The great wilderness inside us

Since one of the ways you sell things is to use fear as a motivator, it should be no surprise that antibiotic cleaners, wipes, soaps, and the like, make it sound like germs are everywhere, and people have reacted by becoming excessively germaphobic. Well, as biologists know, we virtually live in a microbial sea awash in countless microbes. In a study use of antibiotic wipes and soaps did no better than regular soap at preventing illness among users, but those using the antibiotic products got more severe illnesses. A nice little evolutionary study of selecting among common bacteria to leave more nasty types behind.
Most people are alarmed to find out that the human body harbors more teeny, tiny organisms than the body has cells. And now that molecular techniques are beginning to allow us to examine microbial diversity in the GI tract, it turns out that a maintaining a diverse ecosystem is quite important to your health. "Like a lush rain forest, a healthy microbiome in the human gut is a diverse ecosystem... When you use antibiotics, you essentially drop a bomb on a microbial community...Last year, Stanford microbiologist David Relman published a study that illustrated the potentially devastating impact of antibiotics on the [gut] microbiome. He gave three healthy adults a five-day course of the antibiotic Cipro, then another course six months later, and monitored the state of the microbiome after each treatment. The gut flora of all three subjects gradually recovered from the impact of the antibiotic treatment but never returned to their original state."
Although this sounds sort of icky, like other ecosystems, your GI tract flora can be restored by transplanting them from someone else, usually a close family member. Use of antibiotics in cleaning products and the like should be banned; they do more harm than good. Once again, it's time humans learned to live with the flora and fauna around us rather than trying to destroy it.

Are you a germaphobe? Let me help.

Apparently advertising for sanitizers, cleansers, and the like, especially here in the USA, has resulted in a much enhanced paranoia about encountering "germs", yet another manifestation of biological ignorance and fear mongering (which also seems popular in politics these days). In public places do you worry about touching faucet and door handles, countertops, table tops, hand railings, and any of the other countless things we handle each day for fear of contracting some "germ"? Do you carry disinfectant wipes with you all the time, and especially when traveling? Do you use germ killing cleansers all over your house? OK, if so, let me ease your mind with a bit of basic biology. Please understand this.
Life on this planety is mostly unicellular and mostly microscopic, so small you really, really don't understand the size of vast majority of organisms. We big organisms, and yes, humans are way, way up on the large end of the scale, live in an environment teeming with countless tiny organisms. Your own body, consisting as it does of some 100 million cells, is host at least a trillion organisms. A cubic centimeter of soil, a volume about the size of a sugar cube, will have somewhere between 8 and 20 million organisms in it. One commercial disinfectant cleanser ad suggests that your clean looking kitchen counter top cold have 40,000 or more germs per square inch! Is your reaction YIKES, and you start spraying the cleanser? A reasonable biological response is "Wow, so few, that's a really clean counter you got there lady." So my dear germaphobes, get over it. You have a naive and inaccurate view of the biological world, and fortunately for us all, our bodies have evolved to deal with all these tiny organisms. Yes, some germs, bacteria, can cause serious diseases, but on a day to day basis, you just aren't going to be exposed to any real risk of infection. This means the 5-second rule on dropped food is complete crap; the instant it touched the floor, it picked up bacteria, but so what? You've been living with all these guys day in and day out anyways, so brush off the cat hair, and eat it anyways. What's a few million more among friends? We close hoping this public service announcement has made you feel better.