Return to: Scandals: Prescription For Disaster - Is Vaccine Policy A "House of Cards"?

Baffling Rise of Intestinal Disorder in the Young - The New York Times

Crohn's disease, a serious disorder of the intestines, appears to be increasing sharply among children, a trend that may refelct some unknown influence of Western industrial civilization, a British scientist said yesterday at a scientific symposium in Houston.

"It's almost as if the infection-free environment of modern Western society could be a factor," said Dr. John Walker-Smith of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, an expert on intestinal diseases of children...

....Dr. Walker-Smith said it was possible that the decline of many childhood infections might allow children in the West to grow up without the vigorous development of their immune defense systems that such infections would ordinarily promote.

Can Dirt Really Be Good for People? Maybe. But a Little Goes a Long Way. - The New York Times

In the last year, the world of infectious diseases has begun to lose its bearings. The simple John Wayne-like world where the good guys (vaccines, antibiotics and hand washing) chase away the bad guys (bacteria, viruses and all the rest) is fading fast into the sunset.

Rather, some investigators are arguing that, contrary to your mother's (and everyone else's) advice, many of us are not receiving enough infections. Writing recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Scott Weiss of the Channing Laboratory at Harvard, referred to the new focus as the "eat dirt" approach to health.

The idea, although perhaps unsettling, is neither new nor that complicated. As miserable as infections make us feel in the here and now, routine constant low-grade colds, flus and stomach viruses represent useful assaults on our immune systems. As such, they resemble the relentlessly upbeat personal trainer who preaches the doctrine of no pain, no gain. Infections keep us, and our immune systems, fit and ready to go.

A result is an immune system of great sophistication, forever primed to tackle the various assaults that lie ahead. The final consequence of all of this, according to the theory, is that — maybe — those who grow up in less hygienic, less germ-free and less vaccine-punctured environments have substantially lower rates of an array of autoimmune and allergic diseases like multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, asthma and eczema.

The story is a classic medical tale of epidemiologic observation, leading first to head scratching, then to a flurry of guesses and high-end theories and, finally, to basic scientific evidence to buttress the initial observation.

Plagued by cures - The Economist

...It is, of course, well known that preventing or treating an infectious disease can have profound effects on the pathogenic organism that causes it. The evolution of drug-resistant strains is the most famous example of such an effect. Others, equally disturbing, include the appearance of mutants able to evade the protection conferred by vaccines. But now a new worry has emerged. It appears that intervening in infections may have undesirable effects on the hosts—that is, on people—as well as on the pathogens themselves.

....childhood infections do indeed seem to reduce the probability of chronic disease—an idea known as the “hygiene hypothesis”.

...The second possible effect of intervening in a disease is that the intervention makes the disease worse in the long term, not better. A number of viral infections—chickenpox and polio, for example—are more dangerous to an adult than an infant. If a disease is dangerous and no effective vaccine or treatment for it exists, it might be better to allow a child to catch it early on rather than to try to delay or prevent the disease.

The solution?  Another vaccine..... - SM

Day Care May Boost Immunity To Asthma - The Washington Post via Child Care Canada

Infants who go to day-care centers or who have older siblings are less likely than those who don't to develop asthma later in childhood, perhaps because they are exposed to more germs, researchers say.

The new findings provide strong support for the provocative but increasingly accepted theory that exposure to microbes early in life may help the immune system mature properly, lowering the risk of asthma and allergies.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9487955&dopt=Abstract

 

Arch Dis Child 1997 Nov;77(5):384-5

Related Articles,

 
Early infection and subsequent insulin dependent diabetes.

Gibbon C, Smith T, Egger P, Betts P, Phillips D.

MRC Environmental Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton.

In a study of 58 children under the age of 16 with insulin dependent diabetes (IDDM) and 172 matched non-diabetic controls, infection during the first year of life was associated with a reduction in diabetes risk (odds ratio 0.81, 95% confidence interval 0.67 to 0.98, per infective episode). Decreased exposure to common infections during infancy may be linked with subsequent IDDM.

PMID: 9487955 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]