I have never been a super clean person. I mean, I liked being clean and having clean surroundings, but I have never been one to be obsessive about it. After all, my momma always said, “a little dirt never killed anybody”. Apparently there is some truth to what she said according to the article below.

Too Clean? Fight Against Germs Fuels Allergy Increase
Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: Fri Sep 14, 10:45 AM ET

A dose of dirt could be the best medicine for preventing allergies in kids who’ve never had them.

While avoiding excessive contact with germs can help prevent the spread of infections, going overboard with cleanliness could be at least partly responsible for an increase in allergies among children, mounting research suggests.

“We’ve developed a cleanlier lifestyle, and our bodies no longer need to fight germs as much as they did in the past,” said Marc McMorris, a pediatric allergist at the University of Michigan Health System. “As a result, the immune system has shifted away from fighting infection to developing more allergic tendencies.”

More than 50 percent of Americans ages 6 to 59 years are sensitive to at least one allergen, according to a national survey conducted from 1988 to 1994 by the National Institutes of Health. That’s two to five times higher than rates found in a previous 1976 to 1980 survey.

Recent research has found evidence for the so-called hygiene hypothesis, which explains how more sterile environments can lead to higher rates of illness. For instance, scientists in Germany recently found children exposed to farm animals (and the associated bacteria and other microbes hiding out there) were about half as likely as other children to develop the autoimmune illness Crohn’s disease.

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