Word: asthma
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...called the "Hygiene Hypothesis," and researchers invoke it to try to explain why the number of children who develop asthma has grown so dramatically over the past three decades. Bolstered by a handful of studies, the basic idea is that modern urban society is too clean for the kids' own good. A hundred years ago, children's immune systems would have faced all kinds of bacterial and viral infections. Today those immune systems don't know what to do in our supersanitized environment, so they wind up attacking pollen, dust mites and other usually innocuous substances instead. In the worst...
...care before the age of six months with those who had enrolled at a later date. As you might expect, the younger kids, who were exposed to other children earlier and more often, experienced more infections and wheezing. But after they turned six years old, their risk of asthma was less than half that of the children who had enrolled in day care after they were six months old. The researchers' cautious conclusion, according to co-author Anne Wright: "More infectious disease early in life might afford a lifetime protection...
...association does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship. Furthermore, some infections can by themselves be quite harmful, even life threatening. The last thing any doctor would suggest is that outbreaks of, say, meningitis or diphtheria are good because in the long run they might protect the survivors against asthma...
...even if the association between early infections and a reduced risk of asthma turns out to be real, you can't use it as a basis for healing kids afflicted with asthma. Their immune systems have already made a fundamental shift into asthmatic overdrive. Uncontrolled exposure would only make them sicker. Similarly, the Arizona findings would not apply to babies who are born prematurely and are thus more vulnerable to infections than full-term babies...
...asthma...