Other Average hand has 150 bacteria species w/ only 17% shared between left and right hands

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I think I saw some other articles listed in the Google search about hand sanitizers and how effective they were, but I didn't look into it right now. Maybe somebody else has the time?

What about keyboards and mice? What in the blue blazes do you use there?

 

The more types of bacteria, the better, right? - competition keeps overall numbers down!!

 

Not surprised at all, and it's probably not so helpful that we live in such an antibacterial and germophobic world.

 

whats wrong with germs exactly? I wonder how many you would find in the average healthy persons mouth. I was at a hotel the other night with a girl and she freaked out because i was going through my bad and let my toothbrush fall on the floor. So what? a little hot water and its clean.
germs aren't as bad as people think they are.

 

pretty interesting, and i echo chris's question: What's wrong with germs?

More interestingly, though - Chris - what were you doing in a hotel with "a girl"?

 

They cause the plague...

 

People have to die of something anyway, we have a problem with overpopulation, so why do everything to prevent death?

 

Mmmm germs

Edit:

Slow news day

 

Nah rats caused the plague and its well know it was cured with heavily scented air, now where did i leave those leaches.

 

There's nothing wrong with most, if not all, germs. The germs on our hands (and all over and inside our body, for that matter) are what's known as natural flora. They are there all the time, and most of the time cause no harm. Only in cases of immunosuppression will they actually be a hazard, where some of them may become opportunistic pathogens and cause an infection.

Let's face it, most people actually carry MRSA into the hospital themselves. It's the procedures that happen in hospital which cause immune system overload (we weren't designed to be chopped up, and the immune system doesn't like it when it happens), and MRSA turns from a harmless part of the natural flora into a potentially lethal infection.

The manufacturers of cleaning products and the like use bacteria to scare people into buying their antibacterial products (Buy our product! Feel safe!) when in most cases there's no real need for such extreme levels of cleanliness. All it does is force the immune system to over-react to other stimuli, which is why the number of allergy cases has increased since the introduction of this inappropriate fixation on antibacterial products.

I deliberately avoid antibac products, and get really annoyed by the so-called anti-flu handwashes (Hey! Newsflash! Transmission of flu & colds by contact is very low, you're far more likely to catch it by aerosol).

I'll stop ranting now.

(First degree=microbiology. Bacteria cheesecake )

 

At least 500 different species, 37 of which were not previously recorded, at last count. There are likely to be more.

2kg of the human body is just the germs (mostly from the digestive tract) that live on or in it. We live in a symbiotic relationship with most of them, depending on them for parts of our digestive processes or for protection (through displacement and competition) from other, much more harmful germs and fungi.

Others just live in our body and generally do nothing as long as we're relatively healthy (e.g. MRSA, present in one in three people) and they don't stray into parts of our body where they shouldn't go (e.g. Streptococcus --fine in the throat, but not if it manages to break through the lining and get into your body tissue, where it turns into an almost uncontrollable "flesh-eating" bug; luckily this is very rare; or bacteria managing to get into your spinal soft tissue through a back injury, causing chronic inflammation and back pain).

 

500? higher that I would of guessed. I wonder how they like my listerine in the morning.

I was actually staying there with two, and, um, I guess we were spreading germs!

 

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500? This is just what they found on hands,

I always wash my hands after using the bathroom.

I also wash my hands after contacting raw meat or seafood. This is absolutely followed when working with raw vegetables at the same time.

 

This obviously requires the use of high-tech tools to stay healthy:

http://www.backtobasicstoys.com/item/productid/6276W

 

We need more germs, keep our immune systems active!

 

I agree. have a friend who went to Cuba, the second day he was there he had to go to the hospital, spent three nights there before beeing sent back to Norway, where he was in hospital for a week,
the natives, that eat the same germ-filled food every day were unaffected..
IMO today people are way too germ-focused, and that makes them more wounerable to getting ill.

 

No, they found an average of 150 species on the hands. There have been 500 identified in the mouth, although they expect that number could easily double.

 

I remember when I was in highschool reading about polio. One of the contributing factors to it was that people were becoming cleaner. using chemicles to kill bacteria. I wont use anything thats anti-bacterial unless I have a bacterial infection. There just isn't any reason to.
actually even when dealing with raw meat I wont. I use normal dish soap and just scrub hard with hot water.

 

I've always found it funny how all those silly girls at school who use antibacterial kept catching all sorts of diseases/sicknesses and had much more violent outbreaks than I did in the event I caught something.. I only ever washed my hands with standard soap before eating and after getting my hands "dirty."

How did we ever survive in the middle ages without anti-bacterial products..

 

Well, we didn't. Average life expectancy was about 40. There were plagues and epidemics that regularly wiped out vast numbers of the population, and in quieter periods people could wake up one morning with a mild fever and be dead by the evening --without identified cause.

We've gone a bit overboard these days, but it took Dr. Semmelweis to demand his doctors to wash their hands in 1847 --thus promptly reducing death by puerperal fever on his hospital wards by a factor of ten. The reward for his trouble?

Despite indisputably clear survival statistics, Semmelweis continued to be regarded as a crackpot until Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease which offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis' findings.

The first antibiotics, meanhwile, were not discovered until 1928 by Alexander Fleming. He also discovered very early that bacteria developed antibiotic resistance whenever too little penicillin was used or when it was used for too short a period. Before that, people could easily die from ordinary bacterial infections.

What I am saying is: modern anti-bacterial products are overkill, but employ no hygiene at all at your peril. We developed the use of hot water and carbolic soap for a reason.