May

6

Hygiene Theory Causing A Rise In Allergies?

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Is being too clean causing a rise in allergies?  According to the Hygiene Theory or Hygiene Hypothesis, it is.  As our environment gets increasingly sanitised, it is said that children’s immune systems are not exposed to enough germs to develop antibiotics. According to the market research firm Mintel, Britons spent £612 million on bathing products in 2005; in 2011, the estimated figure will be £709 million.

One clue why this may seem the case is because allergy-related illnesses appear to afflict only the developed world; they are rare or non-existent in poorer, dirtier countries (where, more harmful diseases such as cholera and typhoid are prevalent).

What is getting experts worried is that people may interpret that it is okay to have poor hygiene standards. In reality, the opposite may also be true. Poor hygiene allows bad germs to flourish, and the prevalence of gastrointestinal infections and MRSA, along with norovirus, is an indication that we should not be lax.

There seem to be no end to the differences in opinion in what can be causing the increase in allergy cases. More recently, there is also a growing conviction that it is not extra cleanliness that are making us ill but the benign microbes colonising our gut and skin.  What is good news is that research scientists are  now focusing their attention on finding out more about the gut and benign microbes, what alternative health practitioners have been suggesting for a long time. 

“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.”

News source:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3863223.ece

Sep

29

Allergy Stats On The Rise

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If you are to read the new set of allergy stats announced in the U.K., you will be shocked. It appears that Britain is right in the middle of an epidemic allergic outbreak. The number of people with allergies have trebled in the last 20 years and a third of the population, 18 million people, is set to develop an allergy, it said in a recent report. Although Britain now has the world’s highest number of allergy cases, it has been apparently been “lagging” behind the other European countries in dealing with the problem.

In 2004, research showed that 39 per cent of children and 30 per cent of adults had been diagnosed with one or more of asthma, hay fever and eczema. Hospital admissions due to anaphylactic shock, the severest allergic response, rose seven-times from 1990 to 2004.

The most common triggers are insect stings and foods such as peanuts. Anapyhlectic shock can cause death, if no immediate treatment is sought at the time of the allergy attack.

What was interesting was also that the report suggested that pregnant women and children should not be advised not to eat peanuts because it may actually be worsening the problem of peanut allergy. In Africa, where peanuts are made into a soup used for weaning and in Israel where they are incorporated into a rusk for babies, there has been no major reported problem of peanut allergies. Hence it would appear that not giving children an exposure to peanuts early in life might increase the risk of an allergic reaction later.

The leading theory to explain the rise in stats was proposed by David Strachan in the 1980s: due to leading cleaner, germ-free lives, we are exposed to fewer illnesses in childhood; thus causing our immune systems to become under-developed and over-react when exposed to allergens. Allergens can range from grass pollen, house dust mites and pet hairs. The theory has been verified by many studies since. According to another recent allergy stats, children raised on farms with livestock have a third fewer allergies than those who are not.

With figures not as dramatic, other countries are reporting rises in stats as well. It is likely to be a whole host of factors contributing to our weakened immune system: air, food, water and the products that we use and/or ingest. There clearly is a need to find ways to build our internal resistence to allergens and externally, to reduce the rate of their incidences.