Pacifier Swapping

Believe it or not, sucking on your baby's pacifier might keep your baby from getting sick.  A new study in the journal, Pediatrics, by a team in Gothenburg, Sweden, has linked pacifier sharing to lower allergy risk.  It found that children whose parents sucked their pacifiers to clean them before giving them back were less likely to have asthma or eczema than children whose parents did not. 

 

Vaginal delivery has been shown to have similar effects. 

 

And the effects may be additive.  In the Swedish study, children born vaginally and exposed to parental oral microbiota had the lowest prevalence of eczema, at 20%, compared with 54% for Caesarian section children not exposed to parents' oral biota.