Germs – Vincenzo Ravina

It happened that Mallory MacLeod’s hands burst into flames. She was eager to avoid a virus going around her high school and had disinfected her hands “like five times” with alcohol-based Purell hand sanitizer before going to a chemistry class. It was her turn to light the Bunsen burner for the group. PHOOM.

“It just burned away the hand sanitizer and stopped, but my teacher was very concerned.”

MacLeod is now in her first year at Carleton University in Ottawa, studying Public Affairs and Policy Management. She has about five containers of Purell, one of which she carries in her bag wherever she goes. In her dorm, she disinfects her doorknobs with Lysol, “and I’ll go around disinfecting the doorknobs of anyone’s room I hang out in.”

MacLeod, and many others like her, do their level best to keep the germs away. There are Purell dispensers at the mall, disposable toilet seat covers in public washrooms and disinfecting wipes for your cart at Sobeys. Antibacterial soaps are as ubiquitous as the germs they kill. But is cleaner really better?

Let’s ask a science guy.

David Evans is a virologist in the Medical Microbiology & Immunology Department at the University of Alberta and he’s a really nice science guy. He was the only person in his field who deigned to respond to an interview request and he didn’t even get angry at me when I screwed up my time zone math and called him at 5 AM.

He says, “There’s this impression being created that somehow we have to sterilize the environment around us because that’s good for us.”

It isn’t, necessarily.

It seems that 99.99% of bacteria on every surface you touch is totally harmless – and some of it is actually good for you.

“Fecal material, contaminated poultry, someone going around sneezing… Those are all things that yes, you should be concerned about.” But you might not need that antibacterial stuff. “The major thing that you need to prevent transmission of a lot of these different things is to wash your hands and to clean down counters with regular hot and soapy water… [Antibacterial products have] no real advantages over just regular hygiene.”

Evans says all these cleaning products are “breeding paranoia amongst the general public and [getting] profits for the companies, quite frankly.”

MacLeod says, “Every time I touch something that’s not mine, every time I touch a door handle, I have to wash my hands or sanitize them.”

But, MacLeod insists she’s not a germaphobe, “I just like to keep everything clean.”

Paul Freeman is a professor of psychology at Saint Mary’s University. “Mysophobia” is the actual word for what everyone means when they say “germaphobia.” It is the fear of contamination or illness or germs. But in order for something to be considered a phobia, it has to be actively detrimental and affect your ability to function.

“The person who’s got the bottle of Purell in their purse and they’re washing their hands fourteen times a day with it, it’s probably no big deal for them to do that… they just feel that they’re being cautious. They’re able to function perfectly normally, but they may be more preoccupied than their neighbour.”

However, Freeman, like Evans, has concerns about the ever-spreading germ paranoia. Freeman says companies like Purell, in order to create and maintain a market for their products, create fear, which has resulted in a very germ paranoid culture.

“All of those messages get out there in more subtle ways. It’s not just fear mongering in advertising, but it’s the more subtle: ‘We’re telling you, here’s the paper towel dispenser with the motion sensor, here’s the sink that you don’t have to touch. There’s something to be afraid of here.’”

Not to mention that making the world so clean might be making us all soft like eggs.

“Why is there so much peanut allergy amongst children now?” asks Evans. “It didn’t exist when I was a child… You will never see Crohn’s disease or asthma or peanut allergies in central Africa… What we have done in the Western world is we have created an environment that is so clean that our immune system is twiddling its thumbs, saying ‘What in the world can I do?’”

Evans stresses that the “hygiene hypothesis” is unproven, but it sounds logical to him. The idea is, without exposure to a fun battery of bacteria, our immune systems are overreacting. We may be over-cleaning and it may be doing us harm.

“Some germs are not bad for you,” says Evans, “and a little exposure, in the long run, might actually be good for your immune system.”

It’s working out for Mallory MacLeod, however. She’s only been sick once this year. It was when she forgot her disinfecting wipes upon going home to Cape Breton for Christmas and she says she wasn’t able to sanitize everything.

She says her habits are becoming more common. “A lot of people ask me for hand sanitizer and not a lot of people seem to find it as weird [anymore], if I’m disinfecting their doorknobs.”