Bacteria-Bashing Questioned
Clean bathroom fixtures and a tidy kitchen are not the only way to gauge a home’s health index. As a teen I spent a great deal of time around a friend’s home that onlookers would have sworn had a revolving front door. Set in a college town, that little house thrummed with the activity of older siblings coming and going, career parents on the run and a bevy of student boarders from all over the world calling it home. There was rarely a bare square inch of counter space in the kitchen for all the dishes that constantly needed washing, the laundry machines were never still and there was the subtle but continuous jockeying for an available bathroom.
They had a professional cleaning lady of sorts who gave the place little more than a lick and a promise once a week. You could not tell much more than six hours later if she had been there or not. The amazing thing I now recall from the years that I observed and participated in that milling microcosm, is that there was never a sick person among us, never more than a mild dose of the sniffles. Above the nearly always full kitchen sink, there hung a framed motto: “Our home is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”
There is more and more scientific evidence that points to a truth that lies beneath that motto. A casual observer of many American broom closets today would note the labels on multiple cleansers are splashed with the word “antibacterial”. In bathrooms, it would be hard to miss the array of soaps, shampoos and other hygiene products on vanities and in showers with the same antibacterial designation. It would not be in the least bit unusual to discover a stash of disposable masks or latex gloves as part of a medicine chest’s menagerie. Our culture has been inundated with anti-germ marketing and consumers have embraced the notion of wiping those dastardly culprits out. However such eagerness, according to the hygiene hypothesis, can backfire on humans as we eradicate too much.
The hygiene hypothesis proposes that the lack of exposure during early childhood to certain infectious microorganisms can actually compromise an individual’s immune system. This thinking is not without its critics but it has more than enough plausibility in the science community to warrant some very serious study. In-utero, a baby is supplied with the mother’s antibodies. When born, the baby must develop an independent system of antibodies through encountering bacterial modules which trigger signals that in turn “educate” the child’s immune system. The hygiene hypothesis contends that the developed world is increasingly depriving developing immune systems of important bacterial and viral exposure.
Despite a recent spike in the sale of latex gloves and disposable masks with the media’s attention on H1N1 developments, there is a small grassroots movement among parents across the country determined to get their kids exposed to some ‘healthy dirt’. They scour the grocery shelves for soaps that don’t have the antibacterial label and rely on old fashioned lathering for adequate clean up. This still is a reasonable way to reduce bacteria count to most humans’ coping levels and remains an uncomplicated truth about our primary line of defense against infection.
Ironically, locating a soap in the grocery or drug store that does not have an antibacterial label is not such an easy task anymore, but it is very likely worth the search. The axiom “clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy” is something we should keep in mind the next time we ponder which cleansing products to buy.
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Written by Shelby Morrison on February 8th, 2010 with
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