Stephan: When I was a boy in the summer you got up in the morning, dressed, ate breakfast and ran outdoors to meet your friends and spend the day playing in the woods and street, going to somebody's house for lunch, then back outdoors until the street lights came on.
The standard question when you came home was: "Where did you go?" To which the standard answer was "Out." Followed by, "What did you do?" The answer, "Nothing." My mother called me, "The little gray man" because at the end of the day I was usually covered in dirt, with grass stains on my knees, not infrequently with bandaids on my arms and legs.
Today things are rather different. The average American boy or girl spends less than 30 minutes a day, even in summer, in unstructured outdoor play, and more than seven hours each day indoors in front of an electronic screen. So their exposure to germs is quite slight. And this is reinforced by the germ obsession promulgated by Big Pharma and Big Chemical. All of this is very profitable for the industries.
Yet today we are experiencing a frightening increase in asthma and allergies in children. Why? Research shows, this arises in large measure because American children spend almost no time outdoors and live in environments that are "semi-sterile." The result, the immune systems of many children do not develop properly. Here is the counter-story.
Amish girls
In recent decades, the prevalence of asthma and allergies has increased between two- and threefold in the United States. These days, one in 12 kids has asthma. More are allergic.
The uptick is often said to have started in the late 20th century. But the first hint of a population-wide affliction — the sneezing masses — came earlier, in the late 19th century, among the American and British upper classes. Hay fever so closely hewed to class lines, in fact, it was seen as a mark of civilization and refinement. Observers noted that farmers — the people who most often came in contact with pollens and animal dander — were the ones least likely to sneeze and wheeze.
This phenomenon was rediscovered in the 1990s in Switzerland. Children who grew up on small farms were […]
