[neverdem]

[killermosquito]

I'm not concerned. I'm sure we'll evolve our way out of it.

[Paleo Conservative]

It's Bush's fault!

[caseinpoint]

Interesting but I think asthma has been overdiagnosed, frankly. It seemed to be, for awhile, the disease du jour in California. I know that during that period addressed in the article, my family doctor diagnosed asthma in me and my two daughters and prescribed medication (inhalers). However, we didn't have asthma, never have yet I'm sure we are part of the statistics of the asthma "epidemic".

[kinoxi]

Interesting article. There are hundreds of items in the average grocery store with 'may contain' on the label. Many manufacturers don't know exactly what is in their own product according to their own labels. It seems to defeat the purpose of labeling ingredients.

[BobS]

Just keep on importing people from third-world toilet stalls. I recently got boosters for 11 diseases the military origanally gave me including a flu shot. I got sick for a week a few months later with an upper-respiratory infection that imitates TB. Just keep on welcoming exotic viruses here. Maybe we need a new smallpox or polio virus to "cull the herd".

[bpjam]

I was a child with severe asthma. My mother was a nurse. her advice, stop running around if you start wheezing. After a couple of years, it went away. Apparently, it was a fairly common occurence of childhood asthma which was not permanent or chronic. But if I were a kid today, I've no doubt that the pressure to put me on steroids of some other drugs to prevent any form of inconvenience would be tremendous. It appears that we are no longer allowed to have any kind of diffictulty or malady which shouldn't be immediately treated as a threat on life itself.

With that being said, I have seen studies showing that food additives, airborne contaminants and other chemical additives in cleaners causing allergic reactions which cause asthma-like conditions. And unfortunately, treating these things makes us a weaker and weaker species since nobody is allowed to develop their own antibodies.

[JasonC]

Yeah it is called galloping hypochondria.

[GnuHere]

Well, if the kids of a NYT contributor have it, it must be an important, newsworthy epidemic.

/s

[neverdem]

The gift of language Long, but Theodore Dalrymple utterly destroys popular theories about language.

Bio-inspired Assembly Of Nanoparticle Building Blocks

Huge Fields of Self-Assembled Molecular Ridges May Help Sensor Design

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

[Herakles]

"Living in a place with high vehicle exhaust may make asthma worse, but the evidence is “relatively weak,” the researchers report."

This problem is soooooo obvious as to it's source; just compare the lungs from a cadaver of a person who lived in a city to one that hasn't. At that point the reason for the asthma will be crystal clear and put the above blithering inaccurate statement to rest.

[Mrs Ivan]

Global warming? ;)

[trisham]

My husband and I have asthma, and I can tell you we were not born in 1984 or 1987.

[raybbr]

Asthma is a health problem that seems to be aggravated by MTBE pollution. Although the EPA reports that incidents of asthma have decreased, Dr. Peter Joseph, professor of Radiologic Physics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, says they have actually increased by 50 to 100 percent. The asthma incidents, Joseph said, began to increase after 1979 when MTBE was first used at smaller levels.

From here.

There used to be site called "oxybusters.com" that had detailed information about the effects of MTBE. I am not saying MTBE is the only reason for a rise in astma but it sure caused a lot of problems.

[The Great RJ]

Both my older bother and I had a history of childhood asthma and my brother has a severe peanut allergy, yet both of us were born in the 1940s. Our father who was a family practice physician for more than 50 years had many young patients with similar childhood asthma problems. This is NOT a new problem.

[RobRoy]

And don't even get me started on peanut alergies!

What's up with that?

[6ppc]

Could it have been shag carpet?

[JustDoItAlways]

Asthma and allergies are auto-immune deseases.

That means your own immune system is attacking its own tissue.

The cause of these problems seems to be that when the kids are growing up, they are not exposed to enough dirt, enough bacteria and enough viruses to properly train the immune system to attack foreign invaders only and not your body's own tissue.

So today you have an immune system that evolved in a time when kids where getting sick nearly every day from the dirt, bacteria and viruses they were running into on a daily basis.

We have an immune system that is finely tuned to fight infections 24 hours a day but it is not getting trained on what to fight early in life and it is not getting exposed to enough foreign invaders on a daily basis to keep it busy.

Accidents happen, the system gets out of proper control and now our active immune systems are causing allergies and asthma.

Let you kids go out and play in the dirt the way they were supposed to.

Or do some research on the few doctors who are experimenting with injecting people with different levels of different foreign bodies in order to reset the immune system. There has been some good results to date.