Mystery of the Misery: Expert Muses About Infections

Why is it that dogs can drink out of mud puddles with impunity but tots cannot? Or maybe we the people could also but just don’t know it? I’m not about to suggest that we perform that experiment, but it does intrigue me that within the past several years there has been a lot of talk about the “hygiene hypothesis.” Since it doesn’t promote the wisdom of “hygiene,” maybe it should be called “antihygiene” or “lowgiene”? Of course, parents or not, we have all observed with fascination and fear our little rugrats wrapping their gums around all kinds of nutritive and non-nutritive debris they have picked up off the non-hygienically approved floor. Do they survive in spite of — or because of — this activity?

When I was a wee tyke I got a tetanus shot and a smallpox vaccination. When I was in my ‘20s, typhoid and polio were added. Nowadays an infant hardly gets home from the hospital before it gets dozens of immunizations. But the hygiene hypothesis claims that we are getting all kinds of diseases, such as asthma and Type I diabetes, because we are not training our immune systems adequately in early childhood. Why? Because we avoid exposure to all the germs and stuff that we used to have before we began bathing in soap and alcohol 20 times a day. So, what to do?