesis”, which considers whether modern life has become too clean; that in our increasingly sanitised, antibacterial and deodorised age, children's immune systems are not exposed to enough germs to develop normally.

We have certainly declared war on germs, but has it come at a price? The incidence of certain illnesses - asthma, eczema and respiratory allergy and autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis - has soared. One clue is that these illnesses afflict only the developed world; they are rare or non-existent in poorer, dirtier countries (where, admittedly, more harmful diseases such as cholera and typhoid are prevalent).

There are other clues: children in bigger families are less likely than those in smaller ones to suffer allergies. One theory is that they are exposed through siblings to more childhood infections, which benefits health. Likewise for children who, while babies, were brought up with household pets or on farms; they are less prone to animal allergies.

What do all these factors have in common? Germs. Siblings, pets and poor neighbourhoods carry them in abundance. That has led to the idea that the sterility of modern urban life is making us ill. A recent book, Good Germs, Bad Germs, by Jessica Snyder Sachs, explores the idea that modern medicine and sanitation has expunged harmless germs along with the bad, and that these harmless microbes are responsible for protecting against allergy. Some scientists argue that we should restore some germs to their rightful place - back inside us.

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.

But in recent years there has been a backlash against the Hygiene Hypothesis, especially from experts on infectious diseases. They worry be-cause the hygiene hypothesis lulls people into thinking that poor hygiene is OK, or beneficial, when the opposite is true. Poor hygiene allows bad germs to flourish, and the prevalence of gastrointestinal infections and MRSA, along with norovirus, show we should not drop our guard.

Professor Sally Bloomfield, an expert on infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is one who finds the persistence of Strachan's unproven thesis counterproductive. “When we have unacceptable levels of gastrointestinal disease, norovirus - and Sars and a possibile flu pandemic - the idea that hygiene is unnatural is frightening. We need to support cleanliness and hygiene. I still find people who think it's proven that we are too clean. We must dispel this.”

How has this error come about? Bloomfield says that while exposure to microbes seemed pivotal in the prevention of allergies, Strachan went farther, suggesting that it was disease-causing microbes (pathogens) that offered protection: “He made the link between exposure to infection and protection from allergy, but it could be benign microbes, rather than disease-causing ones, that are providing protection. It could be that as we've improved water and food, knocked out the benign bacteria along with the pathogens. Or it could be nothing to do with microbes.”

Bloomfield is a member of the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene, which suggested several years ago that the Hygiene Hypothesis be renamed the Microbial Exposure Hypothesis. It would convey the growing conviction that it is our modern relationship with microbes, rather than extra cleanliness, that is making us ill. Scientists are warming to the idea that the benign microbes colonising our guts and skin, rather than full-blown diseases, defend against allergy. A recent study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology showed that British, Swedish and Italian newborn babies with a narrow range of bacteria in their stools are more likely to have developed eczema at 18 months than newborns with a wider range of bacteria (researchers, from Lund University, Sweden, speculate that antibiotics given during delivery might be killing off beneficial bacteria).

Another way of smuggling “good” microbes back into the body is to consume probiotic yoghurt drinks or fruit juices. These products contain so-called friendly bacteria. But the science on whether they improve health remains contradictory.

And that's the rub: we don't yet know if extreme hygiene has propelled the rise of allergies. What we do know, to our cost, is that a lack of cleanliness is leading to an explosion in preventable, transmissible infections at home and in hospitals.

Searching for the good microbes in your gut

Scientific attention is now focusing on the gut, home to benign microbes that have colonised human beings throughout our history. For every one of your own cells, there are ten microbial cells. Most moved in on you just after birth, evading your immature immune system and then setting up permanent residence. Scientists have a scant knowledge of these teeming creatures; they do not know if the microbes in your body are anything like the ones in mine.

The mystery attached to microbes has inspired the Human Microbiome Project, akin to the Human Genome Project. This huge undertaking - to catalogue the microbes that live on and inside humans and work out how they affect our health - began last year, funded by the National Institutes of Health in America.