proper (full) rehabilitation

ARTE – TUESDAY OCTOBER 8 AT 8:55 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

Microbes, these double-faced Januses. Their dark side is known: it is that of the emissaries of infectious diseases. But they also have a luminous side, essential for our health. It is this beneficial side that this documentary with an eloquent title rehabilitates, Long live germs! : “We often consider that bacteria are our enemies, but the vast majority are our partners”recalls Michael Wagner, microbiologist at the University of Vienna, Austria.

In a famous fable, the country rat teaches the city rat a lesson. Today, rural children can be models for those in metropolitan areas: they are much better equipped against allergic diseases. Since the 1960s, the frequency of asthma, eczema and allergies (to pollen or certain foods) has doubled every ten years in industrialized countries, where they now affect 35% of the population.

A riddle that scientists have finally solved. It is their thrilling detective work that the director, Marie-Monique Robin, invites us to follow. The investigation first leads us to the very first museum in the world dedicated to microbes, in Amsterdam – and its famous collection of droppings. Then it transports us through the urbanized, rural or wooded areas of Franche-Comté and Bavaria, Finland and Thailand, Gabon or Japan, with a small detour through the Amish and Mennonite communities in the United States and through the European Parliament, where researchers and politicians debated these diseases of civilization.

The “farm effect”

Dust from rooms and stables, bacteria from the digestive tract, intestinal parasites from villagers, playground floors… Everywhere, doctors and immunologists, microbiologists and ecologists are exploring microbial trails, comparing the immune defenses of urban children to those of children in campaigns.

This is how the hypothesis of the “farm effect” was eventually born: by exposing children early to a wide diversity of microbes, this rural environment trains their immune system to recognize and tolerate “good antigens”. » – and not to overreact by creating inflammation. An antidote to concrete, to the lack of contact with nature, to the sterilization of industrial foods and to the hyperhygienism of city dwellers, in short.

The ideal, concludes Michael Wagner, would be “to teach everyone to have a healthy intestinal microbiota”. Repeated contact with nature, forest bathing, favorable diet: so many precepts which combine business with pleasure.