So every time a child gets an illness, we’ve got more immunity after the child has finished fighting off the illness. So actually, in that respect, illnesses are good and even being exposed to things that the parents are trying to get away from like keeping an aseptic or totally sanitary kitchen, like you’d be in a hospital, has not really been shown to be a good thing due to something called the hygiene hypothesis, which is we’re making things too clean. We’re supposed to be exposed to these things. You drop a piece of food; you pick it up; you eat it. And when I was a kid -- I’m only 58 now, but when I was a kid, nobody got smacked for picking up something off the floor. Half the time, we didn’t even rinse it. You put it in your mouth. Hey, you’ve got some bacteria in your mouth, your body identified them. If they were a problem, you got a little bit more of an immune function from it. So we develop our immunity by having exposure to and fighting the different things that we are exposed to, not by seeing that we’re not exposed to them.

Okay. Well, historically, if you go back, let’s say, many, many decades or even hundreds of years, the reason that you would often have children dying from these same diseases, it seems to be mostly due to poor sanitation. So we didn’t know that it wasn’t a good idea to have the garbage dump in the middle of town. I mean, it was convenient. Why not have it right there? Why should we have to have things carted away and brought far away?

We didn’t have indoor plumbing, so we had greater amounts of exposures to different pathogens because of not understanding cleanliness and not understanding sanitation. And due to that, our immune system had a much greater assault than it would ever have today when we know these things and keep houses cleaner. And so the immune system wasn’t working as well because it was having so many different assaults, and one more assault could be enough to throw you over and your body couldn’t handle it anymore.

Well, if we get a childhood disease -- we being any child -- and basically at any age, and you’ve got measles, you’ve got mumps, you’ve got chicken pox, and there are quite a number of different ones. Again, the body identifies it, and if we get it in the normal channels, which means that you got it through exposure most likely to somebody else that had it. And usually you can even tell who it came from because somebody had the condition and some child was exposed to it and they go, “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was exposed to this particular person’s son or daughter.”

Again, the immune system identifies it. The body sees what it has to do in order to fight it off, and after it has fought it off, it recognizes it and you basically develop an immunity to that particular pathogen. So you get measles, you get mumps, you get chicken pox. How bad a case of any of those you get is dependent on how well your immune system is functioning, which has to do with lots of things like diet. But once you’ve gotten it and you have fought it off, you then have lifetime immunity. So with maybe an exception of one in a million depends on what study you look at if you ever are exposed to chicken pox again or measles again or many, many times again, you're not going to get it. You will have no reaction whatsoever because you’ve got your immunity, your body sees it. “No, that’s not going to affect us. We are not going to allow that to have an effect.”

Interview with David J. Getoff
Naturopath and Board Certified Clinical Nutritionist