[A-List] The Dirt on Germs

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Katherine Ashenburg

Orion magazine (November / December 2007)


We all know people who go to extraordinary lengths never to shake hands
or touch a tap in a public washroom, and whose cupboards are filled with
antibacterial soaps. Inventions that address their fears are
multiplying. One new product, a plastic box to be installed above the
doorknob in a public toilet, sprays a disinfectant mist every fifteen
minutes. Another, the Sanitgrasp, replaces traditional door pulls in
restaurants and other public places with a big U-shaped object that
allows the door to be opened by a forearm.

The list of these products stretches from the plausible to the wilder
shores of paranoia. You can buy a portable subway strap so your hands
never have to come into contact with the overhead bar, as well as a
strip of vinyl that covers supermarket-cart handles. You can store your
toothbrush in a $50 holder that kills germs with ultraviolet light.

But some scientists see value in bacteria. Throughout the late-twentieth
century, there was a baffling rise in asthma and other allergies, and a
group of researchers says the likely culprit is the scrupulous
cleanliness of the developed world. In the late 1980s, a German doctor,
Erika von Mutius, compared the incidence of allergies and asthma in
children from East Berlin and West Berlin. She expected to find that
children living in unhygienic, polluted, and economically disadvantaged
East Berlin had higher rates than the children from the same genetic
background who lived in clean, prosperous West Berlin. She found just
the opposite.

The research of Mutius and others interested in the "hygiene hypothesis"
has begun to fill in a picture of those who were most and least at risk.
Children who had lots of siblings, who lived on farms, had cats, or went
to daycare in their first year were discovered to do best at avoiding
allergic diseases. Even children whose mothers had lived on farms during
their pregnancies were less likely to become allergic. The children most
likely to develop allergies and asthma were children who lived in
cities, did not go to daycare, had no pets, washed their hands more than
five times a day, and bathed more than once a day.

Today the hygiene hypothesis remains a hypothesis, but an increasingly
respected one. There is both contrary evidence (the presence of dust
mites and cockroaches has been associated with the development of
asthma) and growing corroboration of the theory. So far there are no
proven practical applications, although experiments are being conducted
in several countries. In Perth, Australia, some asthmatic children are
taking a "dirt pill" with the probiotic bacteria they apparently missed
out on as babies and toddlers, and antioxidants. Other children with
asthma will receive a placebo, and all will be monitored for frequency
of attacks, tolerance for exercise, and breathing capacity. Japanese
children who were given mycobacteria, a weakened form of tuberculosis
bacteria that is related to soil bacteria, were found to have a
significantly lower incidence of asthma and allergies than other children.

So far, no one has suggested feeding children actual dirt or relaxing
hygienic standards to any great extent. Eventually, asthmatic and
allergic children may take some kind of bacterial medication, but for
the rest of us, Tore Midtvedt, a microbiologist at the Karolinska
Institute in Sweden, advises a more moderate approach. He wants to see
an end to "war on germs" thinking and a new understanding that reflects
our often fruitful coexistence with germs. Midtvedt isn't advocating
that we live close to rats or fleas or drink polluted water, just that
we stop trying to live in sanitized houses and bodies. "I'm not saying
that we should be more dirty", he says. "I'm saying we should be less
clean".

Adapted from The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, published in
November by North Point Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux and used here
by permission.


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