Tag Archives: Markus Söder

No allergy protection of children by farms

I have written before about the myth of an allergy protection here in Bavaria while we now have an empirical proof – it is a non causal association introduced by colliding.

Unfortunately millions of tax payer money  have  been wasted on that idea, misleading newspaper articles published and  fancy prices given.

I have no idea where the obsession with dung hills originates (early childhood trauma?) and why this had been prized many times.

 

Jachenau Ortsschild 31.10.2025 mit Kühen auf der Weide

 

Jachenau was one of my favorite locations in the 1989/1990 Upper Bavarian Allergy Study where we (re)discovered the low allergy prevalence in farmers that had been forgotten for a century.

https://opentopomap.org/#map=14/47.60231/11.44020

We had been in Jachenau on April 30, 1990. Examining 20 kids we found zero asthma, zero allergic rhinitis and just 2 out of 20 children showed borderline positive grass skin prick tests at 3 mm and 4 mm wheal size respectively. This was definitely one of the lowest prevalences but not only in the children, also in their parents and is being confirmed now 3 decades later by meta-analysis of many more farming studies.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 07.11.2025

Farming and allergy

Hopefully the thread here on “farming and allergy” is now coming to an end. I tried to refute it for many years – last attempt in 2020

the main objection against the farming hypothesis is the interpretation of a negative statistical association as a “protective” effect. Only after thorough exclusion of alternative explanations, this interpretation may be justified.

but  unfortunately missed another paper from the literature that had already been published in 2011, sorry for that.

With environmental exposures aside, at least 2 profound differences between farming and nonfarming families could be a threat to the validity of such investigations. One of these is the long-term selection of traits and genes in favor of the demanding living conditions of farmers because the agricultural lifestyle is often handed down within families. Referring to the “healthy worker effect,” we could expect certain disadvantages to be underrepresented in a farming population, giving rise to the concept of a “healthy farmer effect.”

Also the second point  of Grabenhenrich has never been assessed

The other area expected to be different when comparing farming and nonfarming families constitutes behavioral patterns, lifestyle, and knowledge. For example, “soft factors,” such as health care use, symptom perception, and labeling, as well as access to and interest in health-related information, are most likely to be distributed dissimilarly. This disparity, in turn, could severely affect the response pattern in studies basing their case definition mainly on questionnaires. A temporal shift of these soft factors toward increased cautiousness and awareness has been assumed to contribute to the worldwide increase in symptoms of allergic diseases and, to a lesser extent, to the increase in clinically apparent disease.10, 11 Why should such a change be uniform in all parts of a population? Particular subgroups might be susceptible to catch up more rapidly. This phenomenon could be studied by identifying outliers in otherwise homogenous populations.

in the hope that journalists and politicians will never find it?

Is this “pioneering epidemiology” as judged by MP Dr. Söder?

Promoting a stolen idea (the original was published in German only)  where the source was never cited?

Is it any good science ignoring all objections?

True heroes in epidemiology and public health are Semmelweis, Snow, von Pettenkofer, Doll & Hill, Hesse & Rehn but not a MD who can not even explain an Odds Ratio

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 07.11.2025