Statement
Allergies only have one symptom.
Text - Dirt is good for you
There is a huge increase in one particular illness in the western world. There are a variety of different symptoms, like: sneezing, swollen eyes, rashes and feeling breathless. With this illness, people often feel very ill, and sometimes they die. The causes are not deadly bacteria, however, they are everyday things like nuts and flowers. These people are not suffering from terrible diseases, but from allergies. And experts predict this epidemic could become one of the biggest medical challenges of the next century.
Allergies affect large numbers of the population; in some parts of the world, a third of adults and a half of children. So why are our bodies doing this to us? Scientists have used historical evidence: hygiene and medicine were much less advanced a century ago, but allergies didn’t exist. People used to drink water from rivers and work on muddy farms. They didn’t use to wash much and they used to suffer from many more illnesses. But they didn’t use to suffer from allergies. ‘Nowadays, everyone things hygiene is very, very important,’ explains Dr Smythson from a top London hospital. ‘We wash our hands, we clean our houses and we make sure our children are clean. We think it is a good thing, but we don’t understand that some bacteria are good.
Bacteria and dirt are, in fact, essential for our bodies. Children who play in mud and get dirty develop strong immune systems in their bodies, which then fight off ‘bad’ things like diseases. If our immune systems don’t develop properly, they become oversensitive to ‘good’ things, like food, pets and flowers. Scientists in various countries, including England, Germany and Sweden, are finding ways of giving people good bacteria in mud and they have found that this can reduce allergies dramatically. It will take time to find out exactly which bacteria are best, and how to create a treatment, but they are certainly on the right (muddy) track!
