Amish children owe their extremely low rate of asthma to living and playing around barnyard animals, says a study out by the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the New York Times, researchers were so impressed with their findings that they suggested formulating a spray for children who don’t have livestock at home.
But not just any livestock. The study compared the Amish, who have an asthma rate of 2-4 percent across the community, to the Hutterites, another community devoted to simple, agrarian living, but with a much higher rate of asthma at 15-20 percent.
Researchers believe that the difference lies in how the two groups raise their animals. “The Amish live on single-family dairy farms. They do not use electricity, and use horses to pull their plows and for transportation. Their barns are close to their homes, and their children play in them,” says the Times. “The Hutterites have no objection to electricity and live on large, industrialized communal farms. Their cows are housed in huge barns, more like hangars, away from their homes. Children do not generally play in Hutterite barns.”
Compared to Hutterite children, the Amish children in the study had far more neutrophils in their cells — white blood cells that respond to microbial invaders. The Amish children were better equipped to handle a bacterial assault, whereas the Hutterite kids had a lot of eosinophils in their blood — cells that excite an allergic reaction. The researchers went on to find that the dust in Amish barns was full of bacteria, whereas Hutterite dust was far less populated with microbes.
Dr. Talal Chatila, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School, who co-wrote an editorial for the research paper, said, ““it is not far-fetched to start thinking of how one could harness those [Amish] bacteria for a therapeutic intervention.”