The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [102]
Although Gerba says “we have to reinvent hygiene because our world has changed so much,” his mantra is an ancient one—clean hands, clean hands, clean hands. He washes his own whenever he leaves his desk, when he goes to the bathroom, after he teaches. When asked, people in movie theatres swear they washed their hands in the restroom, but Gerba and his gimlet-eyed researchers say only 65 per cent do, only half of those who wash use soap, and only half of the ones who use soap wash long enough—it should be for fifteen to twenty seconds. By contrast, he says, to get to a sink in the restroom at a sanitarians’ conference, “you have to wait in line.” We spoke on the phone, and just before we hung up, I asked Dr. Gerba if he would have shaken my hand if we had met in person. “Sure, unless you had a cold,” he said, and then paused for a beat. “And after we shook hands, within a few minutes I’d be looking to sanitize my hands with an alcohol gel.”
Gerba denies that he’s afraid of germs, because, he says, he knows where to find them, and his basic message is a sensible one. But, with his gleeful counts of germs on sinks and fecal bacteria in clean laundry, he is contributing to the anxious sense that we live in a world populated by billions of unseen enemies. We all know people who go to extraordinary lengths never to shake hands or touch a tap in a public washroom, and whose cupboards are filled with antibacterial soaps. Inventions that address their fears are multiplying. One new product, a plastic box to be installed above the doorknob in a public toilet, sprays a disinfectant mist on the knob every fifteen minutes. (However, Dr. Gerba says, “Never fear a doorknob.” Unlike a sink, it is not moist, and moisture supplies the most hospitable breeding ground for germs.) Another innovation, the Sanitgrasp, replaces traditional door pulls in restaurants and other public places with a big U-shaped object that allows the door to be opened by a forearm.
A poster from Ontario’s 2006 campaign to encourage handwashing.
The list of these new products stretches from the plausible to the wilder shores of paranoia. You can buy a portable subway strap so your hands never have to come into contact with the overhead bar, as well as a strip of vinyl that covers supermarket cart handles. You can store your toothbrush in a $50 holder that kills germs with ultraviolet light. Imagine the fun Horace Miner would have had with the Nacirema’s inability to go anywhere without their personal subway strap, their reverent attitude to the sacred mist sprayed four times an hour on doorknobs, and their clumsy but ritualized use of the forearm to open doors.
“From birth to death, we’re covered from head to toe by a rich, living carpet that is the product of thousands if not millions of years of coevolution. These germs … interact with our own cells in subtle yet important ways which are only now coming to light.”
—science writer Garry Hamilton, “Why We Need Germs”
People who were once normally hygiene-conscious are behaving more and more like mysophobes (the technical term for those with an inordinate fear of germs). Others whose horror of germs was considered seriously eccentric, such as the obsessive-compulsive TV detective Monk or the television host Howie Mandel, now seem closer to the norm. A decade ago, the editorial writers at a large Canadian newspaper were amused when the germ-conscious editor-in-chief urged them to write an editorial against shaking hands. (He suggested crossing your arms and nodding instead.) The editorial never appeared. It’s doubtful that the editor’s suggestion