To get back to the OP, I did use antibacterial soap the other day – when helping my husband (per his doctor’s orders) clean his nostrils of dried gunk accumulating after recent surgery. I figured that even though he’s used to my germs, under those circumstances avoiding directly feeding them into a pathway right up into his head seemed sensible.
I think back to when I was a toddler, born in India where my dad was teaching for a few years, and my favorite place to play? A mud puddle. My mom would set me out in a nice mud wallow to get all filthy and happy in. Needless to say, I probably got a lifetime’s worth of exposure to all kinds of stuff at that time (but, fortunately, no parasites – at least that I know of!) So it’s not really a surprise that I have a pretty strong immune system today; I can certainly see a direct relationship. I wonder how many overprotective Western parents would be as casual about their child playing in an Indian mud puddle today? It definitely colored my own concerns about my kids’ exposure to dirt and germs, i.e. I never had a problem with it.
Yep, more lunacy. I can understand giving the seat a quick wipe with a bit of paper if it’s manky, but this is along the same lines as those crazy paper cover things you see in the US. It’s an ARSE! How clean does it need to be? You’re going to shit through it, for Og’s sake, so why bother keeping it sterile?
As a matter of curiosity, does she boil her ass in bleach after every dump?
So where does Purell and the like fall in this category? I use hand sanitizers quite a bit, am I contributing to super-germs?
I agree that it is hard to find hand soap anymore that is not anti-bacterial. I do get regular hand soap when I can find it and use a weak bleach solution for cleaning around the kitchen. Lots of spray cleaners are anti-bacterial now too.
Purell and bleach basically rip the cell apart. There’s no way for bacteria to evolve a resistance to that.
Antibacterials work by disrupting chemical pathways in the cell so that it cannot do what cells do (eat, excrete, grow and/or divide.) Antibiotics work along the same lines.
Within every population of bacteria, there is some genetic variation. A random mutation that changes a chemical pathway in a bacterium is most likely to just kill the bacterium. But there are bajillions of bacteria in the population, and so there is a non-zero chance that some of the bacteria will have a mutation that changes the chemical pathway in a non-lethal way. And if the mutant bacteria are really lucky, that mutation could mean that the antibacterial (and maybe to certain classes of antibiotics, too) won’t have any effect on it anymore. Now, normally the resistant bacteria still have to compete with all the non-resistant bacteria, so they are unlikely to take over and become domninant. But imagine that you wash your hands with an antibacterial soap while a resistant mutant is present. While its buddies (i.e. its competition) die off all around it, the new mutant is delighted to use up all the resources that have been freed up, multiplies like crazy, and, voila, your skin/sink/environment now harbors a resistant strain of bacteria that’s not going to get killed by your antibacterial soap.
Now, it is still soap, so it will still remove bacteria from your hands in the usual manner. But the scary part if you happen get an infection of that resistant bacterial strain, there’s a chance that, because of its mutation, it might be resistant to some antiboitics, as well.
I should stress that this is not going to happen in every single home where people use antibacterial handsoap, but when you have millions of households using it, some resistant strains are bound to pop up.
Let’s see…
In hospital I wash my hands with hibiscrub when I enter and leave a ward, and before and after I touch a patient (even a handshake). I use alcohol gel when entering and leaving each 6 bedded unit and private room within a ward, even if I haven’t touched anyone. That’s following hospital policy, but is probably more than most people.
When I get home I wash my hands (with ordinary soap and hot water, but using proper handwashing technique) after using the bathroom, handling raw meat, emptying the rubbish bin, before and after eating etc.
I put on a hand cream last thing at night if my hands are dry (they’re usually not, actually).
People tend to be immune to their own flora, but not to other people’s…just because YOU never wash your hands and don’t get sick, doesn’t mean someone else didn’t have to spend 3 days in hospital with the infection they got after shaking your hand!
Waving your hands for 10seconds under a running tap is no use at all. If you’re going to wash your hands, do it right. It doesn’t matter what you use, but unless your immune system is dodgy or you work in a high-risk environment (hospital, nursery school, old people’s home etc) don’t bother with anti-bacterial products because you won’t need them.
Funnily enough, I’m sitting here with a nasty cold courtesy of my boss who coughed on his hands and my keyboard last week. Now I have a bottle of Bath&Body antibacterial hand gel in front of me because I have no desire to subject anyone else to these vicious germs.
Note to self: Buy some Purell tomorrow AM. Ta much, Podkayne.
I was worried about killing off yeast when I make bread, so I had my wife get some non-germicidal hand soap. She had to search the aisle for 5 minutes to find some.
In looking up what hand sanitizers actually do, they do not claim to have an effect on viruses, which, as Cervaise so accurately pointed out, cause colds and flus. A dilute bleach solution is still the most effective disinfectant, as far as I know. Labs always have tons of bleach bottles around to spritz anything; I think offices should start offering this as well. Keyboards, mouses, telephones, bathroom doors and fixtures, door handles - these are all great places to pick up a rhinovirus.
One problem with bleach solution is that the bleach breaks down over time, so you should use it fairly soon (within a day or so, I’m told) after you mix it. That’s not a problem in an environment where it gets turned over quickly, like a lab, but for the office, a commercial disinfectant spray containing bleach or some cans of Lysol might be more practical. (Disclaimer: I’m not an expert in degermifying stuff, so do more research if you intend impliment such a plan.)
Yeah, I know about mixing fresh bleach solution often (I was a lab tech, after all). I figured they could just buy a big gallon jug of bleach and we could mix up small batches as required. I don’t know about using a commercial disinfectant containing bleach; I have one of those at home, and the fumes from it are killer. Of course, the smell of bleach is no picnic, either. Maybe it will have to be Lysol.
I figured they could just buy a big gallon jug of bleach and we could mix up small batches as required. I don’t know about using a commercial disinfectant containing bleach; I have one of those at home, and the fumes from it are killer. Of course, the smell of bleach is no picnic, either. Maybe it will have to be Lysol.