Go Ahead, Pick Your Nose....

"I tell people, when they drop food on the floor, please pick it up and eat it."
"Get rid of the antibacterial soap. Immunize! If a new vaccine comes out, run and get it. I immunized the living hell out of my children. And it's OK if they eat dirt."
"You should not only pick your nose, you should eat it."
"Our immune system needs a job. We evolved over millions of years to have our immune systems under constant assault. Now they don't have anything to do."
Dr. Meg Lemon, dermatologist, specialty allergies and autoimmune disorders, Denver

"Hay fever is said to be an aristocratic disease, and there can be no doubt that, if it is not almost wholly confined to the upper classes of society, it is rarely, if ever, met with but amongst the educated."
British Journal of Homeopathy, Volume 29, 1872

"Allergic diseases were prevented by infection in early childhood, transmitted by unhygienic contact with older siblings, or acquired prenatally from a mother infected by contact with her older children."
"Over the past century, declining family size, improvements in household amenities, and higher standards of personal cleanliness have reduced the opportunity for cross infection in young families."
"This may have resulted in more widespread clinical expression of atopic disease, emerging in wealthier people, as seems to have occurred for hay fever."
Paper: "Hay Fever, Hygiene, and Household Size, British Medical Journal, 1980

Too many? Mark Blinch/Files/Reuters

Hay Fever? A catch-all term for all manner of allergies caused by seasonal exposure to pollen along with other airborne irritants. An aristocratic condition? In the 1980 paper published in BMJ in 1980, the author studied the prevalence of hay fever among 17,414 children whose birth month and year was March of 1958. "Most striking", he observed, was a detected association between the number of a child's siblings and the chance the child would acquire hay fever allergy.

He concluded that the more siblings, the less the likelihood of an allergy. Those children unlikeliest to become allergic were the children with older siblings. Exposure, exposure, exposure. This paper and its conclusion appeared to herald the hygiene hypothesis since evolved and expanded, providing deep insight into a condition the modern world imposes on people. We are now, more than at any time in our relationship with the world around us, exposed to less 'good' bacterial germs that help immunize us against the 'bad' ones.

Jack Gilbert, co-author of the book "Dirt Is Good," says kids should be encouraged to get dirty, play with animals and eat colorful vegetables.      Elizabethsalleebauer/Getty Images/RooM RF

We do all we can to shield ourselves from exposure to unsanitary conditions, unclean water, dire weather conditions, turning what we felt once to be an environment dangerous to good health outcomes in our search for survival techniques. We identified and then avoided foods that could be dangerous. Before refrigeration, long before any kind of safe food storage, pork was identified in ancient cultures as harbouring toxic contaminants from E.coli.

We learned to clear our hands of the presence of contaminants by washing them before eating, we learned to cook our food thoroughly to have it last longer before spoiling and to avoid being threatened by raw-based germs. "So they shall wash their hands and their feet, that they die not", advised the Biblical chapter of Exodus. We wash everything now that comes in contact with our mouths, and we wash our surroundings and purify our water.

Our homes are cleaner than they ever were; we observe the injunction that 'cleanliness is next to godliness'. And our immune system began to find itself unemployed. We have smaller families, our milk is pasteurized, food processed and sterilized, to avoid microbes we imagine are all harmful. The immune system is more readily aggravated, developing allergies, chronic attacks of the immune system and inflammation; counter-productive, irritating and potentially dangerous.

More prescriptions for antibiotics might mean more allergies. Gary Cameron/Reuters

According to a paper citing research from the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, skin allergies "doubled or tripled in industrialized countries during the past three decades, affecting 15 to 30 percent of children, and two to ten percent of adults [while asthma] is becoming an 'epidemic' phenomenon". Another report by the World Allergy Organization states that by 2011, one in four children living in Europe had acquired an allergy, a figure on the rise.

The conclusion has been realized that antibiotics have been vastly over-prescribed, leading to a situation where the immune system faced with a deadly infection can no longer rely on the efficacy of antibiotics. "We have to get away from the idea of annihilating these things in our local environment. It just plays upon a certain fear", stated Dr. Keiji Fukuda, a scientist who led a mission at the World Health Organization to develop a global policy limiting the use of antibiotics.

We have done ourselves no favours in minimizing our interaction with nature, with germs, and with what can be 'friendly' bacteria by holding ourselves aloft and separate from contact with anything that might conceivably transfer germs to us. Those 'friendly' bacteria and parasites that once taught our immune system how to react are in short supply, leaving our immune system at sea and over-reacting, allowing exposure to dust mites or pollen to produce allergies at an ever-rising rate of infection.

uBiome