Like most kids, I played in the dirt a lot. Sure, I am a neat-freak now, but that's not how I always was.
In the old country five and six decades ago, I cannot imagine any kid not having played a lot in the dirt. Villages like grandmas' offered plenty of dirt all around. Young ones crawled, on floors licking anything and everything that they came across. Toddlers rushed outside and grabbed whatever they found and, as toddlers do, gave them a good licking too. And more, as you can imagine.
Urban India was not that different.
Perhaps I was a tad more in the dirt than the average kid. I recall a phase when I had boils in my arms and legs--my unclean self had made them possible.
Oh, there was more "unclean" stuff. Like tiny worms in vegetables. In the rice too. Bugs in the lentils. Ants seemingly in everything.
There was no point complaining to the grandmothers. "That's ok, if you swallowed ants, your eyesight will get better" was one of the responses. And here I am wearing glasses. Clearly the ants that I swallowed didn't help ;)
Could all these early experiences have also helped me become healthy?
That is the hygiene hypothesis in health.
The argument has been that our immune systems do not gear up to fight infections, or even go rogue sometimes, if they have not been trained early on in our lives when we were kids. The more kids (and adults) live in sterile conditions most of the time, the less that their bodies know how to develop a fertile internal environment that can be the army to fight invaders when they come knocking.
I am not sure if we can establish this with certainty. But, it has always appealed to me, and I am thankful that I grew up dirty, and am clean during my middle age as my body begins to weaken.
In the age of the coronavirus, the hygiene hypothesis has reared up in an interesting way. Could tropical countries that are also poor, like India or Nigeria, be handling Covid-19 better because the people there got a lot of hygiene and immune building exposure during their childhood?
Now, new research by Indian scientists suggests that low hygiene, lack of clean drinking water, and unsanitary conditions may have actually saved many lives from severe Covid-19.
In other words, they propose that people living in low and low middle-income countries may have been able to stave off severe forms of the infection because of exposure to various pathogens from childhood, which give them sturdier immunity to Covid-19. Both papers, yet to be peer reviewed, looked at deaths per million of population to compare fatality rates.
Before you jump to conclusions, keep in mind that a lack of potable water and sanitation infrastructure literally kills people. Bad air quality also is a killer. By having clean water, sewage processing systems, and clean air, we save lives and extend longevity. So, we don't want to cut back on these, right?
Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, believes the "hygiene hypothesis" in Covid-19 "does fly in the face of our understanding of anti-viral immune responses".
An immunologist in the US, with a last name of Iyer. Hmmm ...
Low hygiene conditions correlated with low Covid fatality rate is merely a correlation at this time. We have very little understanding of the virus almost a year into the pandemic.
Clearly, a range and variety of reasons could be possibly behind the low fatality rate. "We still have a lot more to learn about the virus as we are still only 10 months into the pandemic," says Prof Kuppalli. The fact is there is much we don't know.
There is much that we don't know. But, I am always inclined to believe that all the dirt that didn't kill me in my childhood made me stronger. As I wrote seven years ago, "I am willing to buy into the idea that all those tiny doses of dirt in the air and the food helped me develop my immune system, and I now worry that I will live way too long for my own good! And that the absence of that from my regular life now is why I have to be ultra-careful when I visit India."
I wonder when I will be able to visit India again!
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