Dog Allergies

If you’re a dog lover, you may be wondering if it’s possible to avoid allergies to dogs in your children. You may be planning to start a family, and wondering if there’s any way to ensure that the new addition to your family does not have allergies to dogs.

The good news is that recent studies have found that there is a surprising way to avoid allergies to dogs in children – and if you already have a dog, you already have the treatment on hand!

How to Allergy Proof Your Children

According to the findings of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, exposing your children to dogs in their first year of life can greatly reduce their chances of developing allergies to dogs later in life. If you already have a dog living in your house, you should be fine, but if not, and you want to avoid allergies to dogs in your children, why not take them to visit people with dogs, or consider adopting one?

Guide dog associations also often have puppy fostering programs, so you could combine your desire to prevent allergies in dogs with doing something wonderful! Foster a puppy for a year, and during that time, you’re also making sure your child will have less likelihood of developing allergies to dogs.

How Effective Is It?

Now, you may be wondering just how effective something so simple will be in avoiding allergies to dogs in your child. According to the research, there’s a fourteen percent reduction in the likelihood of developing allergies to dogs if you choose to expose your infant to dogs during the first year of life!

In fact, children who are not exposed in this way are thirty three percent likely to develop allergies to dogs! That’s a third of the children born! Children who have been “allergy proofed” in this way are only nineteen percent likely to suffer from allergies to dogs, which is less than one in five.

What Guarantee is There?

Of course, this is not a completely fool proof method, and there is still a chance, in spite of your efforts to reduce the likelihood of allergies to dogs in your children by exposing them to your pooch (or someone else’s!) However, even if you’re not a gambler, the odds seem a whole lot better for those who are not exposed to canines in their first year, than in those who are, to develop allergies.

Allergies to dogs, particularly if severe, can limit your child’s choices – they may not be able to visit certain friends and family, and there are some careers that may be off limits to them. Then again, you might have trouble moving house – dog allergens can remain in a building for months after the dog has left! All in all, while it’s not a guaranteed method of preventing allergies to dogs, this does reduce your child’s chances significantly, and since we all want to give our kids the best, it might be worth considering.