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medpundit |
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Thursday, September 19, 2002Children who had relatively large amounts of microbial dust in their bed linens were only half as likely to be asthmatic as children whose sheets contained little of the residue. Furthermore, those who had spent their first year of life on a farm -- which presumably would have given them early contact with the bacterial substances -- appeared to be especially protected. The findings are the latest evidence supporting the theory that modern man's obsession with cleanliness may be leading to a rise in disorders of the immune system, including asthma. As someone who is less than meticulous about housekeeping, I’d like to say this study gives definitive proof that scrupulously clean houses are bad for children, but I can’t. The study compares rural children who live on farms to rural children who live in non-farming families. Farming families happen to have higher levels of dust in their mattresses than non-farming families, and lower rates of allergies and asthma. The association could be serendipitous. There might be something else about farming families that’s responsible for the lower asthma and allergy incidence. A better study would have been to group kids by the amount of dust in their bed linens and compare the rates of asthma and allergies to the dust levels. The study only expresses that outcome in terms of odds ratios and in a table that’s incomprehensible. It also mentions that some of the associations they found weren’t statistically significant. Oh, well. posted by Sydney on 9/19/2002 08:23:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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