Having the baby crawl could help reduce the risk of asthma

Keeping the house clean is necessary when we have a baby, especially when it starts to crawl and touch everything. However, it should be known that excessive hygiene is also not recommended, since an excessively clean environment weakens the immune system by avoiding the exposure of children to any type of germs.

Crawling, touch the floor or carpet, looking more exposed to environmental dust particles. And as a study published in Environmental Science and Technology that contact would help reduce the risk of asthma in the baby.

What does crawling have to do with asthma?

Crawling babies raise a cloud of dust, which although imperceptible, being near the ground, inhale four times more than an adult could breathe (per kilogram of body mass).

To study it, researchers from Purdue University created a crawling baby robot to take samples of carpets from real homes. "The goal was to assess exposure to tiny bioparticles and dust during the baby's drag movement," says Brandon Boor, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and ecological engineering and lead author of the study.

"The baby's drag movement agitates the sedimented dust particles that accumulate on the carpet and releases them into the air."

The scientists discovered that the concentrations of the particles in the dust cloud that were around the robot baby when crawling was up to 20 times higher than the level anywhere else in the room.

These micro particles are formed by skin cells, bacteria, pollen and fungal spores.

"This is the first study that shows that crawling babies are exposed to significant concentrations of suspended biological particles, and that many of these particles are deposited in the lower respiratory tract of the respiratory system," says Boor. "Their exposure is amplified due to the proximity of their breathing zones to the ground."

House clean, but not sterile

As we said before, to a certain extent it is good for children to get dirty because their immune system needs minimal doses of germs to be active and healthy.

Your immune system needs to learn to defend against various toxic substances and pathogenic microorganisms, and this learning is essential in the first years of life. In other words, being exposed to certain allergens will increase the chances that generate immunity against them.

So, you know, crawling is very important for the development of the baby that allows him to prepare for later stages. But now we know a new benefit for your respiratory health.