again

For years I've seen people carrying around their little pocket bottles of hand sanitizer or Purell antibacterial soap. I always used to joke with them that if they keep killing off all the microbes around them that they're immune system wouldn't be able to handle an attack as well as it might if it had to fight off a microbe once in a while. I always dismissed it as nothing more than a joke, but these people seem to get sick just as often as I do and seemingly battle the sickness for longer.

This week's reading in cradle to cradle touched on an interesting point. They mention that all the anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, and even anti-biotics eventually wind up going down the drain and mixing in with the sewage. They state that this becomes a problem when these products kill off all the bacteria that is used to break down the sewage, they basically hinder the process. Whats more interesting is that the only bacteria that survive are the ones that are resistant to these products. We have essentially created the perfect breeding ground for the antibiotic resistant "super bugs" that everyone worries will kill us all. We created these super bugs all because we wanted to kill off the bugs we could have beaten anyway. What irony!