There is also another theory being tested in Switzerland, I think. The
theory is that if we are protected from too many bugs when we are young,
our immune system goes overboard when we have to face these bugs as an
adult. They noticed that children who live on farms have a lower rate of
allergy than town children.
Makes sense to me, but only up to a point. And I notice that it's "lower rate", not "none", which seems to support the "up to a point" theory :)
I don't know when my grandfather (the one with asthma) was born. My father (hives and occasional attacks of petiti mal) was born in 1915, and both were born and raised in a Polish village... Never mind *sterilisation*; if they got a bath once a week, I'll be surprised; once a week bath was what *I* got when I was there for the summer, and I was a city child whose parents had "fancy notions". There certainly was plenty of exposure to animals; the children were only supervised (looked for) when they weren't around to do their appointed chores and all the chores were to do with animals -- that's all we were big enough to do.
I was born in '49 and raised in the city (except for the 5 warmer months of every year which I spent in the village before I went to school at 7, and 2 months a year afterwards). We did have running water cold and warm, so I got a daily bath when in Warsaw, but the only time anything was sterilised was the few months when my youthful (and frisky <g>) nanny caught a sexually transmitted disease (by that time, I was 4). I had only hives as a child; the other, stronger, reactions to food and drugs didn't begin to surface until I was in my late teens (and got worse since, though I *can*, now, eat what I couldn't then).
Since I survived, I applied the same principles of "cold raising" to my own child; with breast feeding there's no need for sterilisation (and many reasons *against* <g>) and, while I'd trash anything he dropped on a street before he put it in his mouth, what he dropped on the kitchen floor at home got a cold-tap rinse at best... He still has asthma -- not as a reaction to the parakeet we had, or the dog we had, or the neighbour's cats... To tree and grass pollen (though only in the US; in Warsaw, not a wheeze, despite the air pollution that boggles the mind and even when all the trees were shedding "stuff" like crazy. He tells me it's not as bad in San Francisco as it had been in Lexington, either)
So I still think that, to some extent at least, the old theory I grew up with holds: you breed from faulty stock, you're gonna get "lemony" results :) My Mother, BTW, although city-bred, never knew the word "allergy" until my father and I came into her orbit; I suppose I'm lucky that at least *some* of her genes are in me, counteracting those of my paternal line (OTOH, I don't mind inheriting my father's "lean" genes; she was almost as wide as she was tall <g>)...
---- Tamara P Duvall mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland
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