Parents: Suck on Your Baby's Pacifier to Make 'em Healthier

Funny Baby Pacifiers over the NeatoShop

Parents, here's a quick way to clean your baby's pacifier and help it become healthier in one fell swoop. Or, make that in one big lick:

The researchers found that the 65 babies whose mother or father sucked on their pacifiers to cleanse them were significantly less likely to get eczema and asthma, two conditions caused by allergic reactions, than babies whose parents did not use the cleaning technique. [...]

To investigate the role of pacifier cleaning, Bill Hesselmar of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues analyzed data they had collected for a broader study about babies' allergies. Among the questions the parents had answered was what they did when their child's pacifier fell out of his or her mouth.

"We asked them how they cleaned the pacifier — if they rinsed them in water — and of course most of them did," Hesselmar says. But a lot of the parents did something else.

"They put it in their mouth, sucked on it and then gave it back to the children," Hesselmar says. "It's a quite common way to clean pacifier."

Rob Stein of NPR's Shots has the story: Link

Gross? It's better than eating boogers to boost your immune system!