Why Having a Dog Helps Keep Kids Asthma-Free

If you’re a dog person, your kids might be in luck. Research suggests that children who grow up in homes with pets are less likely to develop allergies, and now a recent study by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, sheds some light on why.

Working with mice, the scientists found that exposure to house dust from homes with a pet appeared to protect the mice against a common virus called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which infects the lungs and breathing passages and is a major cause of respiratory illness in young children. (In adults, it usually causes run-of-the-mill cold symptoms.) Severe infections in infancy are linked with an increased risk of developing respiratory problems like asthma later on.

Lead researcher Kei Fujimura and her team looked at three groups of mice. One group was fed house dust from homes with dogs, and then exposed to RSV; a second group was infected with RSV without exposure to dust; and a control group of mice was not exposed to RSV or dust.