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health

get dirty – auto-immune disease and uncompleted immune systems. too little washing encourages allergies

“Autoimmunity has [traditionally] been considered a condition of too much stimulation," says Scripps Research Immunology Professor Nora Sarvetnick, Ph.D. "What we are seeing is that it is a condition of too little stimulation."

“In an article appearing in this week's issue of the journal Cell, Nora Sarvetnick and her coauthors in the Department of Immunology assert that we need a certain level of immune stimulation to fill the body with immune cells. An understimulated immune system results in too few T cells, and the body tries to correct this by inducing a vigorous expansion of the remaining T cells, creating a more autoreactive population.”

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