This is quite natural, when young children touch and study all the surrounding objects that their parents will seem disgusting.

Sometimes such a thing can become your dog's favorite bone or cat's bowl.

All the time, sanitary authorities and doctors call on people to regularly wash their hands, use antiseptics, protect children from contact with any suspicious and not very clean items.

Of course, infectious diseases are a serious cause for concern, but some people may object. It is worth thinking about that society may have gone beyond the reasonable scope of nature, protecting children from surrounding microorganisms.

Do our children need such a clean environment, what we are trying to create? The American experts tried to answer this. The main issue of their recent research was far from new. Does the child give frequent contact with microbes more reliable protection against allergic diseases such as asthma?.

The modern western "theory of excessive hygiene" argues that contact at an early age with parasites, bacteria and viruses reduces the likelihood of developing serious allergic and autoimmune diseases - problems associated with a malfunction in the immune system. This theory was born as a result of natural comparisons. Western prosperous civilization, which pays great attention to sanitation and hygiene, was more susceptible to allergic diseases than backward countries, where thousands of people do not have not only soap but even clean running water.

You can compare urban children with their peers who grew up in rural areas. The latter, according to American researchers, have a much lower propensity to allergic diseases.

As the baby's brain needs motivation, information and interaction for normal development, so its immune system needs to contact with natural enemies in order to strengthen, adapt and regulate itself. This is stated by Professor T. McDade from the Laboratory of Human Biology of Northwestern University (Illinois, USA).

What kind of bacteria are necessary for the "correct" adaptation of the human immune system is not entirely clear. This requires further research.

In a recent study, the team of Professor McDade found that children who were up to 2 years of age more often contacted with animal feces and more likely to have diarrhea, were less likely to have inflammatory and allergic diseases in the future. As a result, they rarely had serious problems associated with inflammatory processes, including diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular diseases.

McDade says that they think not only that the immune system plays an important role in allergic and autoimmune processes, but also that it is involved in severe inflammatory-degenerative diseases. And contact with microbes in early childhood helps in the future to keep inflammatory diseases under control.

Professor of Internal Medicine Martin Blaser from the University of New York recalls that many types of microbes interact with us for millennia, and not always this interaction was harmless and useful for us.

Over the past half a century, the lifestyle of a person has changed dramatically, and some microbes, including strains that lived in the intestines, simply disappeared. Some of these species performed important functions in the human body. The disappearance of microorganisms has different consequences, good and bad.

When we excessively disinfect the baby's environment to protect against infection, we can instead simply deny him the opportunity to build a strong, adapted immune system.

But our concern is not limited to hygiene campaigns, during which we deprive children of the opportunity to contact natural microbes. We are doing one more unintentional evil - we use antibiotics without measure and necessity, we treat antibiotics with a minor runny nose, we give them "for prophylaxis," and even without any justified indications.

Now there is a possibility that these measures will turn against us. This is already happening if we compare the data of Western and Third World countries. Therefore, many proponents of the "theory of excessive hygiene" claim that microbes and mud are useful for us.

Dr. Blazer clarifies that this applies only to those microorganisms that are not adapted to the human body. These microbes live in mud, but when they come into contact with humans they do not cause infectious diseases. Other organisms pathogenic to humans must be controlled.

medbe. en.

Keywords:.