Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Kid Got Allergies? Get A Dog!

In the past, people have often said that having a family dog helps children in many ways, such as teaching them about care. being gentle and to love animals.  There has also been a theory that having a dog encourages the immune system to not be as sensitive.  If your child is brought up in a sterile environment and is then exposed to triggers, their immune system may not be as strong and they’ll be more open to illness.

Now, a research team in Germany claims that they can confirm that keeping a family dog does reduce the chance that kids will develop allergies.  Having a dog in your home:

“trains the immune system to be less sensitive to potential triggers for allergies like asthma, eczema and hay fever”

At the National Research Centre for Environmental Health in Munich,  a team led by Joachim Heinrich, did a study of 9,000 children over a period of six years.

“Parents answered detailed questionnaires about possible allergic symptoms in their children, from birth to the age of six, and blood samples were also taken from a third of the group to test for antibodies to common allergens”

If a child did not have a dog as a family pet but did come into frequent contact with dogs, they  did not get the same protection.  The team was not sure about the reason for this but suspected that the children who had a family dog were benefiting from early exposure to the germs on the animals fur being carried into the home.

Heinrich said:

“Our results show clearly that the presence of a dog in the home during subjects’ infancy is associated with a significantly low level of sensitization to pollens and inhaled allergens.”