Researchers at UC San Diego say that being covered in Staphylococci bacteria "blocked a vital step in a cascade of events that led to inflammation," after an injury.
By studying mice and human cells, they found the harmless bacteria did this by making a molecule called lipoteichoic acid or LTA, which acted on keratinocytes - the main cell types found in the outer layer of the skin.Dirt can be good for children, say scientistsThe LTA keeps the keratinocytes in check, stopping them from mounting an aggressive inflammatory response.
Head of the research Professor Richard Gallo said: "The exciting implication of the work is that it provides a molecular basis to understand the hygiene hypothesis and has uncovered elements of the wound repair response that were previously unknown.
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Not surprised. Hoping they start discouraging the use of antibacterial soaps.
Me too. Man, I hate that stuff. It's ubiquitious.
Wasn't the rise of polio predated not by the dirtying of the world but by its cleaning up?
This was actually the case in House last night. Coincidence or inspired research?
I refuse to scrub that poison onto my hands unless they are already covered with something worse, and there really isn't much worse (flesh eating bacteria come to mind, though).
always struck me as obvious that our flora and fauna co-evolved with us, and was good for us.
If you want to read more, check out this excellent article first published in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?_r=1
I spent a fair amount of time playing in mangrove swamps and tidal estuaries as a kid, exposed to all sorts of bacteria through cuts and scrapes or accidental ingestion. I get sick for maybe 2 days of the year at the very most, every where I have worked or studied people are sick on average for about 7 days of the year. The last time I went to the doctor wasabout 5 years ago.
I put my immune system toughness down to being repetedly covered in crud. Seriously, get rid of all that anti bac crap and I bet there will be a corresponding decrease in kids with food allergies.
my wife and i have a daughter due in March, and we've both decided that that kid will eat nothing but dirt for the first few years. Properly vaccinated againt the big threats, but otherwise a Grade-A hillbilly ragamuffin kid, not a sterilized bubble baby.
Europeans of all ages are definitely dirtier and smellier than their American friends :-)
You won't find any hand sanitizer here. No antibacterial obsession. No one is sterilizing their light switches, and so on. (We also have real yogurt - not that fake dead stuff you folks in the USA have!)
I'd attribute this cultural difference to the fact that at least here (in Czech Republic) people have not been as thoroughly brain-massaged by advertising. Sure we have our share of ads and billboards, but the grip of industrial marketing is not nearly as tight here as in the USA. That, and the Puritanical streak in the USA is somehow giving people that urge to be "clean" I would venture to say.
Now cue a whole bunch of angry people saying that this study only came out so that the government could start rationing antibacterial soap...
This is something that makes complete sense to me. I was an "outside" kid and spent loads of time in bare feet running around our neighbourhood and yard. Now I've got kids of my own and we never use antibacterial stuff (we actually had to get a dr to write us a note so the kids didn't have to use that awful hand sanitizer crap at school!)and they spend as much time as possible outside, in the dirt. And they are healthy. We also don't bathe them everyday *gasp*.
I feel like it's a simplistic view of the world to say "we know (some) bacteria can be harmful, so that means bacteria on us must be eradicated."
Why would the fact that they evolved with us mean they're good for us? If anything, the opposite is true - organisms evolve to compete with and prey on one another. Which indirectly can be good for us, in a way, as it gives us practice fighting things off, so we're tougher when the really bad stuff comes along, and keeps our "fighting off" mechanisms busy enough that they stay out of juvenile delinquency.
We are so over-the-top fearful in North America of so many things. It's a crying shame because living in fear is living by halves. Horrible for us and horrible for us to foist that worldview on our children too.
Oh, and not to be all copyeditorial on you but could the "Its" in the headline be changed to "It's"? Please?
Amen - "pretty much common sense" wins again!
There was a study published a couple of years ago indicating that kids who grew up with animals in the house also had healthier immune systems. I am not surprised - I subscribe to the George Carlin ideology about cleanliness:
"You know when I wash my hands? WHEN I GET SHIT ON THEM."
I really wanted to find a transcript of his bit about swimming in raw sewage as a kid to post here, but I couldn't.
Anyway, immune systems need practice. That's how they get strong.
Sure, some basic hygiene goes a long way towards stopping disease from spreading, but our bodies evolved millions of years (even before there were humans) surrounded by dirt and bacteria, the "let's sterilize everything" movement started just 40 or 50 years ago. Do people think that they can remove bacteria completely without side effects?
Do people think that they can remove bacteria completely without side effects?
The problem with anti-bacterials isn't so much that they remove the bacteria completely, they don't...but by killing 99.99%, the 0.01% that are left are anti-bacterial resistant, and they are the ones that are left to reproduce with no competition. They turn your sink and body into a lab experiment in selective breeding. Evolution works.
another reason why kids eat dirt is because one of the common bacteria (can't remember its name at the moment) mimics a chemical found in breast milk and has the same effect on the safety/pleasure centers of the brain.
or alternately...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,884551,00.html
When I was a kid (30 years ago) doctors knew this very well. I wonder why they must now reinvent this knowledge.
Once again, big science proves (hallelujiah! Amen! Whatever would we do without you?) what the supposed uneducated, and ahen-unwashed masses, already knew. it's called mother's advice.
Way to go science! Keep at it-eventually you'll have to come down off your high horse and realize we're smarter than you-except when it comes to making supercolliders.
No surprise here. My mother, a former nurse, forbids antibacterial soap, and we kids were expected to play in the dirt. We're all healthy. My nephews are well on their way to having the same kind of healthy childhood.
It's the kids in the sterile households that end up being violently allergic to things.
The problem with many of the comments here is that the commenters appear to be equating all germs as the same level of dangerousness, and human immunoresponses to be the same. Research suggests that exposure to bacteria in earth and plants is good for developing immune systems. Bacteria transmitted by people, left on door handles and toilet flushes are not good for developing the immune system, but are in fact bloody dangerous. Furthermore, getting exposed to germs is useful, contracting diseases shortens overall life expectancy.
This is not straightforward, but the behaviour has to be two0fold. Let your kids play outside in the dirt, but disinfect bathrooms and kitchens, and when you are in environments that have been used by other people (shops, restaurants, planes, buses, etc) then clean your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water.
Thoroughly.
Great, so you're smarter than science? Perhaps you could help me with the central difficulty in my PhD then. If you can come up with an easy way to predict which person with Alzheimer's dementia will pass an on-road driving assessment then please let me know. So far the science and my relentless experimentation hasn't provided me with an easy answer, but apparently I should just be making stuff up and going with hunches to find out how the world works.
Nah, science is real. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty33v7UYYbw
Way to go science! Keep at it-eventually you'll have to come down off your high horse and realize we're smarter than you-except when it comes to making supercolliders.
Says the person on their personal computer via the internet.
A rousing 'Duh!' from this corner of the peanut gallery. Of course, being part of the last generation on a family farm, I'm sure I ingested my peck of dirt quite early, such as being set in a box on the seat of a wheat-hauling truck at the age of 4 months...
My fiance is a microbiologist. For fun, I'll just whisper 'antibactierial soaps' in her ear and stand back to watch to 15-minute rant.
The vast majority of bacteria are harmless, and a significant number are beneficial (such as symbiotes). The natural 'flora' of bacteria on our skin usually displaces the harmful bacteria, and when this balance is lost, the body is more susceptible to infections via wounds.
yeah, i was a straight huck finn rip-off kid in the woods and rivers of mississippi and louisiana (sp?). don't get sick much.
of course IT'S healthy.
I know that everybody wants to believe it, but it's lies, sorry. Dirt may or may not be good for children, but the researchers said nothing of the sort; they were investigating mice, not children, and have not examined whether this same process also occurs in humans - it might do, but nobody knows yet. It's unclear exactly who made the story up, but I'm inclined to suspect the university press department.
The actual research is quite interesting, and largely unrelated to what the BBC posted. Their coverage has been quite disappointing; fortunately, the NHS has a service where experts examine current news stories and they have covered this one. You can find their report here: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/11November/Pages/Is-dirt-good-for-kids.aspx. They give a detailed explanation of what the actual research paper says, and also this:
Look at this ad I saw in the supermarket aisle. WTF? http://www.flickr.com/photos/pisceanelectron/3416324480/
Oh good grief, how many times does this have to happen before people stop? I'm so sick of the news when it says "a report out today restates the bleedin' obvious at huge public expense..."
We all know that you don't die from dirt and germs because multiple generations of us have eaten both and survived to tell the tale. People of my generation were out all day as kids, out of sight of their parents, doing who knows what all day, climbing trees, eating dirt and plants, getting lost, talking to strangers, and guess what? We didn't die. So why does that same generation bring up their kids to be afraid of everything and seal them in a sterile plastic bubble so they have no immunity to everyday dirt and grime?
Global warming is going to have to speed up to destroy us because at this rate we will all die from a dirty fork long before it kicks in.
++ to #31
I really hate the way that the media misreport studies as saying something shocking or convenient when they actually report something completely different.
Until then, stick with common sense hygiene. Wash your hands with soap before handling food and after using the toilet. Be particularly careful about meat and faeces (dog/cat crap can have some nasty stuff in it), which tend to contain the nastier germs. Get vaccinated against nasty diseases. Don't get obsessed with cleaning and disinfecting everything unless nasty germs are likely to be present (i.e. in hospitals and around sick people in general).
One caveat - don't apply common sense to something complex like the immune system. It's horrible to see people anthropomorphicising the immune system as if it were a child that needs to graze their knees a few times to teach them to be careful.
"People of my generation were out all day as kids, out of sight of their parents, doing who knows what all day, climbing trees, eating dirt and plants, getting lost, talking to strangers, and guess what? We didn't die."
To be fair, the fact that YOU managed to survive doesn't mean that nobody died, or suffered lasting harm. I agree in spirit, but it's also important to remember that the expectation that all your kids will survive to adulthood is quite recent, historically speaking.
There is good hygiene, I'm a fan of plumbing and whatnot, but there may be overkill. I'm against antibacterial soaps as they've become a ubiquitous intervention with no evidence to suggest they make anyone cleaner. The overuse of antibiotics in medicine has not been an inherently a good thing, was not sure why they needed to add it to otherwise healthy soap. The increase in MRSA came around about the same time antibacterial soaps became more prevalent.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3_supp/levy.htm
The wiki on Hygiene theory (yes I know it's just a theory, but I believe it), also does a decent job of noting the supporting studies.
Studies like this are a small link in a bigger picture that needs more data to be definitive, but smart money is on their being some legitimacy to the hygeine hypothesis.
my standard comment seeing the "kills 99.99% of all bacteria" bit on products: "hey that's the same percentage that's harmless!"
if you aren't about to do surgery you probably don't need it.
@ Camp Freddie:
People always say things like this, but it's essentially meaningless. One person's "common sense" is completely different from another.
How many forums do you think I'd have to search through before find a post that says something like "Everyone knows bacteria are everywhere. Use antibacterial soap always! It's just COMMON SENSE people!!1" Not many, I think.
You dismiss the research, but it's actually the research that distinguishes between your common sense, my common sense, and the truth.
i know that personally, the people who are always getting sick are the ones who grew up in sterile environments. i grew up in the middle of nowhere and have never seen my parents house clean, except in pictures from when they bought it. i never clean my wounds (except to remove excess dead skin) and besides shampoo every two days, i dont use soap on the majority of my body. a rinse is all that's necessary 90% of the time.
go dirt!
The "Hygiene Hypothesis" seems to support this, and also asks whether we might be want to reintroduce some parasitic worms into our collective Gut.
http://autoimmunedisease.suite101.com/article.cfm/parasites_and_the_hygiene_hypothesis
#8: With everyone getting sick so frequently all around you... Have you ever considered that you're the carrier of some crazy megagerms? :)