I knew it! Cleanliness leads to disease

[Undertoad]

A new study just out says that we are too damn clean for our own health. Required reading for the germ-phobic:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/index.php?newsid=7311

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have found a connection between poor T cell survival in the body and the development of autoimmunity, they ask whether autoimmunity is also a question of being too clean.

On the basis of this connection, the scientists are proposing a new hypothesis about the cause of autoimmunity, in which components of a person's immune system attack his/her own tissues leading to diseases such as Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
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This hypothesis could explain a discrepancy in the number of cases of autoimmune disease in developed and developing countries. Disease rates have been on the rise in developed countries in the last 50 years compared to their developing neighbors, presumably because people in less developed countries are exposed to more pathogens.

"The cleaner everyone is, the less stimulation their immune system gets," says Sarvetnick. "Their immune system tends to be incomplete."