All around me, people are rubbing their hands with a few drops of liquid that are said to kill germs. I hear government officials lecturing us on washing our hands. I read blog posts on how to cope with the menace of doorknobs. And Phized at schools is more and more sterile, designed to prevent the kids from getting dirty.
At the same time, the near panic over swine flu, and allergy pandemics. For a while there I thought there would be legislation to ban peanuts from American life, but that seems to have passed. Delta Airlines hands out peanuts without any obvious protest.
Meanwhile, I remember my mother dragging me around to the houses of kids with chicken pox and mumps, so that I could get infected. Why? So that I could build up my antibodies. Exposure to germs helps the immune system. From which it follows that all this cleanliness and sterilization has a downside: it makes us more vulnerable to infection.
And from THAT it follows that DIRT IS GOOD FOR US. N’est-ce pas?
Me, I don’t use those little bottles. Every now and then I do wash my hands–typically before meals and on other occasions I won’t describe here because this is a family blog–but I’m not going to get excited when I get dirty. I do get a flu shot most years, but that’s more of the “infect yourself to get stronger” theme.
Has anybody checked to see if the compulsive clean hands people get sick more than us dirty folks?
I don’t know about the comparative flu rates, but I suspect that the dirties have more fun.
I don’t know if nurses or OCD’s get sick more, but the argument seems to be that they spread tougher organisms – the ones that survive the constant 99.97% sterilization – so that others around them get sick more often – very, very sick at that. I don’t know if it’s a valid argument.
Heh. Your mom was ahead of the curve. It isn’t the avoidance of stresses that adds to life, but the conversion of stress stimuli via rest and recovery.
I dragged my kids around the firing range at an early age for much the same reason. Now that they’ve been ‘exposed to lead’ as it were – and to steel, wood and brass, and to many loud discharges – their infection becomes something healthy. One daughter came up to me at shul, and in front a group asked me nicely if I’d please take the scope off her Marlin, she’d like to keep the iron sites, thanks Dad!
In a larger sense, your point applies across so many flaws in the statist mindset… between government and trial lawyers, we’re being protected from ourselves – for our own good, of course. We’re being “protected” from the results of our own flawed decisions and we are being denied the right to make others. The result is the weakening and infantilization of adults, higher costs, restricted freedoms and a better society? At some point very early in the game, Quinn’s Law comes into play – Liberalism achieves the exact opposite of its stated intent.
Michael, my priest whose father was born in the US, and then moved back to Sicily to be with relatives, then returned to the US when Mussolini came to power, always praised kids eating dirt. Why? For the same reasons that you gave.
Once a body has experience with dealing with pathogens, it is programmed to deal with those pathogens that invade in larger dosages.
Compulsive cleanliness will likely result in a disaster. Human beings are supposed to build up their immune systems. A certain amount of dirt is good for us. In other words, one probably does have to knowingly get moderately sick. Total avoidance is a far worse alternative.
While I agree too much of antiseptic upbringing can be bad for children, there are better ways to strengthen immune systems than exposing children to disease.
Vaccines do the same thing without the risk of illness. That’s why I vaccinated my son against the chicken pox rather than exposing him to it.
Infectious disease has a cumulative impact on the human body. Studies of dead civil war veterans have showed us that disease significantly shortened their lives and led to serious chronic problems.
Plus, being sick sucks. Why would I want my son to go through that?
Allergies do seem to be related to a lack of exposure to antigens.
So, dirt good, disease bad.
I’m all for vaccinations, hope I didn’t imply otherwise. But when I was a kid back in the 18th century there weren’t so many as there are today. I remember when the Salk vaccine came out. Wow. I had friends with polio…
This applies to more than just dirt: If you try to protect the mind of children through the prophylaxy of political correctness, they will never understand anything about the human nature, and will become unable to deal with adversity in life.
Most of us were not intensely bombarded by the principles of collectivism, until the Nobel laureate of our time undertook the task of education plumbers at arm’s length.
Now we receive the madness in stereophony, (from Pelosi on the extreme left, and Reid on the middle-of-road left, plus surround sound by Van Jones, Cass Sustein and Valery Jarret), and the American electorate gradually develops some measure of immunity to the marxist viruses trying to perform the Gulliver maneuver on America.
I doubt it. But dirty is fun. LoL!
Michael, if I ever meet you in person some day, I’ll be sure to cough on you. J/K
)
I am careful about salmonella and e-coli since food poisoning doesn’t strengthen the immune system and I have to keep my house pretty spic-n-span because I’m allergic to dust but ‘dirt’ doesn’t bother me. Once you have a kid, you get over ‘dirt’ pretty quick unless you want to be a total ogre for a parent. lol
our sons always played in the dirt…and now they’re Marines! but we didn’t poison them, ahem.
The rationale to infect children in antiquity the past was:
1) some disease cause lesser damage to children than to adults
2) if one must die for a disease, it is economical for the parents to have it die as a child. They had many other children to grow, anyway.
The virus responsible for chickenpox (varicella zoster) is also the causative agent for herpes zoster, better known as shingles. There is some interesting evidence emerging that suggests the increased incidence of shingles in middle-aged Americans (most of whom had chicken pox as children) might be an unintended consequence of widespread varicella immunization. The theory goes that when adults who’d had chickenpox as children were exposed to the disease in their own kids, it acted as a kind of booster to their own immune systems. That is no longer happening since varicella vaccine has been in use for a generation and immunity is now required by many school districts. It’s all still speculative, of course, but interesting nonetheless.
The craze for antibacterial soaps is something else – even hospitals are caught up promoting this stuff as an acceptable alternative to hand-washing when they certainly know better. Not all bacteria are bad, in fact some are necessary to good health. But these products kill all they come into contact with, including the ones your body relies on to protect itself. The upshot is that prolonged use leaves a person more susceptible to infection! Regular handwashing with ordinary soap and water is a much more reliable defense.
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