How Clean is Too Clean?

Why does science fiction often depict a (literally) sanitized future? How has the need for clean environments evolved with science and technology? Is it dangerous to be TOO clean?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, either everyone and welcome to Forward Thinking. The
podcast that Looks in the Future says, there was a
young sailor who looked through the glass. I'm Jonathan Strickland,

(00:20):
I'm Lauren Pokon, and I'm Joe McCormick. Guys, Now, if
I were to give you just a term, just saying
starship Enterprise, what are some of the ways you would
describe the interior of that starship? It's so perfect and immaculate. Yeah,

(00:41):
Busters everywhere, Yeah, yes, space Dustbusters of the future. Yeah,
I was looking for Lenz Flair, but my Starship Enterprise
doesn't involve that much. Lens Flare. Clearly Abrahams has nothing
to do with Lauren's Starship Enterprise. Um. Yeah. If you
think about the inside of the ships in Star Trek,

(01:03):
they look disgustingly clean. Well, not all the ships in
Star Trek, though, that's all the Federation. Yeah, that's right.
If you go you look inside the clingon ships, they
look really grungy. And I don't know if it's just
bad lighting or if there's like filth on the surfaces.
I always assumed it was some kind of like since

(01:23):
the Klingons to me were always a terrific parallel for
Communist Russia, that it was clearly some kind of like
in Communist Russia clingons. I don't I can't really finish
that statement where I don't have anything clean. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's one of the exactly the machine oils you.
That would be what the way I'd go, Um, yeah,
it turns out that, you know, when we think about

(01:45):
the Star trek Uh universe, whenever we're thinking about those
Federation ships, we have those incredibly pristine, clean ships. This
is not the only example of futuristic worlds where everything
is spotless and immaculate, right, I mean the spaceship on
two thousand one or the space station I guess I
should say two thousand one absolutely spotless. I would say,

(02:06):
especially if you look into earlier science fiction, they envisioned
the future is an extremely clean place. I think one
thing that was a sort of revolution in later sci
fi depictions is they sort of dirtied up the future
a bit. That's something you saw once you had Star
Wars and Blade Runner and stuff like that. Fifth Element,
although technically Star Wars is not the future that happened

(02:27):
a long time ago. Well whatever, although lots of depictions
in books, I mean you can't see the grid, and
I think that a lot of this was also design elements.
More so, I mean it was style over the substance
of a concept of the future. Um, not that something
like the fifth element isn't very stylish, but Highland for example,
certainly never sometimes he did, but but he usually didn't
describe his his future escapes as being pristine. Well, no,

(02:50):
I would tie it probably to an idea, a sort
of utopian idea of about the future, like like in
Star Trek. I mean, when you look at and Vary's
vision of the future, he has this vision that's generally
better than today, very optimistic, right, and and and again
that's where that kind of clingon thing comes in, because
the Federation was this utopia and cling on society was

(03:13):
portrayed as very much not now. However, I will counter
that by saying, there are several dystopian versions of the
future that are also very very clean. And in this case,
the it's meant to be more sterile, a clockwork orange, right, Yes,
So these are world these are worlds where the cleanliness
is a symptom of something that's actually rotten in that

(03:34):
world where it's not you know, it's not that everything
is beautiful and lovely, it's that things are cold and impersonal.
I would say that the association between cleanliness and a
sort of utopian vision of the future is understandable once
you look at the history of sanitation and sterilization, especially
as it comes to medicine and society. Sure, because you

(03:57):
can sort of see an arc that, oh wow, learning
how to clean up our medical facilities and our homes
and things like that, that was actually a big step
forward for human beings, right, And that's really what we
wanted to talk about in this podcast. Is this. I mean,
it seems kind of odd, but this is actually inspired
from one of our our listeners sent in a suggestion. Now,

(04:19):
his suggestion was about a very specific thing that we're
going to address in a future episode, but in general
it had to do with this concept of cleaning and cleanliness,
and we kind of got into this this discussion about
you know, what, what is the future of this, What
is is there such a thing as too clean? Is?
In what realms? Is this super hyper cleanliness necessary? And

(04:45):
are there anywhere it's something that would be a problem
because again, in these different versions of the future, we
have the ones where cleanliness is an example of an
idyllic society and others where cleanliness is an example of
some sort of uh dystopia. And of course, in order
to discuss that, we we really need to look at
at how the technology of cleanliness has developed over the

(05:08):
past century or so, because because it is very much
a technology or a series of technology. Sure, yeah, yeah,
we should. Actually, I'd say we should go back a
few centuries um to to the idea of say, germ theory. Yeah,
we can go back even further before we understood what
germ theory was in fact, because there were some observations

(05:28):
that led to the formulation of germ theory. Right, yeah,
let's talk about Igney simil Wise. Similwise, Yeah, a pioneer
in antiseptics. So some of ice had a friend named
Jacob or Jacob if you prefer the Anglo cutonized version,
but ja Cob. He was a doctor who had performed
an autopsy and in the process of performing this, accidentally

(05:52):
cut himself and then subsequently came down with a terrible
fever and died. And simil Wis was obviously distressed by
this because he also, being a physician, was very much
upset that his fellow physician passed away and passed away
from an illness, and he also was observing something unusual

(06:15):
to him. It was that in his area, women who
were giving birth who were assisted by midwives were having
more having better success with with their their babies surviving childbirth,
but the women who were giving birth being assisted by
medical students had a higher rate of infant mortality. And

(06:35):
so civil Wise decided to look into this, and you know,
it was kind of his friend's death that sort of
sparked his imagination as he looked around at what was
going on, and he determined that the medical students who
were assisting in childbirths were the same medical students who
were performing autopsies, and that perhaps they were corrupting the

(06:56):
childbirth someway was something that they were carrying from the
the dead bodies. They had no concept of germs at
this time, believe it or not, that these people didn't
necessarily know that you should wash your hands in between
handling something horrible and delivering a baby. And so he
ended up demanding that medical students follow a protocol which

(07:16):
would involve them washing their hands with a chlorinated antiseptic solution,
and then they saw mortality rates drop significantly. So it
became clear that the practice of midwives who weren't coming
into contact with dead bodies like the medical students were,
we're better than the ones that the medical students were following.
And this was a big step. I mean, it was

(07:38):
one of those things where you know, today we take
it for granted, but at the time it was revolutionary. Well,
moving on from washing your hands, just the idea of
water sanitation was something that came to people fairly late,
the idea that they needed to be really careful about
the water that they drank, and that in fact, that
could cause illness if they were careful. So a doctor

(08:02):
John Snow, who, as I put in my notes, obviously
did not know nothing for all your Game of Thrones
fans out there, found in the early nineteenth century he
was he was trying to figure out a cholera outbreak
in London, and there was a specific neighborhood in London
where there were a lot of deaths due to cholera,
and he was starting to really look into what was

(08:23):
causing it and He took a very kind of forensic
approach to this. In fact, made a map and plotted
out where people were, and he figured out that there
was this one water pump that was somehow contaminated with
cholera UH. And at the time, this was a a
big departure from the common belief, which was that cholera

(08:43):
was spread through some form of noxious gas that escaped
from the sewers, that it wasn't something that they were ingesting.
So anyway, doctor Snow was able to convince the city
government to shut down a particular water pump in this region.
He had determined that this one water pump was somehow contaminated,
and so they removed the handle. Thus you could not

(09:04):
pump water this water pump um and as a result,
the cholera outbreak started to disappear. People stopped UH coming
down with cholera, and part of that was also because
there was a general um decrease in population in that region,
not just from the depths, which obviously that would decrease it,
but people were fleeing because they were worried that this

(09:27):
was somehow a tainted area and they would catch cholera
if they stayed around. But even taking that out of consideration,
they saw a significant drop and that is kind of
what led them to the conclusion that water supply was really,
really important, and it was very important to have a
clean water supply to avoid illness. And it wouldn't be
until seventy when we get Louis pasteur uh sending out

(09:51):
this idea of the germ theory of illness, that illness
can be caused by micro organisms that are too small
to see with the naked eye. But that is what
truly revolutionized medicine because now people knew the reason why
you had to go through this process of sterilizing everything
was because things you cannot see could in fact kill you. Yeah,

(10:13):
and apparently somebody named Joseph Lister read old Louis Pastewart.
Joseph Lister promoted antiseptic surgery in the late nineteenth century,
and he experimented with anti microbial chemicals, so he would
sterilize surgical instruments, wound sites, and operating theaters with stuff
like carbolic acid, which was actually quite effective. Uh. Carbolic acid,

(10:36):
though also known as finn all, is highly toxic. It's
not so much used anymore now we've got other stuff
we use. Yes. And also the antiseptic listerine is named
after him, not not invented, yes, not invented by him,
named in honor of Dr Okay. Yeah. So now antiseptic
surgery and hospital facilities are basically the norm, or at

(10:58):
least through what we're striving for, whether or not it's
actually achieved. Um. And as a result of all this work,
the medical field sort of put in place standard procedures
for how to keep operating rooms clean, how to keep
hospital rooms clean, what you should do to your instruments.
All right, so we understand that it's important to to

(11:22):
be very clean and medical procedures. Now we understand that
it's important to to sterilize equipment, to wash your hands.
What are the ways right now that medicine, Uh, what
are the procedures that medicine follows too to ensure this? Okay?
So currently there are a bunch of methods of sterilization
of things. So if you're cleaning off like a a

(11:45):
site on a person's body, you might rub them with
alcohol or with an iodine solution. Um. If you're sterilizing instruments,
one of the most common things you would use is steam. Actually,
steam is super great. In fact, it's probably like the
best thing to use, uh superheated steam, hot moisture in
an autoclave. So this will like locked steamer box too.

(12:08):
It'll get things clean, it'll penetrate fabrics, it'll it'll really
cut through and kill pretty much everything, kill or incapacitate.
This is also also why you want to make sure
if you're ever getting a tattoo or your ears pierced
or something else, pierce that the the establishment has not
a clave that they used to clean their instruments and

(12:29):
that they use, you know, one time use instruments for
things that are disposable and all that kind of stuff. Yeah,
there are also instruments that are not tolerant of heat
or maybe not tolerant of water, and in those cases
there are chemicals that you can use. You can use
say ethylene oxide, parasitic acid, or hydrogen peroxide gas plasma.

(12:50):
Those are three things I read about there basically in
use today or at least being tested. So these methods
that you're talking about killing off germs, I've slee it's
solved all the problems. Right, So now we're we've got
these perfectly safe medical theaters where there's no worry whatsoever
of contamination, infection, Nope, what nope? Okay, So hospitals are

(13:16):
obviously a lot better than they used to be, you know,
before Joseph Lister, I think it was probably just pretty common.
You go get an operation done and then oh you
have word fever. I don't know what caused this, but
now you're dead. Yeah. American Horror Story Season two really
taught me a lot about the various hospital conditions of
the past. Yeah. And they were just they were using

(13:36):
unclean instruments, you know, it was just it's gross. Uh.
Now we're doing a lot better job. But still we
have not gotten rid of hospital associated infections. That's what
they're called now, h Ayes. Uh. They did not disappear
after the revolution and antiseptic medical care. In fact, I
found a CDC source from two thousand two that estimate

(14:00):
did the number of hospital associated infections in US hospitals.
So this is just in the US, and basically it
came to the conclusion that were there were one point
seven million hospital associated infections. Uh. Part of the problem
that we're talking about here is one that we talked
about in our antibiotics episode, which is that in in

(14:23):
in hospitals, sometimes through the use of of drugs that
are drugs or other methods that are meant to kill
off bacteria, some of the bacterias survive and become more
hardy and difficult to kill. And that therefore hospitals can
sometimes contain strains of superbugs that that get passed around
and are difficult to get out. Yeah, because then the

(14:44):
drugs you would use to to take care of such
a UH infection are no longer effective because they've built
up a resilience to that drug, right, right, And I mean,
you know, and certainly things are a lot better than
they used to be. Like we've said, I always think
of that moment in an Undiscovered Country, which which I'm
sorry is is a terrible reference to make in a
science fiction show. But when Bones, you know, is here

(15:05):
in the twentieth century UH medical center and he's just
horrified by everything, He's like, you savages, what are you doing? Technically,
that's Star Trek for Voyage Home when they go to
rescue Chekhov who's passed out. But did I say the
wrong thing? I totally say the wrong thing. I did
say Undiscovered Country, which is more about cling on, cling

(15:26):
on medical care, which is also complicated because they have
two hearts. It's very warm in here. It is very
warm in here. Well, I wanted to talk about one
interesting other way I found of disinfecting in hospital facilities,
which is using rays. Oh yes, I've seen this sort
of stuff where you get like the little UV chamber

(15:47):
that can dal's say a device or instrument or even
like your toothbrush with uvs. Well, I'll do you one better. Yeah, yeah,
what if you need to disinfect an entire room. Well,
so you could wipe down all the surfaces with alcoho
hall or with some kind of antiseptic solution, But that
doesn't always work, and also that is time consuming and
people don't always get all the surfaces they need to.

(16:10):
There is, in fact, a disinfecting robot I read about.
This is manufactured by a company called zen X, and
it's a little R two D two buddy and you
just wheel him on into a room and you shut
the door behind you, and it uses a pulse zen
on UV light that zaps micro organisms and it will

(16:31):
basically kill them. It disrupts microbial life at the cellular level,
so different UV frequencies can damage RNA DNA cell walls,
internal cellular structures, and it can do a whole room
in about fifteen minutes. You put it in like three
different positions for five minutes apiece with the door closed
because you don't want to be in there staring at

(16:52):
it with it destroying your eyes. And ultra violet light
can have a nasty effect on on us, especially if
we have prolonged exposure. Yeah, it actually makes use of
uv C light, which is the kind of UV light
that is usually blocked by our atmosphere when it's sent
in by the sun. And supposedly this thing is pretty
durn good. I like to imagine that when this thing

(17:14):
is is active. Even though ultra violet lights outside the
visible spectrum, we can't see it, right, but I'd like
to imagine when it's active, if you were outside the hospital,
you just see these crazy disco flashing lights coming out
the window and you hear the the Moss Eisley Cantina
song playing. But maybe that's just me. But hey, I
want to talk about something else about the future of cleanliness,

(17:34):
which is that it doesn't just matter for hospitals because
the more we get down into miniaturization, whether it's in
the medical field, or in industry, electronics research, whatever it is,
having contamination can really cause problems, absolutely so in the

(17:55):
manufacturing process for electronics, when you're trying to create semiconductors,
when you're creating micro processor chips, you're talking about working
with components that are on the nanoscale. So it's not
unusual now to have a computer with a microprocessor where
the trans the transistors, the individual components on it may
measure forty five nanometers across or even less. That's super tiny, right,

(18:19):
I mean these this is the a scale at which
quantum effects start to take take hold, so it doesn't
necessarily behave the same way we it would on the
classic macro scale, which basically means that if you've got
I mean, we're not talking about germs. Most of the
electronics that I know about at any rate will not
get an infection from a germ like that. But tiny

(18:41):
specks of dust could very much screw your Yeah, you could.
You could have an entire die of semiconductor material ruined
if there are dust particles inside the room. You want
to control for that as much as possible. So as
we get to this point where the precision is really important.
Something like a dust particle could comple completely dwarfed the
components on a chip, and if it were to fall

(19:03):
in place, it would ruin it. And of course, you
know that's money, right, You're you're spending money to make
this stuff, and everyone you everyone that's ruined you cannot sell,
so you lose money on the deal. Yeah, I mean
on those scales, having a piece of dust in your
semiconductor or or whatever it might be at the nano
scale would basically be like having a rock in an

(19:24):
engine block. Yeah, it's throwing a monkey causing major problems.
But how the heck do you rule out a tiny,
tiny particles micron. There are a couple of different things
you gotta do. Well. One, you've got to construct a
room that is sealed so that you can seal it
off from the rest of the building so that you're

(19:45):
not getting air drafts pulling in more dust particles from
somewhere else. It's like having an airlock system. Really. Secondly,
you have to have an air filtration system that can
recycle the air in that room and filter it out
very efficiently. So we're talking like replacing all the air
in that room regularly through this filtration system, and most

(20:06):
of these clean rooms that you know, that's what they're
called in the industry where these microprocessor manufacturing machines exist,
are able to do that frequently, like several times an hour. Essentially,
as you're you're putting all the air through this filtration
system over and over again to remove any particulates that
happened to be floating through it. So you end up
with like an incredibly pure air or atmosphere within. They're

(20:31):
not like pure oxygen, but as in there there's no
particulate matter flowing around. And on top of that, you
make everyone played dress up. Yeah, I'd imagine you don't
just walk in from the parking lot. No, No, I
mean obviously, like you know, anything on you anything like
in your skin, particles, your hair, any dust that's on
you with in my in my case to yeah and

(20:55):
in my case to now congratulations. So anyway, which would
mean you would be uh, I'm not making any nanotechnology. Now,
you would not be allowed inside the clean room in
that state. So what you have to do is you
have to put on a special kind of suit. They
kind of look like hazmat suits. They're called bunny suits.
In the industry, that's really what they're called. But it's

(21:17):
something that covers you from head to toe so that
you can enter the room and not contribute any sort
of particulate matter that would otherwise corrupt the system as
it's being as it's as it's going through this stuff. Now,
most of the time these manufacturing processes, I mean, they're
they're automated. Obviously, when you're talking about creating stuff on
the nano scale, you don't have someone in there doing

(21:37):
it by hand. That would be impossible. But you know,
you do occasionally have to put humans into the system
to do various things. So imagine especially if you're doing research. Yeah. Yeah,
so it's one of those things where whenever a person
does have to go in, they have to you know,
get suited up and everything, make sure that they're not
going to corrupt it. So yeah, and it turns out

(21:58):
it's not just in electron x that this is important.
There's a lot of different industrial um processes that require
precision and cleanliness together, and in fact, the more precise
you get, the more important that cleanliness is because if
it's a really super tiny mechanism, those parts have to
fit together exactly, and even just a little bit of

(22:19):
grease or oil could make it so they don't set properly.
So what do you do? I mean, as it turns out,
if you make especially tiny little metal pieces components, often
grease or oil is part of that process. How do
you clean something so tiny that you can't just you know,
take a brush and brush it off, or take a

(22:41):
cloth and wipe it off, because it's far too small
for that. What would be your next best approach? I
have no idea. Some kind of gas exactly a gas,
or at least you start with a gas, but you
compress it and lower the temperature down so that you
convert it into a solid, specifically carbon dioxide. According to
Science Daily, there's one company it's been looking at carbon

(23:01):
dioxide and actually using it to cool it down into
what they call snow crystals, and they blast the various components.
Let's say that it's a clock mechanism that has really
super tiny components in it, and you want to get
all the grease and oil off of those parts before
you assemble it. They would blast it with this these
little snow particles which are enough to knock off. It

(23:24):
absorbs all the oil. It absorbs grease. It can knock
off dust without damaging the components themselves. That obviously is
very important. You can't just sand blast these things because
you don't want to damage them. Plus stand everywhere, so
they This is used to shake loose any particles and
to absorb oil and grease. And because it's solid carbon dioxide,

(23:45):
it's it almost instantly converts right back into gas. It
goes straight from solid to gas, which, if you remember
the great movie Real Genius, is totally awesome and you
can make something do that. It's like an evaporating sham Wow. Yes,
yes it is is a sham well that that disappears
in front of your very eyes. But no, it's a

(24:06):
it's a really cool solution literally, But it's a really
cool solution because it allows you to clean off these
little components convert over to gas, so you don't have
to worry about any kind of damage due to moisture.
You know, it's not going to get any of the
components wet. It just goes straight from solid to gas um.
So it's it's really a neat and innovative approach to

(24:29):
cleaning these tiny little components. Yeah, I can imagine how
clean rooms and clean industrial and research facilities are going
to become even more important and widespread once nanotechnology becomes
a more widespread field. Absolutely, yeah, because any anything could
could contaminate the sample. Also, I imagine that this would
have some kind of crossover back to the medical field.

(24:51):
I mean, any time that you've got got methods of
of purifying a situation, an environment, or a piece of equipment,
that's that's a good thing, right, Okay, So our need
to have things clean and a lot of various settings
is getting more pronounced, and we're keeping up. Basically, we're
getting better technologies to keep things clean on a smaller

(25:11):
and smaller scale. But should be should we be worried
that we're getting too clean? Because I remember back maybe
ten fifteen years ago, there were a whole bunch of
magazine articles that had headlines like, you know, is your
house too clean for your kids? Are you making your
kids sick with all of your cleanliness? It was that

(25:32):
sort of like mom bating attack kind of headline that
you still see, the kind of thing. But there was
a lot of stuff about this, and I at the
time I didn't really look into it because I was
too young to care. But yeah, yeah, it's called the
hygiene hypothesis and um and and it's based around this

(25:52):
concept that that getting things too clean has messed with
our immune systems. And and this has to do with allergies,
because allergy there are really just immune system responses to
what's otherwise harmless stuff, you know, certain foods, or pollen
or mold, animal saliva, which by the way, it's a
saliva usually not the dander itself in general, like if

(26:12):
a cat. If a cat like soon you're allergic to cats,
you might end up with a nasty little rash exactly
where the cat licked you. I, in fact get that
all the time. It's great um. But but at any rate,
what happens here is that your immune system attacks the
allergen in your blood by producing an antibody that the
allergen binds to. But the antibody is also attached to
this particular kind of blood cell called a called a

(26:35):
mast cell. And when all three of these things link up,
the mass cell is triggered to produce chemicals, including histamine,
which causes the symptoms of an allergic reaction. So essentially,
what we're saying here is that your immune system no
longer has to do the work it would have had
to do if you were surrounded by germs all the time.
So like the fact that we have managed to reduce

(26:57):
some of the micro organisms around us particular, really, if
we're in a a hyper clean home, that this this
hyper clean realm means that since our immune system doesn't
has to work against micro organisms, it gets bored and
starts a fight club. Yeah, that's I mean essentially, or furthermore,
that your immune system won't be primed, it won't be

(27:18):
strong enough to deal with with microbes when they do
come around, and that therefore they won't be able to
kill those off efficiently. Right, And uh, it's interesting in
our notes here, the tendency toward having allergies is genetic,
but specific allergies are not inherited. This explains why my
parents are able to eat lobster to their hearts content.
And I am not Oh, you're allergic to lobster, deadly

(27:40):
allergic to lobster. I'm allergic to red lobster. I am amused, Joe,
But I am, in fact, I am seriously severely allergic
to lobster. Like if I eat lobster within an hour,
I'm having some really nasty symptoms, you turn into Kirby.
I kind of I did. I definitely get pink and
puffy and then I stopped breathing. So that's a problem. Yeah,

(28:03):
that's that's bad. I once wore a lobster costume for
I mean, completely legitimate editorial work purposes. I can tell
you the story about that one later, um and what
it was. Sort of itchy. I once broke out in
a rash of to be fifty two concert there at
any rate. So do you guys, do either of you
have any severe allergies? Not really, My wife has really

(28:26):
bad allergies. Yeah. I don't have any anaphylactic allergies, um,
but I do have some like seasonal pollen related kind
of things and cats cat dan. The only the only
two anaphylactic ones I have are lobster and alcohol. So
Al's lobster and liquor shack is way off. I can't.
But you can eat as many oak tags as you want. Yes, okay,

(28:49):
but but so an interesting thing that that research has
been done about by the National Institutes of Health No
less UM is that more people are experienced allergies recently
than they were in the past. UM. One particular report
said that over Americans surveyed from from said that they

(29:11):
were sensitive to at least one allergen um, which is
two to five times the rate from a survey conducted
in nineteen seventy six to night Right. So, one of
the suggestions for what is contributing to this uh perceived
increase in allergies is that the hygienic practices that we
have put into place may in fact be putting things

(29:33):
out of whack, right, right, that these that that hygiene
hypothesis that um that sterile environments actually lead to more illness.
And this isn't just in the antibacterial way, which again
we talked about in that previous episode, UM, where we're
not just creating superbugs. It's that our immune systems are
basically bored or underdeveloped. Right. So the thing is that

(29:54):
this is not this is not a hypothesis that has
gone unchallenged. There are are plenty of arguments against it,
or at least saying that the cleanliness of our environment
maybe a factor, but it's probably not the major factor. Well,
I would just like to point out that our homes
are not sterile. I mean they might be might be

(30:16):
cleaner than they were a hundred years ago, but they're not.
But the perception based upon that mom bate, you know,
fearmongering we talked about earlier was that if you don't
have a clean home, your kid will get sick, and
then it was if you have to clean a home,
you're making your kids get allergies. Oh well, well, part

(30:36):
part of this whole theory is that there's a lot
of good germs, um, microbiole flora and fauna that evolved
in tandem with us and and that are not pathogenic,
are not going to hurt us, and that those are
also being killed off in addition to the bad bugs
that we're trying to get rid of with all of
the lisol and vacuuming and uh, I don't know what
else really growing everything in Yeah yeah, yeah, mr um

(31:05):
And and there is a lot of actual research involved.
This hypothesis was proposed back in nine nine and uh
and and since then there have been a bunch of
reports that that seemed to indicate that it that it's
a thing, that it's a that it's a legit thing. Um.
One study found that that kids exposed to farm animals
were half as likely to develop Cron's disease, which is

(31:27):
an autoimmune disorder, or another one found that infants living
in a home with two or more dogs and cats
were less likely to develop allergies than their peers. Anecdotally,
I grew up with many dogs and cats and alcohol
and lobster will still kill me. But that's anecdotal, and
obviously in a scientific study that has no bearing whatsoever. Well, no,

(31:49):
but but it is you do kind of raise an
important point. There are many, many, many facets to this issue,
and anything health related is going to be extremely complex,
So you know, there's there's also indications that that any
number of factors from malnutrition to lack of exercise to
pollution could be creating these these more allergenic populations. Right,
so it may be allergic populations. Allergenic as a whole

(32:11):
separate word. Boy, there are a few people here that
I consider to be allergenic. Uh At any rate, The
interesting thing here is that you know, it's it's one
of those like I said, it could be, it could
be a factor, but most people, I think agree that
it's not a major contributing factor. And also it's way

(32:32):
more important to be to practice good hygiene and cut
down on access to things like, you know, bacteria that
could hurt you, rather than to invite it in and say,
let's let's go ahead and invite all the germs and
dirt and everything into our world and make ourselves sick
and we'll deal with it. Then. Well, I think that
there's a happy medium between going out and eating dirt

(32:56):
on purpose all the time and and cleaning every thing
within an inch of its of its non life, you know.
I think that there has to be something in between there. However,
I do want to put in that one of the
topics that comes up a lot when people talk about
the hygiene hypothesis is vaccination, and and there's some amount
of rumor that that vaccination is part of the hygiene

(33:18):
problem here. But but really exposing your immune system to
more stuff and thus making it stronger is good. Yes,
vaccinations are very important. I mean, obviously, uh, we feel
very strongly about it. But vaccinations they promote herd immunity,
which is incredibly important if you want to prevent things

(33:40):
like pandemics breaking out that otherwise could severely damage a population. Yes,
there's absolutely no research that indicates that, um that vaccinating
is leading to some kind of immune disorder in anybody.
So bottom line is, guys, go out there and get vaccsnated,
you know, I mean, it's seriously I mean, there was

(34:03):
a story recently about someone who went to Asia, came
back to San Francisco had measles rode the public transportation system,
potentially exposing as many as four thousand people just in
that time span alone, two measles. California, by the way,
very low rate of vaccination, so that was like the
recipe for a possible pandemic to break out. So it's

(34:27):
really important stuff. And it's not just so that you
don't get sick. It's also so that the people around
you don't get sick. And the more people who participate,
the better off we are, you know. Just it's it's
just simple science. Yes, but this is all very slightly
off topic. So yeah, let's clean this up, all right, guys.
Here here's the bottom line. We've gotten really good at

(34:49):
creating very clean environments for very specific uh applications. We're
still trying to get better, especially when it comes to healthcare,
so that we can make sure that uh, we don't
end up spreading disease while we're trying to heal others.
And really there's not such a thing as being too clean,
particularly around your house. I mean, it's not like you're

(35:10):
going to create an allergen problem using household cleaners and
that sort of stuff. Although you know, don't don't worry
about it too much. I think it's probably the moral
of the story, like, you don't You don't need to
be hyper village exactly. You don't need to. You don't
need to be scrubbing the floor all the way into

(35:30):
the wee hours of the morning every day. But at
the same time, don't worry that by cleaning up a
spill and using some cleaner that you're going to cause
our you know, your kid to develop allergies. That way,
don't like the floor on purpose, but don't worry if
you happen to. Okay, wise words for us all, So
let's wrap this up. Guys, if you have any suggestions
for future topics about the future, then you should let

(35:54):
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