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HEALTH

No, Your Clean Home Isn't Messing With Your Immune System.
Here's Why
JACINTA BOWLER 6 JULY 2021

Sometimes unhelpful (or just plain wrong) health advice sticks in our brains. For example, you
don't necessarily need to drink eight glasses of water every day, and an apple a day may not
keep the doctor away if you have fructose intolerance. But what about overly sanitized homes
ruining our immune systems?

Although it's been debunked time and time again, this incorrect interpretation of the 'hygiene
hypothesis' has stuck around in our collective consciousness. Now, researchers in the UK have
published a paper systematically rejecting the idea that we're just too clean for our own good.

"For more than 20 years there has been a public narrative that hand and domestic hygiene
practices, that are essential for stopping exposure to disease-causing pathogens, are also
blocking exposure to the bene cial organisms," said Graham Rook, lead author and a University
College London microbiologist.

"In this paper, we set out to reconcile the apparent con ict between the need for cleaning and
hygiene to keep us free of pathogens, and the need for microbial inputs to populate our guts and
set up our immune and metabolic systems."

The researchers stress that microbes are incredibly important to us. Our whole bodies, including
our guts, skin and lungs need them to keep us e ectively running.

The hygiene hypothesis is speci cally about early childhood exposure to particular microbes
which have co-evolved with humans to help develop a robust immune system – particularly in
regards to allergies and other immune disorders.  
Doing things like not washing your hands before eating is not going to help you develop a better
immune system, it just means you're more likely to give yourself gastroenteritis. (However, it's
important to note that your choice of washing products can breed hardier microbes, so it's best
to stick to plain soap.)

In the new paper – which is a review of previous literature – the team lays out four particular
nails in the co n for the 'clean home is bad for immunity' adage.

Firstly, babies and children develop their own little microbial system, seeded rst by their
mother, and then mostly by family members and their environment. Microbes from individuals
shed and intermix, creating a speci c household microbiome mostly shared by those living
together (including pets).  

"Exposure to our mothers, family members, the natural environment, and vaccines can provide
all the microbial inputs that we need," Rook said.

"These exposures are not in con ict with intelligently targeted hygiene or cleaning."

Secondly, vaccines are actually surprisingly good at priming our immune system for other things
too, in the same way a potentially deadly disease is.

"In the 1980s, it began to be reported that vaccination with a live measles vaccine in Africa
reduced overall childhood mortality to a degree that could not be explained by the incidence of
measles itself," the team wrote.

"The nonspeci c e ects of vaccines are similar to the nonspeci c survival bene ts seen after
recovery from the corresponding infections."

Thirdly, we are now well aware that exposure to the outdoors is important for helping us develop
robust immune systems. But no one is cleaning the great outdoors, and the team notes that the
bacterial pro les of nature are completely di erent to the ones you nd indoors anyway.

"Exposing children to biodiversity from the natural environment in their school playgrounds
resulted in increases in peripheral blood biomarkers of immunoregulation," the team wrote in
their paper.

"So evolutionary and epidemiologic considerations point to the view that children need exposure
to the microbiota of the natural environment rather than to the unnatural microbiota of modern
buildings."

Finally, although this last point is not yet de nitive, the team suspects that when there are health
issues related to a clean environment, it might not be the removal of organisms that are causing
the health problems, so much as the harsh cleaning products used.

The team suggests that targeting our cleaning might help limit these kinds of issues, as well as
our exposure to the sort of microbes that might make us sick.

"So cleaning the home is good, and personal cleanliness is good, but, as explained in some
detail in the paper, to prevent spread of infection it needs to be targeted to hands and surfaces
most often involved in infection transmission," Rook said. 

"By targeting our cleaning practices, we also limit direct exposure of children to cleaning agents."

The review has been published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.