Dirt is good for babies: the Hygiene Hypothesis

In studies of what is called the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with “dirt” spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies suggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and resulted in autoimmune disorders, allergies and asthma.

These studies, along with epidemiological observations, seem to explain why immune system disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and allergies have risen significantly in the United States and other developed countries.

“What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,” Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, “Why Dirt Is Good” (Kaplan). “Not only does this allow for ‘practice’ of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.”

One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?_r=1&ref=health

'You'll eat a bushel of dirt before {some age!)'

PS, I suspect that the super-clean/sanitized world advertisers tell us we want is, in fact, NOT good for us in the long run. Littl'uns go to nursery school etc., share germs, develop illnesses, AND also develop IMMUNITIES which stay with them so they're not sick as often as adults.

when I was a kid, I played in the dirt, rarely wore shoes and was your typical "dirty little boy". My brother was not. He has allergy problems and gets sick at the drop of a hat. I am still treating my body like an amusement park and doing just fine.

It was about polio and how the improved sanitation in cities is what led to polio epidemics. The germ lives in dirt and up until the time it was easier to keep clean, everyone was exposed to the germ and it's theorized that many people had mild, misdiagnosed (most often as a flu, a bad cold or scarlet fever) cases of polio that did no permanent damage.

that had kids. The fanatic mothers who try to protect their children from EVERYTHING usually have the sickest kids when they get a little older and start playing with other kids and going to school where exposure to many different germs is inevitable. Certainly it doesn't mean that you don't take any care at all, but too much caution isn't good.

with lavender drops in his nose to ward of infection. I was like - that kids needs all the colds in the world right now when he is growing up. But I didn't say anything.

my dad spent the first year of their marriage in bed with one cold after the other. He needed a stronger immunity system I guess.

with viruses for the flu and such. I don't think they had superbugs back then. Their antibiotics worked well.

And more than a few (obviously NONmicrobiologists) here on DU have jumped all over my a-- for that, lol.

But truly - the VAST majority of microbes in the world are harmless to us, and many are essential for us to survive.

of feces enemas to restore normal bacteria in the guts of patients on multiple antibiotics who have developed overgrowths of resistant pathogenic bacteria that are normally held in check by the normal flora.

We need some bugs to survive the others, in other words.

CHEERS!

I remember playing in the mud a lot, but don't remember doing anything with worms that didn't involve a fish hook.

i am one of those people who refuses to buy anti-bacterial hand gel or similar products. there's bleach in my house for laundry and regular cleaning and i wash my hands regularly, but that's about it. we've become overly paranoid of germs and i worry about the repercussions it will have down the road.

And I have to say that it has kept me well. I'm 62, and I've never been sick enough to go to a hospital. I don't get colds or allergies. Perhaps it's good luck, but I think that my childhood of digging in the dirt has served me well.

--imm

that due to lack of insurance and sick days in today's workforce, parents have become hyper-vigilant about keeping their kids well and in school.

:D

I always wondered about why I've been mostly
allergy free; and when I do get allergic
symptoms, they don't last long.. and I
never medicate these days.

I was an active, outdoors child and I am
sure I ingested everything possible, and
I was exposed to everything. I got bouts
of mumps, measles, chicken pox,flu, colds,
etc.

The only downside has been herpes cold
sores that I've gotten periodically on or
around my lips.

Now that I'm older, stress tends to make
me get sick or to get cold sores... so I
try to remain as stress free as possible,
while I also exercise in one form or another
every day.

Life is good.

is a smallpox vaccination. Back in the day, I knew a couple of people who would get those cold sores, and they'd just go to the doc for another smallpox vaccination and the cold sores would go away for a few years.

I just did a quick search on the internet about this, and don't have the patience to read through all of the many things that popped up when I put in smallpox and herpes virus as the search term, so I can't tell you why the smallpox vaccine would cure cold sores. But it did, and nowadays I don't think there's any good remedy out there like the good old smallpox vaccine.

I also use it to control herpesvirus in ME, lol! Specifically, 500 mg once or twice a day long-term maintenance, 1000 mg twice a day in the face of travel or other stress that I know will set me up for cold sores.

I suffered with the damned things for 40+ years before learning this trick. No more. I can't remember the last cold sore I got - I have probably only had 4 in the past 5-6 years, and they stay tiny. I also rarely get canker sores anymore. Lysine inhibits herpesvirus replication by interfering with cellular uptake of arginine, which is essential to herpesvirus replication. It's not voodoo - there is a physiologic basis for it working.

anymore last I checked.

and I used to watch my mother boil everything, including toys if the baby put it in its mouth. I hung out in the woods and got filthy. When I raised my kids I let them run around barefoot and get dirty also.
ultra hygeniec homes make sick children. My grandson lives with 2 dogs, a cat, and a reasonably clean house, but he is a healthy little guy. I am glad his mom and dad have the good sense to let him be a kid and not a showpiece.

have a lower heart disease rate despite a diet high in fats because they drink red wine. Or is it because they wear berets? Or possibly, heart disease is not caused by a fatty diet. or not by the fats that the French eat. Or maybe they die of something else before they get heart disease. Besides, the notion that being exposed to all kinds of dirt prevents asthma doesn't seem to apply to kids living in run-down houses in the inner cities.


As long as we're exchanging anecdotes, one daughter had JRA, another has lupus, one son has severe asthma and all my children are asthmatic sometimes. Believe me, my house is not hygienic. The place is 150 years old, and much to my chagrin is full of dust and animal dander.

Just because someone has a couple of degrees doesn't mean that they aren't talking through their hat sometimes.

Mold spores will activate my asthma in no time at all.

up above.... there are also genetic and other environmental factors to consider...

may well be triggered by cockroach dung.

Auto-immune disorders, one of which is lupus, are another whole world, but I honestly suspect that all the vaccinations we give our kids might possibly be one trigger. Note I said one. Auto-immune disorders are fascinating and are not well understood at this point. Both of my sons have alopecia areata, which is an auto-immune disorder that causes hair loss, so I'm very cognizant of auto-immune disorders and pay attention to research that's done about them. Both of my sons are astonishingly healthy, I am a lax housekeeper at best, and they did get all of the vaccines prescribed for them as they were growing up. They're now 26 and 21.

What is JRA? I'm not recognizing those initials.

I believe asthma is considered an auto-immune disorder.

Before you commit yourself to the notion that vaccines are behind auto-immune disorders, google a little bit about Vitamin D, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, arthritis and Crohn's disease. For a real thrill, toss in breast cancer and prostate cancer. Researchers from various fields keep finding connections and mechanisms explaining the connections. I'm starting to think that we are all suffering sub-clinical malnutrition as a result of eating food raised on depleted soils and loaded with traces of pesticides. But then, that's my pet theory!:)

I have that same theory, or at least it is part of my theory that lately is leaning along the lines that many of the disorders are linked as an evolutionary trend related to our bodies adapting to this malnutrition and changing activity/survival patterns. It is severely half baked but I encourage you to check out the Weston Price Foundation.

I definitely believe that the increasing dx of ADHD, ADD, Autism, Aspergers, MS (CNS issues) are d/t depletion of Omega 3's in our bodies, including their mother's bodies and their mother's mothers bodies.

dropped since tests were first run back around WWII. If anything, you would have expected the values to rise slightly as tests became more sensitive! It has to be considered, too, that we only test for the things we know about. Omega 3s were never mentioned when I was in school long ago.


It may seem far fetched to blame disease on mal-nutrition, but just look at how long it took before pellagra was recognized as a deficiency disease!


This is all speculation, of course, but my point is that it all needs to be investigated before we close the book.

Yes, rheumatoid arthritis is considered auto-immune.

I'm not completely anti-vaccines. And auto-immune disorders are clearly complicated and undoubtedly have multiple causations. Even with obviously contagious things like colds or flu, it can be a mystery that one person catches the illness while another, equally exposed, doesn't. Our personal genetic makeup is always a factor.

And your theory about sub-clinical malnutrition and depleted soils is probably accurate. I was reading some book recently about that exact thing.

the incidence of autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's Disease is MUCH higher in countries with higher standards of hygiene. And research has proven that administration of porcine roundworm eggs to Crohn's victims results in transient cure, probably because the immune system functions better when it has an actual enemy present to attack.

But go ahead with your hatred of scientists and their documented work.

standards of hygiene are also in higher latitude, which means people have less exposure to sunlight and lower serum levels of Vitamin D. So which is it, better hygiene or less Vitamin D?

when they found in a research study that kids who eat food in their bedrooms and then spent a lot of time there had more asthma problems. Food crumbs were attracting roaches, and those rooms had a lot more roach feces around.

that dirt is good. I'm asthmatic and I have to keep my house dusted and vacuumed particularly for insect debris or I get asthma attacks. The ancient Romans didn't know what bacteria was but they did know that clean drinking water and bathing kept the population from spreading diseases and plague, which is why they invested so much of their engineering skills in building aqueducts and public baths. I really wish that scientists would think before they publish things like this and qualify where there arguments may not apply or be valid.

..and nowhere in the article did it state casual exposure to pathogens is a guaranteed way of preventing inapporpriate autoimmune responses.

This will lead to other work trying to find a causative link. Some correlations are stronger than others. Strong correlations should not be dismissed out of hand -- such correlations often point the way to research proving a direct link.

by mother nature will carry beneficial micro-organisms. Polluted dirt from uncomposted feces and other wastes not processed and composted into clean dirt has the potential for carrying some nasty diseases. There are also other pollutants that are carried in water from mining wastes and other industrial wastes that are not beneficial for any human or animal and cannot be processed by mother nature but remain in the ground water and contaminate dirt and sometimes work their way through the food chain. An example is mercury in the fish you eat that has the possibility of eventually poisoning you.

I prefer to err on the side of hygiene, keeping my environment as clean as I can without being compulsive/obsessive about it. As far as kids are concerned, sometimes you can't stop them from putting nasty stuff in their mouths but parents should be vigilant about making those moments as few as possible and by educating the child to not experiment with unknown substances.

Went to camp and got dirty as hell there every summer too...Still got crohn's disease and sebhorreic dermatitis, both immune system disorders.

Fascinating research has been done about transient cures brought about by self-limiting infection with the porcine roundworm.

humans are not their natural host, the porcine roundworms can't reproduce. Eventually (months) they die and the Crohn's symptoms return. The patients typically beg for more.

the idea that a little dirt is good for you.

One time I was getting ready to visit my sister who at the time lived about 600 miles away, and the day before I was to leave she called me to say I might want to reconsider as her oldest had just broken out with chicken pox. I said, "Hooray" and headed right to her house and made sure my kids played with little Miss Chicken Pox. My oldest, already in first grade at that time, had been through several rounds of chicken pox outbreaks at his school and hadn't yet come down with it, and I wanted him to get it and be done with it. Lucky me, both boys broke out the same day about three weeks later.

I also think there's a real down side to vaccinating against every single thing out there. Almost every winter there are huge threads here on DU about getting the flu vaccine, although I haven't noticed any this year. It seems that the ones who are most ardently pro-vaccine are the ones who come down with any little thing that goes by. I absolutely refuse to consider it, and at 60 I'm in the age range where everyone is supposed to get it. I never get the flu, I'm the healthiest person I know, I'm pretty much the only woman my age who doesn't take some kind of supplements. I always thought that hormone replacement therapy was a bad idea, and was proven right several years ago on that.

Being exposed to all kinds of things in our youth is the best way to build a good immune system. The immunity you get from a given disease by actually getting it is far superior to the vaccines. And while I am glad to live in a world where most adults are no longer scarred from smallpox, I'm not completely convinced that we should be vaccinating against the old childhood diseases that I got, like measles, mumps, and german measles (rubella) that my children did not get because the vaccine for those was around for them. I do understand that many disagree with me about those particular vaccines, and note that I did have my sons vaccinated.

(and I mean a SEVERE CASE) like clockwork, though I blame my niece and nephew being little germ factories (I visit every Christmas). Now that they are adults and better about handwashing, I never catch anything from them. However, I get flu shots about every other year because clients love to bring sick toddlers in with them for their cat's annual visit and I have caught nasty stuff THAT way. But mostly I don't get sick anymore. I have already had everything out there once.

I had sanitized my stethoscope earpieces with some alcohol before sticking them in my ears that one time I developed a horrendous cellulitis that spread across my ear and halfway across my face--don't know what bug that was, but it was virulent! Lucky it wasn't "flesh-eating", or I'd be missing half my face or worse. See, that's the problem--there are enough worrisome viruses and bacteria out there (MRSA, anyone?) that can disfigure or kill you that you can't make a blanket statement against disinfecting your home/belongings as often as practical. And I also draw the line at worms. I plan for my children to remain free of intestinal parasites.

I've worked for years in Infectious Diseases and have always subscribed to this hypothesis. Dirt is good (within reason, of course). Disinfecting everything is bad. ;-)

<snip>COMMON DISINFECTANT TRICLOSAN COULD BREED SUPER-BUGS

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent, Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

It sounds like a good idea -- put a germ-killing disinfectant in toothpaste and soap to keep kids and adults safe from infection -- right? Wrong, Boston-based microbiologist Laura McMurry and colleagues at the Tufts University School of Medicine say.

McMurry said triclosan, a disinfectant widely used in products as diverse as kitchen sponges, soap, fabrics and plastics, is capable of forcing the emergence of ``superbugs'' that it cannot kill. And experiments have shown that it may not be the all-out germ-killer scientists once thought it was. Changing just one gene in the E. coli bacterium allowed it to resist triclosan's effects, McMurry said in a telephone interview. ``We were able to get resistance by simply changing an amino acid in the target.''

Triclosan is used so widely because it is what is known as a nonspecific biocide -- it kills all microbes. Like bleach and alcohol it was believed to interrupt so many cell processes there was no way any organism could develop resistance to it. ``It was just kind of thought it dissolved the membranes. If it does, then you are probably not going to get resistance. You would have to have a totally different membrane that would be resistant,'' McMurry said.

Most drugs used as antibiotics work on just a single process. For instance, penicillin stops many bacteria from building a strong cell wall by acting against one component, known as a mucopeptide. But this specific action means many bacteria, including the very common staphylococcus, can resist penicillin. That is why new generations of antibiotics have had to be developed.

MORE USE MEANS MORE CHANCE OF RESISTANCE The more a drug is used, the more chances bacteria have to evolve resistance. Unless all the bacteria in an infection are killed, the ones that survive exposure to a drug will be those that resist it in some way, while the weaker ones die first. Thus, a species of bacteria can evolve resistance, especially if this happens over and over again. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are becoming a bigger and bigger problem. They range from penicillin-resistant gonorrhea to super-strains of staphylococcus that cannot be killed by vancomycin, the strongest antibiotic available.

For this reason, doctors are now being warned to cut back on frequent prescriptions of antibiotics except for people who really need them, and patients are being reminded to take their full course of drugs to make sure no resistant bacteria survive to breed more resistant bacteria. But no one had thought this evolutionary process was a problem with triclosan because it was thought to kill all bacteria. Then McMurry and her colleagues put this to the test, breeding bacteria that had various genetic mutations to see if they would resist triclosan. Writing in the most recent edition of the journal Nature, they said they had found one. It was a gene called fab1, which is involved in the creation of fatty acids in cells. McMurry said this could mean that bacteria could evolve resistance to triclosan, but she stressed that there is no evidence so far that this has happened in nature.

http://www.health-report.co.uk/probiotics-triclosan-dangers.htm

I read a study a few years ago that when families started having more than one bathroom, the incidence of diseases like Crohn's started increasing dramatically. Made sense to me that sharing a germy toilet seat and spitting at the same sink would tend to pass on germs and resistance. I've resisted the push to using antimicrobial cleaners for that very reason. There have also been studies that home births spawn drastically fewer complications because 1) You're already acclimated to the organisms in your own (hopefully carefully cleaned) home and 2) You're not exposed to the smorgasbord of really dangerous ones in the hospital. Yes, they're starting to get really anal about things like washing hands before and after they leave your room, but what about those computer keypads they drag around now as well as all the other paraphernalia there's no way to really keep sterile? Maybe it's because I transcribe acute care--and largely things like ICU and STAT cases--but damn, it seems like it's rare for anyone to get out of there without at least C. dificile or E.coli screwing them up long-term, and the number of MRSA and serious fungal infections is alarming.

Driven through suburbia lately? Not many dirt fields for kids to play in, and the ones that do exist are usually fenced to protect the owners from liability. Even the playgrounds use woodchips instead of sand nowadays.

My kids love the fact that we live in a rural area with lots of wild spaces around for them to play, but we're constantly amazed by our paranoid urban friends who freak out when they bring their kids over. You'd think the world was ending because their kid stepped in horse dung or got a little muddy running around in the field. I had one co-worker who EXPLODED when she found out that her kid and mine were eating blackberries of a wild bush at the back edge of my property (we had a company picnic at my house). To her, the concept of eating an unwashed wild berry was so disgusting and potentially dangerous, and she was so infuriated that I let my kids do that sort of thing, that she left the picnic threatening to call CPS on me for CHILD NEGLECT.

The reality of modern life is that some people are genuinely fearful of their children getting dirty.

My four year old has been sick twice in his life. I can count my teenagers illnesses on one hand. I attribute all of that to the fact that they've been digging in my garden since they could walk, and playing in the fields since they could run.

I wonder if that is the reason.

research money for something else : ).

I grew up in a farmhouse with ponds and streams and dirt and mud was part of my summer attire. I'm sure I ingested dirt and germs (my mother was not the most obsessive housekeeper - and neither am I. I always tell my friends I'm too creative to be more than casually neat (fact is - I'm lack the ability to organize and I'm not to good with decisions so a moderate chaos ensues). I'm an artist, too, and I would scream in horror if it were spotless. Its a space that sort is sort of alive... I'm always happiest when there is a paint splotch on something.

But I think the obsession with sanitary, germ free, clean-room antiseptic type environments we're trying to sell ourselves (women aren't "good" wives or mothers unless they are the cleanest, neatest most hygienic - we're sold a bill of goods and it's mainly directed at us through marketing and our own social competitiveness that feeds off itself... I never got that, myself.

The result is kids aren't exposed to germs and dirt and normal things that they would encounter in a normal bacteria filled world. And they don't build up resistance, they get sicker more often, more antibiotics are prescribed... it's INSANE!

Let your kids get dirty and messy and kick around in mud puddles... (within reason, of course). Its a good thing. My digestive tract is seemingly indestructible... so I something worked in my imperfect,, muddy disorganized childhood. : )

So... I think they're right.

Hooray for science! : )

One of the most horrible recent trends I've seen is kids using bacteria-fighting hand lotion all the time. Our immune systems are designed to be exposed to a certain level of foreign particles. Obviously, we should be sanitary when it involves things going in our bodies, but we've taken germophobia to dangerous levels.