Kids Living on Farms Less Likely to Have Asthma
Posted on Mar 11, 2011 | Comments 1
A new study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, has found that children who grow up on farms are less likely to have asthma, and the cause of this may be something unexpected – the bacteria that is likely to be found on farms!
Children who grow up on farms are obviously going to be more exposed to a great variety of microorganisms when compared with their peers in urban and suburban areas, found the study that was conducted in the Bavarian region of Germany.
The study found that kids living on farms were 30 to 50% less likely to have asthma when compared with their urban counterparts.
The researchers collected samples of domestic interiors, household dust and so on, to gauge the fungal and bacterial DNA of the samples.
They found that the farm kids were routinely exposed to a greater variety of microbes and bacteria on a daily basis, and that these microbes and bacteria seemed to protect the health of the children.
It was the diversity of the kind of bacteria that was seen to be responsible for the children’s resistance to asthma because some of the farm bacteria could actually be helpful in battling other harmful bacteria.
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Posted in: ASTHMA
There is a theory named “Hygiene hypothesis”.
“Hygiene hypothesis” is the phrase used to explain the fact that, as a species, we are much more hygienic than we have ever been. Most households use strong cleaning products, and young kids are not as exposed to dirt and bacteria as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Even as this cannot really be seen as a bad thing, some studies have suggested that it may have contributed to an increase in asthma cases.