EU membership has been blamed for many things – and now researchers say it is responsible for a massive increase in allergies in Poland.
The increase has been found in Polish villages after Euro-membership forced farming practices to modernise, researchers say.
The study found that in nine years rates of allergy jumped from 7% to 20% in the rural south-west of the country.
Children raised in the countryside tend to have low rates of allergy because of exposure to farm animals.
According to researchers at Imperial College, London, working with Wroclaw Medical University, Poland, many villagers abandoned the raising of cows and pigs because the Common Agricultural Policy made it uneconomical.
Professor Paul Cullinan, of Imperial College, said it was likely similar increases would be found across Europe.
The researchers tested villagers for the prevalence of asthma, hay fever and skin reactions, known as atopy.
They found no increase in rates of asthma but rates of hay fever increased from 3% to 7.7% while rates of atopy increased from 7.3% to 19.6%, they report in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Professor Cullinan said: "We found that rapid changes in farming practices after Poland joined the EU were accompanied by a sharp increase in allergies over a very short period of time.
"It’s likely that similar changes are occurring in other places in Europe, and we can expect that elsewhere in the world, we may see major increases in allergies, asthma and hay fever over the coming decades as countries become more westernised and less rural."
B. Sozanska et al. Atopy and allergic respiratory disease in rural Poland before and after accession to the European Union. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology December 2013; doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2013.10.035
Leave a Reply