Comments on: Starts off being about bacteria and turns into a crazy hippie rant directed at western medicine and The New Yorker

By: dv

dv — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:51:16 +0000

Whoa!

By: lindsay

lindsay — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:08:29 +0000

This is exactly why i take my 2 years old (c-section, one course of necessary antibiotics) to some clean dirt in the hills above Oakland and let him roll in for a couple hours then don’t wash his hands or give him a bath for 2 days. He is the child of two parents with chronic allergies and this is all I can offer him.

By: Yours Truly

Yours Truly — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:00:58 +0000

Gross! And, yeah, I basically follow this advice. Wash my hands when involved with poop; before cooking; when in New York.

that daycare story is so fucked up

By: kerry

kerry — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:10:55 +0000

Ah, but to that I say you are indeed walking around with poop on your hands, because we are ALL walking around with poop on our hands. And it’s not the animal poop that makes us sick, it’s people poo! For me, one of the best parts of grad school was reading some truly disgusting studies about the amount of fecal contamination on common surfaces. There is one particular study about day care fecal contamination that will make you have nightmares. They put this day-glo stuff in kids’ diapers and set them loose, then used a blacklight to assess fecal transfer–the researchers said the room lit up like a glow-stick from the floor to the walls at about three feet high. Now I am not saying you hang out in daycares, but guess what? Those little fuckers are everywhere, and their gross parents with poopy hands are too, touching your stuff!

Remember the horrible giardia story? To that I say, you ate someone’s poop, my friend. Also, you are never sick (not with TB perhaps) but you are definitely shedding lots of lovely bacteria and viruses, and though you may not have symptoms others might.

Of course, there are places you are more likely to get seriously sick if you don’t wash your hands. For instance, I wash the FUCK out of my hands whenever I am in contact with kids, or travel to places where sanitation is not as great as it is in the US, or come within 50 miles of New York City.

Anyway, in ‘the biz’ we teach that there are critical times for handwashing to prevent spread of disease: before preparing or eating food, after cleaning a child’s butt, or after cleaning your own butt. Follow that practice, and wash with regular old non-anti-bacterial soap and water, and you are set.

GOD I LOVE TALKING ABOUT POOP!

By: Yours Truly

Yours Truly — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:34:52 +0000

well I’m not, like, walking around with dog poop on my hands. Also I am never sick so it’s not like I’m coughing TB germs on my hands and then touching doorknobs!

the vulnerable of the world will have to make it through without me washing my hands 10 times a day. SORRY VULNERABLES!

By: kerry

kerry — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:31:44 +0000

THAT ARTICLE!! I was reading it out loud to my husband last night. “Honey, there are THREE POUNDS of bacteria in/on the human body!!” (“More like seven or eight on me, nyuk nyuk”)

You know what is really crazy? I work for a nonprofit that provides millions doses of free deworming drugs to kids in developing countries. Now, these worms are bad–they come from eating other people’s poop, they cause anemia, stunting, malnutrition, etc. Not having your stomach and intestines full of worms is without doubt the preferred state of things. HOWEVER. The side effect of all that deworming, or rather the result of our efforts to get all these parasites out of kids, is that we’re going to have a shitload of dudes with asthma and allergies in about ten years’ time. Yes, they are not shitting out worms and anemic and a foot shorter than they should be, BUT they will have massive allergy/sinus/asthma issues because guess what? Low levels of those parasites actually do a good job of hindering your body’s immune response to other environmental irritants!

Now think about this. These deworming drugs are super cheap, buthow much do allergy and asthma drugs cost? And guess who donates all those deworming drugs to nonprofits like mine??

OH MY GOD!

We can’t do anything right.

Also POOP TRANSPLANT! I want to see this on a TV show. “I HAVE TWENTY MINUTES TO GET THIS TURD HALFWAY ACROSS THE STATE AND INTO THE BUTT OF A DYING WOMAN. NOW GET ME TO A CHOPPER.”

By: bocko

bocko — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:17:54 +0000

OK but here’s the thing about hand-washing…. it protects other people. Just plain hood old hand washing with old-fashioned soap, which merely lifts the germs away from your skin and rinses them down into the oceans, thereby protecting vulnerable people from falling ill by touching the things your filthy hands touch. Be kind!!