BY ALTERING the balance of gut microbes, antibiotics can disrupt the immune system's ability to distinguish between innocuous substances and harmful microbes. This finding, from experiments on mice, adds weight to the notion that antibiotics could be at least partly responsible for the rise in allergies and asthma in children.
The antibiotic hypothesis is one of many competing theories for the worldwide rise in asthma. Its proponents argue that the increase has tracked widespread antibiotic use. For instance, research in Berlin found that both antibiotic treatment and asthma were low in the east compared with the west before the wall came down. But as antibiotic use has gone up in the east, so has asthma.
And last year a team in Detroit that monitored 500 children for seven years reported that those given antibiotics before they were 6 months old were twice as likely to develop allergic asthma. Those given ...
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