MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Bill Hesselmar University of Gothenburg Sweden MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Hesselmar: The hygiene hypothesis is the background for this study, and the hypothesis states that children’s immune system need to be stimulated by bacteria and microbes to mature in a proper way prevent the children from developing immune mediated diseases such as allergies. There are increasing support for the hygiene hypothesis, with less allergies found in children from milieus with a rich microbial exposure such as: growing up on a farm or in a developing country, in children with many siblings, and after vaginal delivery as compared to caesarean section. Even though these findings are interesting from a theoretical point of view, they can’t be use in primary prevention since you can’t recommend anyone to live by a farm. We are investigating if there are harmless “microbial sources” in different daily life-situations that are good enough to stimulate children’s immune system. So far we have observed two such possible sources, the sharing of children’s pacifier (Pediatrics 2013) and hand dishwashing (this study). These are, however, only observational data – we have only found an association between hand dishwashing and a lower risk of allergy, we don’t know for sure that the lower risk of allergy was just because of the hand dishwashing. So far we regard it as an “interesting observation”, which need to be confirmed in new studies before any general conclusions could be made. The main findings was a lower risk of allergy (Odds Ratio 0,57) in children from hand dishwashing families as compared to children from families who use machine dishwashing.        (more…)