Rise in Allergies and Asthma could be related to biodiversity loss | The Izilwane Blog

A recent Finnish research study suggests that a decline in biodiversity in the plants, animals and microbes in our daily environment may be linked to rising rates of allergies and asthma.Researchers studied 118 Finnish teenagers and found links between a healthy immune system, growing up in more rural or natural setting, and the presence of certain skin bacteria.This idea supports the biodiversity hypothesis – the idea that an environment with a diverse population of living things including microbes – is important for the development of a normal immune system in children. You may have heard of a similar idea, the hygiene hypothesis, suggesting that being exposed to microbes early in life trains our immune systems not to respond to harmless microbes or foreign substances like pollen. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that we have become too clean for our own good.Increasingly, scientists and researchers are realizing that we know less about many of the microbes that are in our environment, on our skin and inside our bodies. Nor do we know how they affect our health and bodily functions.

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