Conceive - Why children need to get dirty

 

More than a decade ago I had written an article on ‘Friendly neighborhood germs’ that the readers of the publication thought was a bit too alarmist. I had then defined myself as not just my cells but the entire population of bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa and other parasites that live in me & on me. I cannot exist as a whole without them. This has now been characterized as the ‘microbiome’. 

 

We as humans are not just us as made up of our cells but an entire ecosystem where the number of microbes outnumber us by a ratio of ten to one, i.e. 100 trillion of ‘their’ cells versus about 10 of ‘ours’. In the modern living with our obsession with hygiene we have messed up seriously. Just look around and see the proliferation of ‘anti-germ’ soaps, cleansers, disinfectants and the bane of my life: alcohol hand rubs. I tell my students to open their bags and check for these in their hand bags and lo behold 90% of these modern educated Emirati girls flash their hand sanitizers. And then, I ask them to explain the rationale of carrying these in a environment where hand wash basins are dime a dozen. These for God’s sake were designed for healthcare workers for hospital hygiene when faced with a lack of time to wash their hands in between patients and not for the community at large. And certainly not a replacement for hand washing with soap & water. The reports of ‘drunken bugs’  which can actually use the alcohol in the hand sanitizers as a source of carbon has seriously put a question mark on their use even in hospital environment.

 

So what are we doing messing about with our ‘microbiome’ by overusing anti-microbial soaps and shampoos and sanitizing the world around us? The advertising industry bombards us daily with pictures of ‘good mother’ equals ‘disinfectant using mother’!  While the reality is that the less we expose ourselves and our children to the good bugs, the more immature our immune system gets and the more it over-reacts adversely. 

 

 Unfortunately as we can see all around us in this ‘modern- clean’ world, the numbers of allergies, inflammations and autoimmune diseases affecting all organs are reaching epidemic proportions. Obesity and depressive illnesses are on the rise too. What is now defined as the ‘gut-brain axis’ is the microbes and their products in our gut affecting the way we eat & think. So please get your hands dirty, wash with plain soap and water, let the child grow up playing on a clean but not disinfected floor, let the dog lick his face and certainly let him ‘eat the cookie that fell on the floor!