Although completely non bulldog related, this has been bugging me over the course of the week, and now they are looking at reviewing these places and even talking about banning under 5s from petting farm animals, I can't help but wonder if this has been brought on by ourselves? I have the same theory about MSRA and other super bugs in hospitals. When I was a child, my mum cleaned the house with furniture polish and ajax, if I had chocolate or ice cream round my chops she washed my face with the dishcloth from the sink or she spat on a tissue. A sharp intake of breath had more suction than the hoover and the only thing that every saw bleach was the toilet bowl. We were exposed to germs on a daily basis, we sat in the dog bed, ate dirt from the garden and no one ever had a super bug because we all had decent immune systems. These days everything is disinfected, no one has carpets but clinically clean laminate flooring, our children are exposed to no germs whatsoever and the result is that no one has a decent immune system any more. I'm sure that these superbugs were around in hospitals long before they became headlines, but we had good immune systems so they never affected anyone. Bulldogs are coming into rescue with the excuse "I'm pregnant so obviously the dog has to go", I used to crawl around the floor with our family dog.
Kids raised on farms always had the best immune systems, now you send a kid to a farm for a fun day out and he gets sick, parents scream "close the farms they are unhealthy!", the government begin reviewing the "safety" of petting farms.
And while I'm on my soap box - 2000 people A DAY visited the farm in Godstone - 5o something are sick over the course of a month and I bet every single one of those children lives in a home where there isn't a single germ to be seen!
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Couldn't agree more. When my daughter was young she used to tip her dry cereal on the floor. My sister in law couldn't believe I let her eat it!(I did hoover up dog hairs daily!) Our first Bulldog used to sit next to me when I was feeding her. She crawled around with her and I am sure shared food. I used to as a baby I gather.In fact I used to curl up in the basket with our Great Dane. My sister in law was cleanliness obsessed. The children were never allowed to get dirty and they were the three sickest youngsters I have ever known. I wouldn't advocate living in filth but a healthy disregard for too much sterile living must help build decent immune systems. An extra thought; over use of antibiotics hasn't helped.
ReplyDeleteIn principle I absolutely agree with this blog. I am sure that my immune system was made much stronger by eating dirt, and the fact my mother wasn't very houseproud, and the dog licked my face! but I don't think you have picked up that the particularly virulent strain of E Coli to which small children in petting farms are now exposed is a relatively new mutation. It was first identified in 1975 and only recognised more widely in 1982. You might find it worth looking at the Wikipedia article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_O157:H7
ReplyDeleteit is carried in the gut of ruminants - cows, goats and sheep - and does the animals absolutely no harm at all. But if young children or vulnerable older people are licked, it is transferred and lives outside the body just long enough to set up a nasty infection resulting in food poisoning. In as many as 15% of cases, not only food poisoning but other complications, particularly kidney failure.
I totally agree with you Tania, we drank water from the stream, ate leaves and as you say there wasn't all these anti-bacterial sprays around. Babies and kids made mud pies in the garden and a lot of the dirt went in their mouths. I used to share the dog biscuits out of the dogs bowl. We petted cows and ponies, ate raw eggs we pinced from the hen house and squirted milk from th epoor old cows straight into each others mouths.
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