KID'S BEST FRIEND

Adopting my three rescue cats is both the best and worst decision I’ve ever made. Having grown up around household pets it finally hit me that I was missing that extra bit of love when I came home from work. However, at the time I wasn’t dating someone allergic to them—now I am. By contrast he did not grow up in a pet-friendly family, and one morning while he wanted to scratch his eyes out and my fur babies were trying to jump on his lap I asked Google what I could do to ease the reaction. As often happens when trying to self-diagnose, I went down a rabbit-hole and was introduced to the polarizing “hygiene hypothesis.” Essentially, Dr. David Strachan identified a correlation between the rise of asthma and hay fever in the late 20th century with “reduced microbial exposure” during infancy. Later studies expanded the theory to cover even more chronic inflammatory diseases, for example, growing up around animals is just one way to introduce the nubile immune system to a slew of microbes and enhance its potential. While the lightbulb over my head lit up, I have before been led astray with online diagnoses. So, I turned to a more authoritative source, Dr. Jeremy Ostrander, family medicine practitioner at Columbia Asia.