Germophobes Beware

I picked up this book at the library: "The Five-Second Rule and Other Myths About Germs" by Anne E. Maczulak. I'm not here to do a review - it looked far too boring to read straight through. But it was interesting enough to flip through the pages and pick up a few random insights.

A lot of the material was familiar from when I had to take a course a few years back in order to get a food handler's permit - such as keeping food out of the 40 - 140 degree "danger zone" and cleaning your surface after working with raw meat or fish. On another page the author analyzed the fact that bacteria actually grows on a bar of soap, but the effect is minimized with proper hand-washing. Dr. Maczulak suggests the "Double Happy Birthday Method" for determining the proper length of hand-washing time. I was always told singing your ABC's is the way to go. I hope that I haven't been led astray.

Probably the grossest part I read was when she suggested that your clothes may actually come out of the laundry more germified than when you took them off because washing machines are full of bacteria. And then if you do stuff like wash dishrags and dishtowels in with underwear. . . you've got real trouble. That's right, fecal bacteria - potentially on your clean dishes. The effect of bacteria in such loads is minimized by washing with hot water, but a lot of Americans don't like to go that way because they're trying to minimize energy costs.

She mentioned another no-brainer - although hotel rooms appear clean, they are actually very filthy because cleaning staffs are too pressed for time to do any actual sanitizing. (But yet they have time to throw away the bar of soap that I could have used for another day and switch out my towel for a clean one even though they have a sign posted in the bathroom asking me to conserve resources by reusing towels.) There is a product you can get - a portable black light - that causes microbes to glow. However, the good doctor did warn that you may not want to see what's in your hotel room. This reminded me of the episode of "The Office" where they go to the trade show and Michael uses the black light in his hotel room. Dwight says, "It's either blood, urine, or semen." And Michael is all, "I sure hope it's urine."

My take on bacteria is to use precautions but don't make yourself crazy sanitizing every surface in the house. The author mentioned that a lot of the sanitizing products out there do in fact work, but the problem is that the germs and stuff just start coming back as soon as you're done cleaning. So I think getting germs is kind of like getting a sunburn - sometimes it just happens. Maybe you'll get skin cancer, but probably you don't have too much to worry about unless you're stripping off all your clothes and lying out in the sun without any sort of sunscreen from 10 am to 2 pm every day. Germs are just a part of life. Embrace them.

I'll leave with a couple more thoughts from the book: 1) The toilet seat doesn't have as many germs as you might think - there are other areas of the bathroom containing far more and 2) a dog's mouth is not cleaner than a human's - but the bacteria is different.