Today nobody doubts that hygiene and hand washing have been key to having the health we have. It is something so important that there is World Handwashing Day whose purpose is to remind adults and children that With an act as simple as washing our hands we can prevent many infections and infections.
However, for some time now, there are many researchers who are working on the so-called "hygiene hypothesis", which explains why in the end we have been so scrupulous, so clean, that our bodies have become vulnerable to other diseases that do not depend so much on hygiene. In other words, that A little dirt in children may not go wrong.
Proponents of the "hygiene hypothesis" say ...
According to the defenders of the “hygiene hypothesis”, by drastically reducing the number of challenges that the environment offers to the human being, the immune system tends to train less and worse, causing some diseases to be now more serious than in the past.
For example, they talk about now there are more allergies and that allergic reactions are more serious, something that is true, but whose causality would have to be demonstrated, because there is also talk (other researchers say) that the current handling of food makes them more “irritable”, as if they changed to defend themselves and thus became more food allergens They also talk about gastrointestinal disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease and autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
In support of his words, they exemplify how healthy someone who lives on a farm or has a dog can be, who will hardly suffer any of these pathologies (surely you will have remembered the street children on more than one occasion, those that, it is said, are almost never bad compared to ours).
We grew with those microorganisms and now we eliminate them
Untreated water, feces, mud ... all the microorganisms that inhabit them have been with humans since the beginning and, apparently, there was a close relationship between the two that, in a way, benefited us.
Our body got used to all those organisms, using them to train and improve the functioning of the immune system. Now, since he doesn't have them to attack them, he can do his job badly, attacking things he shouldn't.
Let's say that the immune system of babies and children, when coming into contact with most of the surrounding organisms, already known by the species for being habitual, began to train, to see how to respond appropriately and restrained, in order to prepare for future attacks by other organizations.
By not having now those bacteria that are eliminated with hygiene, the immune system has not trained, is more vulnerable to other infections and can also be more aggressive when it comes into operation, doing so when it should not or generating exaggerated responses (greater release of histamine, for example, before an allergic agent, or in other words, causing more severe allergic reactions).
So what do we do with our children?
Researchers who favor the "hygiene hypothesis" will never say that hygiene is negative, because if now we return to times where the absence of it infected diseases we will not be advancing anything. They suggest that we continue as we are now, without reducing hygiene, but without going crazy if one day our son is eating a snack and we realize that he has his hands full of dirt because he has been playing with it.
They say they are trying to know the mechanism by which our immune system grew more balanced before, thanks to microorganisms, without forgetting advances in hygiene, in order to obtain the best of "dirt" and the best of "cleaning" and apply it for better health.
In conclusion, in my house we will continue to do the same, try to ensure that children have clean hands if they come from the street, that they shower every day so that they go fairly clean and neat, but without making their environment a sterile world.
