If you're a dog person, your kids might be in luck. Research suggests that children who grow up in homes with pets are less likely to develop allergies, and now a recent study by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, sheds some light on why.
Working with mice, the scientists found that exposure to housedust from homes with a pet appeared to protect the mice against a common virus called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which infects the lungs and breathing passages and is a major cause of respiratory illness in young children. (In adults, it usually causes run-of-the-mill cold symptoms.) Severe infections in infancy are linked with an increased risk of developing respiratory problems like asthma later on.
Lead researcher Kei Fujimura and her team looked at three groups of mice. One group was fed house dust from homes with dogs, and then exposed to RSV; a second group was infected with RSV without exposure to dust; and a control group of mice was not exposed to RSV or dust.
The study found that the mice that ingested house dust and were exposed to RSV didn't develop the telltale symptoms of infection, such as lung inflammation and mucus production -- these animals looked just like the controls. The researchers then examined the microbes living in the protected animals' guts, and found that the types of bacteria they harbored were different and more diverse than the bugs in the RSV-infected animals guts.
What do gut bugs have to do with asthma? Potentially a lot. Researchers are discovering that the microbiome, as it's known -- the vast community of good bacteria and viruses that live in and on the human body, including in the intestines -- not only play a vital role in basic bodily functions like digesting food, producing vitamins and fending off infection, but may also contribute to the development of chronic conditions and diseases like obesity, cancer and asthma.
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