Time to start embracing germs again to help our health

The anti-germ zealots may kill us all.

That's because despite recent events, germs are our friends.

This is not a popular time to express that opinion – after all, we're emerging from a 15-month battle with a virus that killed more than a half-million Americans, a virus we fought by washing our hands, wearing masks and wiping down surfaces. Those practices made sense from March 2020 until now.

They may be bad for us in the long run.

Don't just listen to me, someone born in the mid-20th century. I have long been baffled by the number of people afraid to touch doors in bathrooms.

Instead, listen to epidemiologists: Obsessive cleanliness can kill things that keep you healthy.

“We’re starting to realize that there’s collateral damage when we get rid of good microbes, and that has major consequences for our health,” B. Brett Finlay told The New York Times.

Finlay is a professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of British Columbia and an author of a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His paper elaborated on the need for microbes and how our response to the pandemic could harm that.

The point? There are trillions of bacteria in our bodies. Those bacteria keep us healthy. They're the essential workers of the human body and they're like any community: A small minority of them are bad, the vast majority are good.

Sanitizing everything kills them all, the germ version of using a nuclear bomb to kill a few bad people in a major metropolitan area.

In practical purposes? Sanitizing countertops constantly may hurt you in the long term. Washing your hands frequently might be unhealthy. Wearing a mask without good reason could be harmful.

Because we need microbes.

The New York Times article on the subject described it thusly: “The ‘hygiene hypothesis,’ introduced in 1989 by the epidemiologist David Strachan, first made the case that bodies deprived of contact with microbes could be at risk for health problems. The hygiene hypothesis has evolved over time, and experts continue to debate many of its finer points. But it’s now clear that exposure to ‘good’ bacteria is necessary for a person’s health, and that living in too-sterile environments may threaten us in ways scientists are only just beginning to grasp.”

We already know this. We know that an overreliance on antibiotics isn’t good – not just because antibiotics weaken over time, but because antibiotics kill things that help us. For example: during the pandemic, many patients who received antibiotics got even sicker several months later. Because their good germs got killed, too.

This is a tightrope. We still need to be proactive for our health. We now know that wearing a mask and frequently washing our hands can protect us from not only Covid-19, but also from the flu or random viruses. But we also need to realize that sterilizing everything and avoiding all germs has a long-term negative effect.

This won’t be popular. People who fear germs – a significant population before the pandemic – have gained steam. Wiping down every counter and overwashing your hands will gain you friends.

But germs are good for us, believe it or not.

It’s time to get back to being unafraid of most germs. Time to consider washing our hands only when they’re dirty.

We should apply one of the lessons of the pandemic: Essential workers (in this case, ‘good’ germs) must be allowed to do their jobs.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.