The natural environment is a source of numerous allergens for those who may experience atopic symptoms.  Many of these allergens are unavoidable as they travel in air currents, for example, pollen and fungal spores.

For most of us the ‘natural’ environment is much less natural than in the past.  New species are introduced and crops, in particular, can have a huge impact on the levels of airborne pollen and other potential allergens in rural areas.  Unloading of cargoes of produce from other countries can similarly load the air of urban, coastal areas with allergens.  Most of this allergen load is of no significance to people without atopy.  Some pollens are naturally irritating through their physical shape. or through chemicals that they carry, but without atopy the response to pollen is generally insignificant.

It should be noted that such things as dust mites and their shed skin and faeces do not cause asthma, although they may trigger an attack.  Dust mites are irritating to the nasal and bronchial membranes and may cause sneezing and coughing when abundant in the air, but without the atopic response, usually caused by consumption of a particular food group, there is no major response – no asthma attack.  Our natural environment is really very benign, apart from those organisms designed to grow and breed at our expense.  It is the development of atopy, through feeding our young on other than their mothers’ milk that creates so many hazards out of otherwise benign components of our environment.

My book, “The Kindness of Human Milk”, describes how I have reached the above conclusions.  So much has been built to obscure the cause of asthma that one cannot help thinking that elements within the pharmaceutical industry have contrived to ensure that they can continue to make huge profits from easily avoidable disease.  Medical input assists this campaign by continuing to insist that everyone must obtain their essential calcium through consumption of dairy products.

It should be noted that where newborn infants have been fed on alternative formulae, such as soya, it is generally because they have already inherited their mother’s dairy milk induced atopy as an acquired character, through transplacental transfer of maternal antibodies.