This CBC opinion piece by Stephen Strauss calls for more systematic research on the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that we live in too clean a world to be good for our immune systems. The results may include the epidemic of asthma, eczema, allergies and perhaps even some autoimmune disorders like juvenile diabetes.
On the other hand, Times of London columnist Melanie Reid laments the increasing incidence of the potentially fatal bug E. Coli 0157 throughout the environment and its implication that we can no longer let our children drink free-running water from our mountain streams.
What they’re trying to formulate at the moment is what controls to put on animals, and how to inform walkers, campers, farmers; and people who live in rural communities with private water supplies. It looks like being a predictable litany: get your private water supply checked; wash your hands after handling animals; carry hand wipes; use bottled water; don’t drink from streams; don’t picnic or camp where animals are grazing; don’t get too muddy.
One scientist even used the analogy of traffic to convince those who resist the advice. In the 1920s you could walk across the road without looking right or left. Would you do that today?
The argument – that improvements in hygiene, not medicine, made the world safer – is a persuasive one, but it’s also terribly sad. There’s something desperately mournful about being told that the countryside, the wellspring of us all, is now a threat. It feels like the severing of some important connection, because in a funny way, the countryside has come to represent the lost land of the free: the last place where you can find an illusion of escape.
There’s an irony, too, in that the rush to the great outdoors has never been greater.”
