"God made dirt and dirt don't hurt"... I'm sure most of us heard the saying growing up - maybe. There is a new generation now and I haven't heard the saying in a while, lately you hear more "Eww! Go wash it! Quick!". Everyone has cleansers, soap, disinfectants, antibiotics, etc. The list of products and techniques available to sterilize our world is endless. Why are we so afraid of germs and when did it start?
I work in a hospital and I am a nurse, so my whole day is an endless battle against germs; and as a nurse I learned along with the rest of the force that the best way to prevent disease is hand washing. I am certainly not arguing with the idea of hand-washing, cleaning rooms between patients or wearing gloves/gowns. The patients we come in contact with carry dangerous "bugs" and we do not want to carry them to another vulnerable patient. What's interesting though is the entire hospital environment is wrought with "dangerous bugs", if you are breathing in a hospital, you're being exposed. So while medical supply companies try to develop machines that cost $40,000 a pair to spray hydrogen peroxide vapor to sterilize a room infected with resistant bacteria, research shows that the air outside the hospital is "self-cleaning" and obviously cleaner...so why not just crack a window? Medicine wants to control environments and wants to fight the unknown and seemingly harmful so badly that it overlooked an important factor for too many years: not all "germs" are bad, actually many of them are necessary for our health.
The air in hospitals is conditioned and filtered, yet research shows that in one cubic square there are billions of microbes. Also, the average American spends 90% of their life indoors, in air conditioning, with the same outcome. All the germs that people are trying to kill and avoid, make up who we are. Actually people are more bacteria and microbes than people. New research shows that the average person carries around with them at least 8 million genes from microbes that do more work for us and our bodies than our own genes from our own DNA do.
Not surprisingly, after years of thinking of bacteria as the enemy we have won and lost at the same time and now find that we aren't as healthy as we had hoped or expected we would be. If you have never heard the term, microbiome, then you probably haven't associated what I am rambling on about with that idea.
A microbiome, in this case, is referring to the human ecosystem, that contains our human cells and the colonization of microbes, bacteria, fungi, etc. Many of us are aware of what happens when we remove a vital part of an ecosystem such as the rain forest, like trees; but do we know what happens when we remove vital bacteria from the human ecosystem? People develop more chronic diseases, they lose the ability to fight off common illnesses, they develop allergies, they become obese, they might be depressed or hyperactive, they are more susceptible to many cancers, and the list goes on and on. All of this because we have a compulsive need to be clean and treat everything with a broad spectrum antibiotic.
Thankfully more and more people in the medical community are starting to ask how we can work with this germy world instead of against it. I am fortunate to work in a facility that is starting to consider these new ideas based on the original recipe.
After this post, I will be following up with things you might want to avoid and things you might want to start including in your daily routine, as well as some seemingly odd and gross extreme fixes for this big problem (i.e., fecal transplants), and even just some interesting facts I pick up along my journey through the human microbiome.
