You’re pushing your baby in a stroller along a busy sidewalk when her pacifier tumbles to the ground. What do you do?
A. Clean it off in your own mouth and then put it back in your baby’s mouth.
B. Stick the pacifier in a bag where you keep “dirty” pacifiers to be boiled in hot water at home later and pull out a clean one from a separate bag.
C. Step into a cafe where you rinse off the pacifier in the bathroom sink.
A new study finds that “A” might be the best answer.
The small study of 184 Swedish babies published today in the journal Pediatrics revealed that the children of parents who spit-cleaned their pacifiers were less likely to develop allergies than those children whose parents rinsed or boiled their pacifiers. The researchers who worked on the study believe that babies benefit from their parents’ microbes and the exposure allows the children’s microbiomes to become better equipped at tolerating “trivial threats,”according to The New York Times. In other words, germs are good and stimulate the immune system. Germ deprivation might result in a weaker immune system.
“It’s really an interesting study, because it supports the theory of the hygiene hypothesis,” said Dr. Samuel Friedlander, an allergy specialist at University Hospitals in Cleveland who didn’t work on the study, told ABC News. “It’s a theory that states that our world is too clean. The immune system is like an army, and if the army doesn’t have anything to fight – like germs – it fights allergens.”
A team of scientists led by Bill Hesselmar at the Sahlgrenska Academy of Göteborg University in Sweden followed the babies and their parents for several years. They interviewed parents about their pacifier cleaning practices when their babies were six months and they checked the children’s allergy sensitivities at 18 and 36 months.
The researchers found that nearly half of the parents occasionally sucked their children’s pacifiers clean. They also discovered that children whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them had one-third the risk of developing eczema (the most common early manifestation of allergy), at 18 months of age, compared to children whose parents did not use this cleaning practice. Development of eczema up to 36 months of age was significantly lower in children whose parents sucked on their pacifiers during the first six months of life.
The study also looked at how childbirth played into the equation. It’s thought that children birthed vaginally are exposed to beneficial bacteria through the birth canal while those delivered by Cesarean section are never exposed to the microbes and as a result have higher allergy rates. The Swedish researchers found that C-section babies whose parents always sterilized their pacifiers had the highest incidence of eczema, close to 55 percent.
The study adds to a growing body of evidence that kids benefit from germs but it’s important to note that the study didn’t prove that the pacifiers cleaned with saliva were a direct cause of the reduced allergies.
The New York Times reports:
The practice may be a marker for parents who are generally more relaxed about shielding their children from dirt and germs, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the research.
“It’s a very interesting study that adds to this idea that a certain kind of interaction with the microbial environment is actually a good thing for infants and children,” he said. “I wonder if the parents that cleaned the pacifiers orally were just more accepting of the old saying that you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt. Maybe they just had a less ‘disinfected’ environment in their homes.”