I’m hearing lot of moms say that it’s ok to let children play in dirt, attend daycare with sick kids, not sanitize the living spaces too much, put dirty stuff in their mouths because they can only build their immune strength by getting sick first(?!).
I have read the hygiene hypothesis paper and many research papers that have disputed that paper aswell so I’m just curious to learn the science behind the idea ‘let them get sick first’.
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TL;DR The immune system of a child is not weaker than that of an adult, it is actually stronger, just “less experienced”, sort of. Intentionally getting your child infected is an overkill and is dangerous, as is overprotecting them by isolation or excessive sanitising. Best and most risk-free way to build immunity against a disease is a vaccine.
Humans actually have two immune systems, innate and adaptive. Innate immune system consists of “general purpose” weapons that responds to threats immediately and fight off a wide variety of pathogens, but is less efficient against specific pathogens. Adaptive immune system is ridiculously efficient against almost every possible pathogen, but takes a while (a few days) to activate. In simple terms, your immune system needs to collect samples of the pathogen and find a specific type of an antibody production cell that can fight off this specific pathogen. Once you recover from the illness, most of the antibody factories will be killed recycled, but a low amount will stay and keep producing the antibodies. Also some memory cells will be created, making it faster to mobilise the antibody factories next time they are needed. This is how vaccines work – your body is provided with some non-pathogenic samples of the pathogen and will be prepared in the event of an actual exposure. It is a very efficient utility – for example, survivability of patients with rabies infection is nearly 0%, because the virus is so good at avoiding the innate immune system. And by the time responsive immune system kicks in, it would already be in the brain, where it cannot be efficiently fought off. But survivability of vaccinated patients is 100%, that’s how efficient our adaptive immune system is.
So the logic behind moms intentionally exposing their children to pathogens is to build up their children’s adaptive immune system while they are young, because our immune system deteriorates as we age. But the counterpoint is, any infection is a risk. While our body can efficiently fight off most pathogens, some can deal severe damage. It is true that getting infected as a child is in many cases less risky than getting infected as an adult, but still more risky than not getting infected at all. So since adults don’t put dirty objects in their mouth neither should children.
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