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The research was led by Dr. Eija Bergroth of the Kuopio University Hospital in Finland. The team stated that a possible explanation for the results of the study was based on the idea that allergens and dirt were beneficial for the immune systems of the babies. The scientists looked at a total of 397 infants that were born between September 2002 and May 2005 at the Kuopio University Hospital.
"In many ways, (the study is) saying, if you're exposed to a natural environment... your immune system recognizes that you don't fight the normal allergens," commented Dr. T. Bernard Kinane, the chief of the pediatric pulmonary unit at MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston, in a Reuters Health article.
Beginning when their child was nine weeks old, the parents of these babies kept weekly diaries of the babies' health along with the child's interaction with dogs and cats. Based on the recorded data and a questionnaire filled out at the end of the year, the investigators found that 35 percent of the participants spent a large amount of time with a pet dog during their first year and 24 percent of the subjects spent a majority of time with a pet cat during the initial year. Even though only a third of the families had dogs or cats, the majority of the infants had some kind of contact with a dog sometime during the study period and one third of the babies had exposure to a cat at some time.
