Flutterby™! : Dirty kids are healthy adults

Want to Fight Allergies? Get a Dirty Dog

More than a decade ago, U.S. researchers reviewing the health records of children with pets—dogs, and, to a lesser extent, cats—discovered that the kids were less likely to develop allergies and asthma than other children were. Other epidemiology studies in Europe have supported this connection, not just with pets, but with livestock as well. In 2010, Susan Lynch, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that dogs who partly live outdoors shuttled environmental microbes into the house, some of which were also found in the human gut.