CLEANLINESS might be next to godliness, but it doesn鈥檛 necessarily make for a well regulated immune system.
A comparison of lab rodents and their wild counterparts supports the notion that excessively hygienic environments may cause allergies. Blood tests found more immune proteins in wild rats and mice, suggesting that they have better immune systems and may show less allergic reaction.
William Parker of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues collected 58 wild rats and 10 wild mice. They extracted blood from the animals and compared levels of antibodies in their serum with those found in 45 rats and 20 mice bred and raised in the laboratory.
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The wild rodents had significantly higher levels of the immunoglobin-E immune protein than their lab counterparts. This might make them less prone to allergic reactions, the researchers say, in a paper published online in the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology.
