Yup./
Ah, my condolences. I hope it isn’t … avocado. Or rust.
Oh. Not that kind.
Whoa.
All I know is I ain’t touching this whole digression with no pole, no matter how long (or short).
Well, it’s more nuanced than that. But a big part of the disconnect is that the public does misunderstand what the Hygiene Hypothesis really means. To the public, “hygiene” is interpreted as personal cleanliness: washing hands, keeping food clean and fresh, sanitizing the home. But as noted in my earlier link about the Hygiene Hypothesis (from an expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), what kids seem to need in their early life to reduce risk of future allergies and immune disorders is passive exposure to those allergens along with exposure to the good, or commensal bacteria, not the pathologic ones.
So what we need is to teach our kids to wash up after using the bathroom, and before handling foods and before cooking, but also teach them is that it’s ok to play in the dirt too. Which is a seemingly contradictory lesson to many folks.
It makes sense. We did not evolve as a species in sterile conditions.
As I remember, that’s fairly exactly the contours of the parental advice we got growing up in the 1950’s - 1970’s. Play outside, wash your hands when you use the toilet, wash your hands before dinner. It was pretty simple.
Agreed. We dug in the sandbox, played in the garden, rolled around on the grass… And we washed our hands before dinner.
Hope no cats pooped in that sandbox.
(I know, I know. I just won’t do!
)
A good example of this is peanuts. Don’t want your kids to have peanut allergies? Expose them to peanuts early on.
Not much chance they won’t get exposed to peanuts. Peanut oil is in thousands of products.
Yup.
And we played with the dogs and the cats; and some of us with the chickens and the cows and the horses.
Probably not. But they washed their butts, and then they washed us.
One word: Toxoplasmosis
Quite a lot of people test positive for exposure, if anybody bothers to test. (I suspect I’d be one of them.) Infection was either asymptomatic or mild and mistaken for something else.
A bad idea to catch it if about to be pregnant or during pregnancy, of course.
If I understand correctly, those of us who grew up with cats don’t have a lot to worry about, since we’ve most likely already had it.
I wonder? Can a person leave it on a public toilet? Another person gets it, spreading to their household, then the neighbor borrows their damp hand-towel, gets it and blames it all on the cats.
Hmmm. I may have just solved the mystery of life.
(I knew cats would be involved, somehow)
Cats insist on getting involved in all human activities. Mine do not believe I should enter the bathroom without feline escort, and Allie cannot leave stuff in desk cubbies alone.
They did. It was kinda gross when we uncovered one. 
This is why there is not one in my yard. Well, that and we inadvertently built it on top of the old outhouse were the human head was found. So it’s all connected. Some how.
It’s sorta how things happen to me.