Finland's National Allergy Program Successfully Reduces Allergic Diseases
publications.ersnet.org
publications.ersnet.org
I've read the gist of this article in my local news org feed. What it basically comes down to is that Finnish scientists noticed that Russian children who grew up in rural areas usually had way less asthma cases than Finnish city children, and thus began to research why this was the case. They hypothesized that early (first 10000 days) exposure to micro-organisms might play a key role in training the immune system not to over-react to (harmless) micro-organisms later on in life, and thus "train" the immune system better. Their hypothesis now seems to have been validated.
Basically this comes down to the hunch I had for quite a long time: Isolating children into an almost clinical environment is not a great way to boost the immune system. This might explain why there are so many people with allergies. People living too cleanly and not getting exposed to (benevolent) micro-organisms so that their immune system prepares them when exposed to later in life. I think that's one of the reasons that kids that are around pets early in life usually have lower risk of developing allergies later on.
The reasoning went like this: We've spent most of our evolution in caves digging in dirt, and now (relatively) recently we have been transported into an environment where we can pretty much have the cleanest settings. What do you think this will do to our immune system?
My hypothesis for why children in rural areas get less asthma is because there's less air pollution, not because they eat dirt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
The basic rationale for it is that the human genome did not evolve in a sterile environment, it evolved in an extremely hostile environment, and so developed pretty harsh defense mechanisms, which if not trained (via early exposure) on the appropriate targets will instead learn to target harmless compounds as well as the body itself.
Depending on where you are born, you can be exposed to a completely different set of microorganisms or compounds present in the environment. Your body first needs to know which of those are benign and not. A simple heuristic is to tolerate most of these that you have been exposed to till a certain age.
But hey this is just my armchair biology. Don't know if there is anything supporting it
A 10000 day old “child” is in their late twenties.
For instance Japan has a known pollen problem. There there's no correlated action to keep small kids out of pollen (that would mean masks, not playing outside at school etc. which are measures extremely hard to take), nor to prevent anyone from getting pollen if they're not known allergics. They go to school and have to be outside for significant time.
Yet the allergy rate increased twofold in a decade, as the pollen presence also increased.
For instance ‘Asthma is incredibly rare in India’. Yet, having lived in India, I constantly ran across people with telltale Asthma symptoms (loud wheezing, lethargy, difficulty exercising, etc.).
I bet if you put those people on a peak flow meter, they’d all be diagnosed. I only knew 1 that got diagnosed though because ‘Asthma is incredible rare in India’, and also who can afford the time and energy to go to the Doctor?
Talking to a couple pulmonologists about Asthma in India (I got it when there!), they basically just laughed and said ‘at least this isn’t Delhi here, that is a gas chamber’.
For allergies, lots of people over time I’ve heard complain about things ‘tasting spicy’ that weren’t spicy, or seen people get facial swelling or hives after eating things. They just chalk it up to ‘oh yeah, that does it for me somehow. I guess I should stop?’. If asking if they have allergies, they just said no, we don’t get allergies here.
In addition, the subsequent generation, my cousins, also have zero allergies. It isn’t until the kids born in 2000 and later that we see any allergies.
I found it funny when US doctors prohibit honey for kids until 1 year old due to risk of botulism, but one of the first things my culture does after a baby is born is give it a drop of honey for good luck. I wonder what the risk of botulism really is, because I have never heard of a baby suffering from botulism in my parents’ and my generation.
Obviously, I am not advising anyone to not follow their doctors’ instructions, but the sheer numbers in my anecdotal study make me wonder.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=ear...
I think you have typo with 10000 days.
And yes, I mistakenly added an extra 0.
Thats nothing more than a racist TikTok trend.
Indians do have a different conception of public urban space which matches more closely with how the urban public in Europe would treat public space a 100 years ago, but that’s not surprising because proper urban cities in India are about as old as urban cities in Europe were a 100 years ago.
And besides what is the point of talking about how Europe did it 100 years ago? We know better now and still we are not taking an effort to instill some basic civic sense here.
It's not racist when it's true. People are disgusting here and makes me want to vomit in times from what I see. There is no self awareness among Indians unless they live in rich well off area in India and move in their expensive cars.
My allergies got better when I moved to a city (probably because there's less allergens), but when I return to the countryside it's still bad (usually it's the worst for the first few days). At least it's not as bad as when I was young (I usually spent a few weeks each year at hospital because of asthma befoer I got 18).
When it comes to air pollution - I grew up during communism in Poland - we had asbestos roof (eternit), everybody was heating their homes with dirtiest and cheapest coal during the winter, and A LOT of people smoked like locomotives. It changed slowly over time.
IMHO there's way too many factors to reduce this to one factor (like sterile environment early on). It probably helps not to have it, but it's not a simple 1-1 relationship.
The same it did to our infant and maternal mortality, make it lower?
It's not about throwing infants in a dunghill first thing after birth and let nature take its course. It's about gradual exposure when the system can slowly get used to it.
10000 days is 27 years, which seems an order of magnitude too large. 2.7 years(~ one thousand days) would be about right, perhaps?
I have an allergy to a specific cleaning product ingredient for instance, although I never got to know what exactly. It was not something commonly used, I never triggered it by myself and only reacted when helping cleaning a friend's house decades ago.
My kid also seems to have it, but again it only ever happened once at a shop, and no allergy test raised it (other stuff were found though)
"dust" allergy is sometimes complicated.
I moved to a big city when I was ~20 and my symptoms got better, but I'm still allergic to all that - it's simply not putting me in hospital anymore.
Doctors told me most people grew out of the worst symptoms over time.
BTW I also somehow got allergic to kiwi fruits between primary school and my late 20s. I ate them rarely and at one point I found out they make me throat swell like a balloon. Didnt' happened before.
But being exposed to the wrongs things can also be bad. The small mountain village I grew up in is partly famous for it's children hospital ("Geilomo barnesykehus"), where kids from the 1930s and onwards would come to live, since they would be better here than in the city. Like kids with asthma and lung diseases could live a much more normal life here.
The also have had eczema since birth and one developed life threatening asthma at one year old. His trigger is the normal cold virus which he is constantly exposed to.
With that said, however, my kids are filthy all the time and play outside constantly in the dirt. One of the seven allergies has resolved completely and one appears to be resolved (haven't done a full challenge yet). No luck with the other five foods yet though.
We don't know about the asthma. Seems better but its managed with meds. Its also way scarier than anaphylaxis (and will be triggered by anaphylaxis and gets worse over the course of a week until he is in the hospital unless we aggressively treat it the moment he has breathing symptoms). The eczema comes and goes. Sometimes it responds to various treatments but usually it doesn't.
Its complicated. But kids should be filthy most of the time.
Humans are really complex, and something that is proven to work for many on a population scale may not work in every individual case.
And the flip-side is that anecdotes to the contrary do not mean that a population-scale observation is invalidated.
(I know this isn't the point you're making, but others in this thread are.)
I used to eat eggs several times a week, and now I have the type of egg allergy now where I can't even eat baked eggs, so no muffins, brioche bread, cookies, etc.
To me, it seems the parasite theory makes sense in tandem with hygiene. Some people by upringing become predisposed to allergies, while others have genetically as a result of humanities constant fight against intestinal worms. As our genetic profile changers as we age, so does how our bodies express said genes which would be designed to fight something we no longer have.
At some point your immune system faced an adversary and conquered it, but one of the signatures it learned from the enemy encounter unfortunately also matches some molecular component of eggs. There is evidence that some people come out of norovirus infection with an egg allergy, for instance. Similar to how a bite from a lone-star tick can give you a meat allergy.
All sorts of auto-immune diseases can be kicked off by relatively benign things, and often we might never discover the cause. Our immune system learned the heuristics of something, but it's too broad so ends up looking too much like our thyroid glands, nerve myelin, pancreas, etc.
Maybe one day we'll be able to enum all of the signatures an immune system has learned and delete some of them.
Its much easier when the amount of nasty diseases they can get from dirty hands is minimal on western world, compared to many parts of 3rd world countries with next to 0 sanitation and usually no sewage separation.
No allergies so far but its too early to tell.
Sounds like the kids were having more fun though.
Let kids play in the dirt, otherwise they'll develop severe allergies to innocuous substances. Early development is when the immune system trains on what is actually harmful. If you don't stimulate it, you wind up with pollen and peanut allergies instead of parasite and bacteria immune responses.
From the paper:
Primary prevention
Support breastfeeding, with solid foods from 4–6 months onwards
Do not avoid exposure to environmental allergens (foods, pets), if not proven necessary
Strengthen immunity by increasing contact with natural environments (e.g. by taking regular physical exercise and following a healthy diet such as a traditional Mediterranean or Baltic diet)
Antibiotics should only be used in cases of true need (the majority of microbes are useful and build a healthy immune function)
Probiotic bacteria in fermented food or other preparations may balance the immune function
Do not smoke (parental smoking increases the risk of asthma in children
This is going to be a big deal in the next 20 years.
I’m from a third world country and the usage of antibiotics is SO irresponsible. People take them (and give them to their children) as candy.
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67ccde8fedd48191a1cb1131bc42b6e1-pha...
Also remember to check Drugs.com or a similar site for dosage, side effects, and interactions.
And my anecdotal input: grew up on a livestock farm, also spending a lot of time in woods and river. No allergy problems at all. Moved to a city and had annoyance-level problems ever since. Decades of observation lead me to suspect particulates (engine soot, tire dust, etc.) as significant antagonists beyond the more commonly cited biological villains. Any chemical with a big-enough stretch of molecule to match what an immune cell is using as its search key.
This reinvigorated phase of allergies in my late 30s is so much hell. I just wish I am able to get some kind of safer “cure”. Safer than those steroid based nasal sprays (which not always work) and those oral antihistamine. I sometimes think whether there has been not enough research in this field because it’s not fatal? Or maybe not too many people are badly enough affected by this?
I still get some bad episodes, especially in winter, and I keep a distance from dust, but most days I'm fine.
My mom is a family and children's photographer. She likes to photograph kids in their backyards or in local parks, sitting in the grass. She often encounters small children who are unnerved by the feeling of grass as they have never touched it before. Also, parents will ask if their child could sit on a blanket, because the ground is dirty. I'm really curious how this attitude started. It is so alien to me.
Now what will happen to my son?
Honestly, I worry that in the US there was a reaction against the "breast is best" movement because of the worry that people were being made to feel guilty if they couldn't produce milk. I understand the sentiment, but there should be a way to communicate facts while still recognizing that not everyone can do it.
I think society as a whole would benefit from (government supported, modern takes on) wet nursing facilities so that every parent has access to natural breast milk, but the unfortunate fact is that today many parents simply don't.
Advice like this is aimed more at mothers who do have milk production but are considering formula because of the incredible drain breastfeeding puts on the body. Formula may still be the better option (what good is breastfeeding when the mother suffers so bad that it impacts the parents' ability to take care of their child?), but for those lucky enough not to suffer too much from breastfeeding, knowing the health benefits may change their minds, or decrease or delay the use of formula for just a little longer.
As for what will happen to your son: who knows, it's all probabilities. You can't connect a specific allergy to a decision. Some breastfed kids get allergies, some formula kids grow up without any. All these statistics state is that probabilities are a bit more favourable across millions of babies when more of them are breastfed. He'll probably be fine, and if he won't be, it's not your fault or anyone else's.