Are We Too Clean

909 Words4 Pages
Are we too clean for our own good? I was born into a generation where cleanliness and importance for health is highly regarded. Many years before microorganisms were found; people believed evil spirits were the cause for diseases and infections. But, by the 1800’s scientists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur proved to the world that it was, in fact, the doing of microbial bodies that created these infections. However, vast decreases in diseases of those microbial infections were created not by the production of penicillin (by Alexander Fleming) but because of the greater knowledge people gained from the discovery of microbes. They became much more understanding of what these microbes were doing, and where they would mostly be found. This awareness grew in correlation to the better understanding scientists got of microbes over the years. Automysophobia is the fear of becoming dirty. However has this fear created a dilemma in which it causes a new threat altogether? The hygiene hypothesis states that if a young child is protected from exposure to infectious agents, microorganism and parasites too well, that child will grow up to become more susceptible to allergic diseases as natural development has been ceased by intervention. Some of the worse dangers of this unnatural interference in a child’s development include the rise of autoimmune disease, autism and lymphoblastic leukaemia. Some studies have shown that in households with pets or with a higher number of siblings (and thus, germs), children are less likely to develop asthma later in life. When a person is infected, their immunity takes action in two types of defence mechanisms, specific and non specific. If the body has not encountered the pathogen previously, there will not be any specific immunity against this pathogen and so non-specific immunity takes place in the form of phagocytosis. During this
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