Make children play in dirt together to help beat leukaemia

Keeping children away from other kids and cocooning them inside could trigger childhood leukaemia, a major new study finds.

Letting children get dirty will help form the immune system properly.

Keeping small children away from other kids and cocooning them inside for fear of germs could trigger childhood leukaemia, a major new study has found.

Rising rates of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) may be caused by super clean homes, Mel Greaves, of the UK Institute of Cancer Research, reports.

Professor Greaves suggests childhood ALL is a “paradox of progress” — smaller families and better hygiene mean babies are less exposed to the infections that help their immune systems form properly.

About one in 20 children has a mutation that predisposes children to leukaemia and of those children, one per cent go on to develop the cancer.

Professor Greaves’ study, which compiled 30 years of research into ALL, found that it is triggered by viruses such as flu in children whose immune systems haven’t been exposed to germs in the first year of their life.

Without this early training, when a child catches flu the immune system over reacts, creating more white blood cells to fight the infection and thus causing leukaemia.

Researchers also engineered mice with an active leukaemia-initiating gene, and found that when they moved them from an ultra-clean, germ-free environment to one that had common microbes, the mice developed ALL.

In Australia, around 180 children a year are diagnosed with ALL, making it the most common type of cancer in children aged from 0 — 14 years, according to the Leukaemia Foundation. The incidence is highest in children between the ages of two and four but until now, researchers have been unable to find a cause.

Professor Greaves suggests that ALL, in common with other auto-immune diseases and allergies, might be preventable if a child’s immune system is properly ‘primed’ in the first year of life

He advises parent to worry less about germs and encourage social contact with as many children as possible in the first year of a child’s life.