While talking about Congress...

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Congressmen, Rats what's the difference!

A new study co-authored by Dr. William Parker, a Duke University professor of experimental surgery, found that dirty rats have better immune systems than their clean lab-bred brethren.

The studies give more weight to a 17-year-old theory that the sanitized Western world may be partly to blame for soaring rates of human allergy and asthma cases and some autoimmune diseases, such as Type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The theory, called the hygiene hypothesis, figures that people's immune systems aren't being challenged by disease and dirt early in life, so the body's natural defenses overreact to small irritants such as pollen.

I've always wondered why allergies seem so problematic here in the US (even accounting for Big Pharma marketing).

Of course, this study may be as flawed as the red wine-studies of the past. These studies claimed that red wine was better for your heart because more teetotallers had heart problems than imbibers. It failed to account for those imbibers who had to give up drinking because they had to take medications. And this group skewed the results in favor of the imbibers. (Hey, tell people that coffee, alcohol and desserts are good for them, and they're not going to look too closely at the study).

In this rat survey, they may have failed (I don't know that they did) to account for those wild rats whose immune systems were compromised and ended up killing them in the process. THat is, the only available wild rat sample are those with strong immune systems. The same sample could survive in the lab skewing the results, perhaps?