By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

I have a ten-year-old daughter who hates bugs. Granted, she grew up in a big city in China, where even bugs have only a 50-50 chance of surviving all the smog. But even so, I draw the line when she runs screaming from a passing moth or earthworm, while thinking nothing whatsoever of going to school all day at Swine Flu Tech, walking the neighbor’s dogs, picking up their poop (OK, she uses a plastic bag), throwing it in the dumpster, sitting on the curb or playing on the sidewalk with her pals, and wearing the same clothes for days on end because they’re her “favorites.” This same kid absolutely wouldn’t dream of washing her hands without being read a riot act, followed by an ultimatum backed up by major firepower (i.e. getting yelled at by yours truly, which she shrugs off as easily as a Seattle drizzle). Yet she is almost never sick.

In sharp contrast to my daughter, or in all fairness, any healthy ten-year-old, are those among us who are so obsessed with germs they sprint from anti-septic soap dispenser to antiseptic soap bottle, open doors with paper towels, refuse to shake hands, wear face masks at the mall, and are general pains in the butt about all the alleged health risks out there. And the funny thing is, these tend to be the sickest people I know.

Granted, there is a healthy economy and large consumer class out there for all these sanitary products (contrast this with much of the world that doesn’t even have toilet paper), which contribute billions to our overall economy. Where would Wall Street be without Johnson & Johnson and Proctor & Gamble? All of us use some of these products, at one time or another, and far be it for me to say not to. But there is plenty of excess, not to mention obsession about matters of cleanliness in our society, and a lot of it has to do with marketing and profits, creating a market for stuff we really don’t need.

Worse, a lot of these products do more harm than good. For one thing, unless children come in contact with common germs, such as cold viruses and such, their immune systems cannot develop the antibodies necessary to prevent the really bad germs from getting them. Not only that, but some of those little buggers are actually good for you (acidophilus, for example) and new medical research indicates that we can’t live without them. This truly is a symbiotic world.

According to a recent article by Karen Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found in a study of a racially-mixed group of men and women, that each of them had an average of 1,120 different species of microorganisms living on board, and that is just on the surface. Some are a nuisance to be sure, like the bacterium that causes acne, and others downright dangerous, like the new basically man-made streptococcus aureus, the cause of those horrific new infections that are resistant to antibiotics. This disaster in progress I’ve written about before, comes directly from the millions of people dumping waste medications in our water supply, combined with abuses from industry and agriculture (such as those factory farms pumping antibiotics into all those chickens, pigs, and cattle just because there’s no room or time to give them a bath and they live knee-deep in feces).

Anyway, it turns out bacteria grow all over us in places you might expect, but also those you might not. For example, the single area of skin most infested with germs is the forearm. Go figure.

Bottom line is you can’t get rid of them, and you might just die trying. It’s like what men like to say about women: we can’t live with them, but we can’t live without them. Bacteria and other microorganisms are not only a part of our environment, but they are part of us, in a very real way (we can’t digest food without them, for example). So obsessing with germ-killing soaps and lotions may be a really bad idea (and a serious waste of your limited resources). In a hospital, maybe. A public toilet, sure. But doctors have proven that plain soap and water is still the best thing to use to keep clean.

As for all those other chemicals in commercial liquid soaps, detergents, lotions, sprays, and shampoos, those, plus the chlorine in the water, are a lot more dangerous than most of those bugs.

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.