TThere was a recent paper in the journal Pediatrics which suggested that parents who, in the first six months of their baby’s life, cleaned their baby’s pacifiers (dummies) by putting them in their own mouth and sucking them, had babies with a decreased incidence of allergic disease, such as eczema, later.

This is not the first time that it has been suggested that challenging babies with germs from the environment at an earlier age decreases their likelihood of allergies as they grow. Poverty, overcrowding, large families, animals in the home, and early exposure to germs in food have all been shown […]