General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: So, why the rise in peanut allergies anyway? [View all]Lydia Leftcoast
(48,217 posts)and that includes China.
OK, I've been to China, and while it's a fascinating country with friendly people and great food, I would never call it "clean." In fact, it's downright grubby in most places.
On the other hand, Japanese people tend to be almost crazy clean. Early travelers remarked on it. Yet their asthma and allergy rates went up in the 1960s.
I never had allergies until I was six years old, when we moved to a house along an arterial street that carried a busy state highway through our town in Wisconsin. (We had lived in Minneapolis before, but on a quiet residential street with almost no traffic and no arterial streets for two or three blocks in any direction.) Within a few months after we moved to that Wisconsin town, I was practically incapacitated from respiratory allergies, since I was coughing so much that I couldn't sleep. I have been on antihistamines almost continuously since then.
My hypothesis is that the increase in respiratory allergies and asthma comes from car exhaust. When car usage becomes widespread in a country, the asthma rates go up.