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A New View on Fighting Baby Allergies With a Sterile Home Life |
 There is no question that allergies in babies and toddlers is extremely common. The chances that parents will have to deal with an infant allergy in their youngster are so high that it would be negligent not to prepare yourself for the possibility that your baby will have some form of allergy problem or another. The Center for Disease Control has done a lot of research into baby allergies and have found that the number of children that must fight hay fever alone tops 7 million.
Hay fever or "atopic dermatitis" is such a big problem in the baby allergy category that the American Lung Association estimates that 30% of infants will have some form of this kind of allergic problem. That means that baby allergies is the in the top five of infant illnesses parents will have to fight and one of the most common reasons parents have to take their babies to the hospital. That is a serious problem that is worthy of some serious consideration by parents to develop a plan for how to fight infant allergies in their babies if they rear their ugly head in the home.
These statistics can be quite terrifying to parents of a young child. Sometimes the methods that are recommended to keep infant allergies out of your home are contradictory or confusing. One source might say that breastfeeding is a sure way to equip your baby to fight allergies while another states a case that breastfeeding, while good for the baby, is not a guaranteed way to ward off baby allergies.
At first, it was believed that if there were allergies in the family lines of the baby, that meant that the youngster would be dealing with infant allergies. But recent studies have shown that parents can keep genetics from deciding the health of their child. There are things that can be done to keep allergies out of the home. But here again, the data sometimes is confusing on what to do.
Naturally, one would think that keeping the home perfectly clean is the way to go. Keeping all forms of dust, pollen and animal residue away from the child seems on the surface to be the best route. And it fits with the instinct of a new mom to clean with a passion so that the baby will be raised in an antiseptic environment. This is the kind of thinking that seems to bring with it a lot of wisdom. In fact, studies done by university medical centers and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology have been published that suggest that the best way to keep a baby allergy free is to keep allergens out of the home.
While we don't intentionally seek to confuse the waters when it comes to developing a plan for fighting allergies, if there are other qualified opinions on the matter, they are worth hearing. More than one medical researcher into the field of infant allergies have suggested that a perfectly clean home life is of no value in combating baby allergies. For example, it has been shown convincingly that babies who go through infancy with pets in the home seem to have a greater resistance to allergies as they go through life. Further, when the lifestyles of children raised on farms with large families are compared, the outcome is surprising. That home life seems to result in surprisingly low incidences of infant allergies despite a home life that is probably not antiseptically clean.
It makes sense when you think about the way allergies work. An allergy happens when the immune system of the baby reacts to an allergen as though it was a dangerous foreign body. So an allergic reaction might be viewed as a "mistake" being made by the baby's immune system. But the immune system is the type of body protection that learns on the job. That is why many immunizations for the flu or other diseases make the child able to fight disease by putting a small dose of the germ into the body. That enables the immune system to "learn" how to fight that disease and give the youngster a fighting chance in a dirty and disease filled world.
Some researchers are taking this approach to how to help infants learn to fight off baby allergies. If this theory holds up, a home that is completely free of the allergens that so often cause infant allergies is the worst thing a parent can do. By taking away from the baby anything that could trigger that allergy, the baby's immune system has nothing to fight against. The outcome might be that there is no allergy problem in infancy but that the issue is postponed to come back later in life when the child finally is exposed to the allergens.
Does this mean that parents should not try to keep the home clean when their baby comes to live with them? Of course not. There are many good reasons to keep a clean home besides infant allergy prevention. There are some allergens such as cigarette smoke that pose a serious health risk to the child and that should be kept out of the home entirely.
But it could be that trying to keep allergens completely away from your child is not a good way to help that little one learn to cope with the world in which she was born. It could mean you don’t have to get rid of the family dog or try to achieve a hospital level of antiseptic clean in your home to help your baby defeat allergies in her life.
By allowing a small amount of allergens to live with you and the baby, you may be giving the infant's immune system what it needs to fight allergies for that youngster now and for the rest of her life. That is a gift that will last a lifetime. And it is a gift we can give to our babies by simply adopting a common sense approach to baby allergy prevention in the home.
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