How clean is too clean?
Study suggests little girls' hygiene expectations lead to autoimmune, allergy disorders
Joce DeWitt
Issue date: 2/8/11 Section: News
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Clough, a philosopher who recently published her work in the journal Social Science and Medicine, has combined anthropological and sociological research to draw conclusions on reasons why women have higher rates of certain autoimmune disorders, as well as diseases like allergies and asthma.
"I'm interested in the hygiene hypothesis and finding out why there are higher rates of diseases by explaining hygiene," Clough said.
Clough's research takes a novel approach to the well-known "hygiene hypothesis," which states that a lack of exposure to germs and infectious agents during childhood years leads to a higher susceptibility to allergic and autoimmune disorders.
Clough's findings help structure the suggestion that due to the links between health disorders and hygiene at a young age, gender is also a major component.
"In populations of folks with diseases, women outnumber men all over the place," she said. "For every one man with Lupus disease, there are nine women suffering from it."
As lack of exposure to germs at a young age may increase an adult's chances of suffering from certain diseases, Clough decided to spend years looking at old studies and investigations through a feminist lens.
"What I did was spent two years looking at the ways parents raise little kids," she said.
What Clough holds responsible for the noticeably larger amounts of women than men suffering from the same disease is society's idea of how little girls should be brought up, which she maintains as not only an issue that is generational, but also cross-cultural.
After Clough examined similar situations in Bengali, India, the expectation of better hygiene from little girls than little boys is more cross-cultural than expected. It can also be traced back to ancient theology.
"Girls and women were considered impure and expected to clean more often," she explained.
This "ribbon-and-curls" image, which Clough describes as the expectation of young girls to always wear pink dresses and be neat and tidy, can be a possible cause of elevated disease rates in adult women over men.
"As recently as 1998, there was a study of 3- to 5-year-old children at school. One-third of all the girls came to preschool in dresses every single day. When you wear a dress, there are certain rules. You are automatically restricted and there are limited germ exposures," suggested Clough.
The effects of urban development and industrialization are unavoidable in a study of this sort.
"According to the hygiene hypothesis, with industrialization comes sanitation," Clough said. "It's the idea that countries of the north and west have the best sanitation because they are industrialized."
Clough's years of studying and pursuit suggest that there is a need to look at old studies in new ways.
"One of my jobs is to look at ways implicit assumptions are guiding research," she said. "You can open up a whole range of new experiments about the hygiene hypothesis."
What Clough described as old research that could benefit from a new approach is a study conducted by hygiene hypothesis researchers on how children who grew up with pets in their homes were affected by allergies. According to Clough, they found that kids raised with two or more pets in their home had fewer allergies later than kids raised without pets.
Clough suggests further research on the exemplified subject and others like it.
"Go back to these studies and see if boys are being encouraged to interact with the pets, and if girls are too," she said.
Not only does Clough's research take a deeper look at the hygiene hypothesis and the social relationship between gender and disease, it is also a focus on epidemiology, which is the study of disease patterns in huge populations.
"Individually, there is variation. These are general; not every girl is raised to be prim and proper," Clough explained. "All claims I'm making are true for populations of people. Generally for populations, this is what I have noticed."
As someone who has a stable idea of how unequal treatment of boys and girls by parents could lead to health disadvantages, parents might benefit from Clough's edifying advice.
"I don't want to suggest eating dirt because it has all kinds of germs we are not aware of," Clough said. "But if your kids are healthy, and you don't worry about your little boy going out to play in dirt, don't worry about your little girl either."
Joce DeWitt, staff writer
737-2231, news@dailybarometer.com
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