It’s that time of year again for me and many other people who suffer from allergies. I have lost track of how many times I have sneezed and how many tissues and allergy pills that have been used. So why do people have allergies? Why do we have to suffer everyday for a good month, or even worse a year?
Scientists say there is no exact cause known yet for allergies. One thing that is known about it is, it’s the immune system pathways that become inflamed when in contact with allergic proteins. Such allergic proteins are pet dandruff, plant pollens, insect venom, or foods.
Our immune system separates foreign and non foreign bacteria by creating special antibodies that can trigger a response to the certain bacteria. The antibodies are made to mass produce and circulate a foreign protein to form an immunological memory. The antibodies are produced to get rid of the bacteria that can harm you, and sometimes they detect non-threatening proteins and launch an attack. This is when you have your allergy attacks. Your antibodies can detect something as a simple plant protein as a foreign object and launch a severe attack on it. Allergies are thought to be an extreme along the same line of autoimmune disorders.
The most common allergy which I am discussing is respiratory allergy. This is mainly triggered by animals, molds, plant pollen, and dust mites which all float around is mass quantities. About 60 million Americans suffer from this, and on average suffer from two to three types of allergens. The most common allergens are grasses, ragweed, cats, dogs, dust mites, venom, food, and birch. I know personally this time of the year I suffer from ragweed and all year long cats and dogs.
Scientists say part of the reason why we develop allergies is because our immune systems are not exposed to enough pathogens. Because of our good hygiene in our households when we are infants, harmless bacteria are seen as deadly parasites, which cause our immune systems to attack. This is when the hygiene hypothesis comes in to affect showing that children in urban settings and countries, who also do not have siblings, develop more allergies.
Allergies are a cruel response from our body and make life hard to live around the seasons and times that the common proteins are developed. To one day stop this epidemic does that mean we need to expose our children to more bacteria as infants? Hearing that question does not sound like a safe thing to do, but if you really think about it, possibly it is logical. Exposing infants to the simple proteins that most Americans have allergies to, can most likely help the infants build up a better immune system and cause them to most likely not develop allergies. Now I am wishing my parents exposed me to more grass and animals, so I would not be sitting here writing this and sneezing.
This is a very interesting topic. I too have very bad allergies to animals, pollen, and grass. Every morning I need to take Claritin to help my allergies. I find the idea of exposing children to bacteria at a young age very interesting, yet very smart. It may seem risky, but it makes complete sense that it will help build their immune system. I found this article that goes into great detail about exposing your kids to germs.