Jonathon Coquet: do germs actually help build our immune systems?

The hygiene hypothesis is the idea that kids must be exposed to germs to develop healthy immune systems. Unexpected results from a recent study suggest hygiene hypothesis might not be so clean cut though. Researchers compared laboratory mice with high infectious exposures from birth to 'clean' mice and found little evidence that the antibody response was altered in any meaningful way. The 'dirty' mice had the same, if not greater ability to develop allergic immune responses than the 'clean' mice. Jonathan Coquet, co-author of the study and Associate Professor at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden joins Jim Mora to discuss the study's results.