A provocative paper published in the British Journal of Dermatology has proposed that women who swim
while pregnant have a greater chance of having their kids develop eczema and
asthma.
Why?
Well, the instigation for this theory is that there has
been a huge spike in eczema, allergy, and asthma diagnoses the last couple of
decades, and one major theory for that rise is the “hygiene hypothesis” which
speculates that because kids are increasingly being raised in “too clean”
environments, that is, kids today are not nearly as exposed to a whole range of
germs, toxins, environmental instigators that past generations, the immune
systems of kids these days are primed to over-respond – to launch preventive
inflammatory responses such as asthma - to many factors that are unavoidable to
encounter at some point in normal life but which are essentially harmless on
their own.
These British researchers say it’s not that that at all
but rather the primary reason for the rise in asthma and eczema is a world
that’s over-loaded with toxins, such as for example, the chlorine that women
who swin while pregnant cannot avoid, but which may in turn damage the
developing immune systems in a fetus.
I have no idea of course who’s right but seems to me that
until someone figures this out one way or the other, a pregnant woman who loves
to swim might well continue to follow her passion, albeit perhaps with the
usual warning that “moderation is everything.”
