Slashdot Mirror
Who's Behind the Shower Curtain?
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, it's not Norman Bates. Instead, hundreds of millions of yellow, pink and white bacteria are hiding on your shower curtain. According to a study by San Diego and Colorado researchers, it should be enough to push you to turn the water off and to make you grab a towel. After analyzing the vinyl shower curtains from their own bathrooms, the scientists found '...about 80 percent of the organisms they found in the flaky scum were in the same genetic families as those known to infect wounds'. Sorry to leave you here, but I also have to go and buy another shower curtain, preferably a disposable one."
It's amazing, how the sciences of epidemiology and microbiology have produced such irrational paranoia in some people. Yes, there are bacteria upon your shower curtain. It's (often) warm and moist. (gasp)
Naturally the rational solution to this is to start throwing away your shower curtain after each use. (!!) But wait, there are bacteria on the trash can... better start throwing the trash out after each use. And that icky dumpster! AAAIEEEEE!
Give it a rest. Unless you have a compromised immune system or are caring for someone who does, this is NOTHING to worry about.
I sure that 80% of the bacteria in your intestines are from the same families of bacteria that infect wounds. But if you kill all of them off you are asking for some serious health problems.
While this may be a factual study, I find myself more interested in the alarmist reactions people have to news like this.
Life is not about walking from one hermetically sealed clean room to another, there's all sorts of things out there that we interact with on a daily basis. Every time you breath, you inhale pollen, dust mites, various chemical vapors, and all sorts of organic detritus.
Every time you drink water, there's a certain quantity of dead organic material, traces of various excrements, and so on, even if your water is bottled.
We do not live life as individual colonies of humanity, sailing through deserts of sterility, instead we walk through a cloud of sloughed off bacteria, viruses, and other debris, and it's O-K.
Humankind has lived for millenia with these things, and for the most part, we've been O-K.
People lived before pasteurization, people lived before water filtration, people even lived before MOUTHWASH! And they were all... O-K.
The world we live in is much cleaner in terms of organic residue then ever before, and the legions of bacteria on your shower curtain have not spontaneously appeared out of the ether, so calm down, take a deep breath, and stop panicing.
It's just a matter of time before someone figures out that there's a correlation between good health and some non-obvious combination of bacteria and organic waste. In the meantime, let Howard Hughes-style cleanliness craziness pass you by and just live your lives peacefully.
Y'all are O-K.
This kind of silliness has lead companies to create all manner of anti-bacterial wipes and soaps, and while they may ward off the occasional infection, more likely it is just watering down our immune systems so that when an infection does strike, our bodies are unprepared. To me, this is just another blip on the mass-media Paranoia-meter.
I guess I'm pessimistic, but IMHO we are hell bent as a species on painting ourselves into a biological and ecological corner.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Humans are designed to survive much dirtier conditions then we live in now, that's what we have an immune system for.
Infact one of the reasons why there's a lot more people suffering allergies these days could be that because we live in such clean conditions our immune system's got nothing better to do then go nuts over minor environmental contaminates.
First off I'll state that I'm a microbiologist. Saying that two bacterium come from the same "genetic family" is totally meaningless. Take E. coli K12 and E. coli 0157:H7 for example. They're the same SPECIES. K12 is harmless while 0157 will give you bloody diarrhea and could potentially kill you. I hate reading crap like this. It helps ignorant people justify their decision to disinfect EVERYTHING, thus inhibiting childrens' development of robust immune systems.
Reminds me of the polio outbreak in the US. It actually occured when they fixed the sewer system. In the early 20th century kids would often play in the streets with open sewage, and although polio existed, it never got out of hand. However when they cleaned up the streets and installed a modern sewage system, the infection rate shot up? Why? Because the kids playing in the streets with the open sewage developed an immunity to the disease early, but after the sewers were cleaned up, the kids did not get exposed to weaker forms and thus the contraction rate shot up.
This is why I think young people in America are going to be a lot more susceptible to disease as they grow older. As the germ phobes buy all these "anti-bacterial" products, it tends to make the developing immune systems in the children weaker because they do not have an opportunity to fight diseases at a young age. Sensationalist media like this doesn't help.
Latin Americans *hate* standing water, they think it's very unclean.
This isn't that far off base. Standing water is a great breeding ground for mosquitos, and as we all know mosquitos tend to carry such wonderful things as malaria with them. So, it may be a cultural thing that simply developed as a self-defense mechanism.
Standing Water attracts mosquitos. Mosquitos carry malaria. Malaria kills people, or makes the very sick. Ergo, don't create pools of standing water.
On the other hand it could just be one of those cultural flukes that have no valid base in reality, kinda like Americans and tits on TV.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
as the saying goes, "what does not kill us only makes us stronger". Attributed to Nietsche (sp?) I believe.
:)
Our bacterial friends are just insuring that the weak members of our species are being culled out. If you can't handle a little bathroom scum then, hey, better to not reproduce. Right?
(For the humor impaired, I'm joking...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I quit using antibacterial soap years ago, and I've never been too big on Lysol or any other cleaning product whose primary purpose is to kill germs. See, I think there's a twofold danger here. Firstly, your immune system needs to know what to defend itself against. If you kill all the germs in your environment and don't get exposed to them regularly, then your immune system is weakened and you become more susceptible to bacterial infection. Secondly, if your cleaning product kills 99% of bacteria, then it's probable that some of the the 1% that survived have some genetic trait that can make them resistant to your germ killer. As that fraction of the bacteria reproduces, you've helped, using Darwinian survival of the fittest, to grow a stronger germ.
Don't get me wrong. I don't leave chicken sitting out on the counter overnight and then eat it raw. There's a fairly obvious line between "not overcautious" and "stupid". By cleaning up the messes that culture bacteria, I avoid a potential point of exposure to dangerous levels of them. But, by not making an effort to utterly sterilize my living environment, I allow myself to be exposed to normal levels of all sorts of buggies, keeping my immune system on its toes.
I recently had my wisdom teeth out and took my antibiotics like the doctor ordered. Guess what? I didn't get a nasty bacterial infection, even when I switched back to solid foods too soon and got some particles of food down in the empty (and not quite fully healed) tooth sockets and didn't notice for a few hours.
We're already starting to learn that to try and eradicate bacteria and other pathogens in our environment is a tactic that backfires badly.
For millions of years our immune system has evolved to protect us from most of these microbes and until recently a satisfactory balance has developed that allow us to co-exist without too many problems.
Unfortunately (and probably driven by idiotic chemical companies) a new mindset developed in the mid 20th century which suggested we should "kill all germs" using whatever disinfectant or antibiotic was most profitable to sell.
There are a growing number of health professionals who now claim that our immune system is actually becoming weaker -- since it's seeing fewer threats. This would be fine and dandy except that bacteria and new pathogens (prions etc) are on the comeback path -- their ability to adapt/evolve extremely rapdily meaning that many of our chemicals and antibiotics are now largely ineffective.
In effect, they're doing a Borg act and already adapted to become immune to our weapons.
The ultimate example of this are the growing number of antibiotic resistant bacteria that now pose a real threat and can't be killed by even our last line of defence -- vancomycin. If you are infected by one of these, you and your immune system pretty much on your own and death is quite likely.
There is now also evidence to suggest that the dramatic rise in asthma is a result of our "cleaner living" and the reduction in bacterial and mould levels in our homes.
It's about time that we woke up to the fact that, with only a few exceptions, bacteria are our friends and pose little or no threat to us.
Even the deadly staph normally lives quite happily in our sinuses and other parts of the body. It only becomes a threat under unusual circumstances which allow it to grow at a rate beyond our immune system's ability to cope.
So, be friends with your shower curtain and learn to appreciate that by being exposed to its bacteria on a daily basis, you're actually doing yourself a favour by exercising your immune system to make it stronger and more capable for when it's really needed.