A couple of months ago I saw a Dutch popular scientific show on
television. The topic was allergies. It mentioned several theories about
the increasing allergy rates:
1.exposure theory = early exposure of allergens leads to sensitivation
2. infection theory = infections during the first year boost the immune
system and keep it working, so that it doesn't start to overreact on
allergens, due to understimulation (excuse for my non-medical
explanation). It is found that next sibling in a family, and children
from lower classes tend to have less allergies. Theory is that these
children go through more infections during the first year.
3. Environmental pollution theory

I haven't seen the whole show so I don't know if breastfeeding was
mentioned at all. When they talked about theory 3, they mentioned a
German study. The researchers compared a group of children living in
Munchen and a group of children living in Leipzig. Munchen is known to
have pretty clean air, while Leipzig (in former eastern Germany) has
very polluted air, due to a lot of chemical industry. They expected to
find the Leipzig group to have more allergies and were surprised to find
that the Munchen group had more allergies. Conclusion was: appearantly
air pollution contributes less to allergies than infections during the
first year. In eastern Germany much more children went to child care
centres than in Western Germany so they catch much more infections
during the first year. The outcome of this research was seen as a
indication of ther truth of theory 2.

However, I remembered to have read in Milk, Money and Madness from
Michels and Baumgarten, that in Eastern Europe human milk banks were
much more common than in Western Europe and that premature babies and
ill babies in the hospitals all get human milk, either from the mother
or from then milk bank. I think that the conclusions of studies as the
above research are wortless if the way of feeding isn't considered in
the research.

--
Annelies Bon                            http://www.flnet.nl/~0bon01/
mother of Dirk 6yo, Tom 4yo, Pieter 15mo
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