Asthmatic Kids and their “Dust” Cloud

Recent research has shown that no matter how clean kids are kept, they are wreathed in invisible halos of dirt and dust that can be detected using small personal monitors. Just like the Peanuts character PIG-PEN who said, “I have affixed to me the dirt and dust of countless ages,” the dust and dirt adhering to children each day can make them sick.

According to Nathan Rabinovich of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, “Each kid has his own individual pollution cloud. What’s in it depends on what’s in their house, their school, and what their daily experience is.”

Scientists have known for a long time that dust and dirt make allergies worse, especially in inner-city urban areas. Studies have focused on measuring the efforts of counseling families on cleaning their houses and buying supplies, such as impermeable mattress and pillow covers. Yet, these studies have focused on allergens in the home, and not on what children carry with them.

Rabinovitch chose to focus his study of what he and other scientists have coined the “Pigpen Effect” on an allergenic protein called endotoxin. Endotoxin, a component of the pollution cloud, comes from bacteria that are everywhere in the environment.

What the researchers hoped to answer was why children’s asthma gets better or worse from day to day. In addition, they wanted to answer how pets may complicate a child’s asthma, even when the child is involved in activities away from home. Although the “hygiene hypothesis,” in which children exposed to endotoxin from animals and insect dust from an early age may be protected from allergies, has found favor with many researchers, it doesn’t explain why some children are allergic from an early age with such early exposure.

The research Rabinovitch conducted with children at the National Jewish Kunsbeg School found that personal exposures to endotoxin, as measured by monitors worn by the children, were significantly higher than the levels kids were exposed to in the environment. Therefore, they were definitely surrounded by a personal cloud, akin to the Pigpen illustration.

This may explain why a child who is exposed to a pet in the home can still can have an asthma attack from that pet while outside the home. As the researchers have reported in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the more endotoxin that surrounds a child, the more airway obstruction he or she will have to endure.

(Summarized from USA Today: Article by Steve Sternberg)