From Ken Cotterill
Theories about excessive hygiene just don’t hold up in my case
(“Let them eat dirt”, 18 July, p 26).
I grew up in the east end of Sheffield in the 1950s when that area abutted
the Don Valley steelworks. We lived in an old terraced house in a grotty street
forever shrouded in a dirty fog.
As a result of this delightful environment I caught, in rapid succession,
polio, whooping cough, mumps, measles, scarlet fever, chickenpox and glandular
fever, between regular bouts of tonsillitis.
Once we moved to the south of Sheffield, on a new leafy housing estate, my
childhood illnesses were reduced to the odd cold, twice a year.
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