December 12, 2013 • 19 mins
Fist Bumps vs. Bacteria: Can a simple fist bump help us out in a war against antibiotic-resistant bacteria? And what strange corners of the Earth might provide us the artillery we need to fight these deadly enemies? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Image credit: Cultura Science/Joseph Giacomin/Getty
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your
my My My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
Would do what your preferred method of greeting, Uh, just
a big bear hug, you know, the twenty second hug,
(00:23):
counting it down slowly and maxuriously right into the person's ear.
Let's see, that's that's a very personal mode of of greeting.
You know. Some people prefer the handshake, which I was
I was reading just a few minutes ago about how
there's this theory that the handshake evolves from a day
when you had to prove that you didn't have a
weapon in your hand. It seems a little outdated and
(00:44):
it's wrought with complications anyway, hand pressure, hand, a texture
of your hand, all that. Um Me, I'm getting more
and more on this fist bump badwagon. Oh yeah, yeah,
I know, there's it has this kind of like a
brow stigma apparently, which I was knowing not I'm aware of,
but I mean, you have limited contact with the other person,
(01:05):
which is especially great with like if I'm interacting with
my sister, who's even more standoffice than I am. It's
like the only way that we can like physically acknowledge
each other because like hugs are out, handshakes are out,
but the fist bump works and that's like only like
the corner knuckles, right, Like you guys don't even do
four knuckles. No, no, no, you can just I mean,
you know what way you can almost kind of have
like a you know, just a slightest touch and it
(01:28):
does the job. Grazing, grazing, a grazing, close fisted high five.
Is it sometimes called? Okay? Well, this may be a
really good microbial strategy because, as we know from other
podcasts and according to Stanford microbiologists Stanley Falcow, the world
is covered in a fine patina of feces. Yes, And
(01:50):
I think about this every time that I get to
this particular restaurant and there's a bowl of candy there,
and my daughter always reaches for it, and I always
kind of corral her away from it, because I think, no,
the batilla of pieces is covering at least a couple
of pieces of those candy, and if she ingests that,
surely the next day will be seeing diarrhea. Well yeah,
I mean it's it's I think a certain level of
(02:12):
fear regarding the bacterial world around us is is sensible. Uh,
And that's why you know, you get into this area
of the fist pone, this concern over the fist pond
being possibly a better means of greeting ban that fully
bear hug. Yeah, because think about it right now, you're
marinating in about a hundred truly in microbial cells from
head to foot and mouth gut on your skin. That
(02:33):
stuff gets around, and as we had discussed in our
roller Derby microbiome, when you come into contact with people,
it's very easy to transfer your microbial colony to another person.
In fact, we saw that with those roller Derby teams
that after matches they would swab the skin and find
that one team's microbiotic which was the same by the way,
(02:54):
because they shared a similar profile of microbiome, would begin
to try to colonize the other ones. So you really
do have to be defensive about the microbes in the world. Yeah,
they're good microbes out there, they're bad microbes out there,
But this is the community move you've built, and we're
understandably a little xenophobic about other people's microbial communities merging
with our own, because it can lead to all sorts
of complications. Well, especially when you begin to wonder whether
(03:18):
or not we're entering into a post antibiotic era. Yes,
because for the longest you've had your antibiterial soap, like
you know, big vats of it, big clear just columns
of it with a giant pump on top. Right, and
and and I've been guilty of this as well. At
the slightest excuse, be it dirt or you just you
just think of something a little dirty, You head over there,
(03:40):
get like two squirts of the pump and just completely
lathered down your hands, and you feel better and supposedly
you're you're cleaner well. And then of course you see
this in a hospital setting at large, right, because you
have to make sure that your surfaces are clean, that
your skin is clean. And by the way, there's a
lot of microbes in hospitals and they become antibacterial resistant,
(04:03):
which is where we are today. But let me before
we jump to that, I just wanted to mentioned that
Hazel Barton, she's a professor of microbiology and geology at
the University of Ankron in Ohio. She has a really
good article on Slate about this, and she talks about antibiotics,
and she says their chemical keys. They're constructed to mimic
seingular patterns to block, bind, and even collapse critical structures
(04:27):
within the microbial cell. They do amazing things. They're really specific.
They can kill one bacterial cell in a sea of
human cells, and she calls it a magic bullet. But
she says that they are much more complex than anti
cancer or anti viral drugs, and their complex structural nature
and high specificity make them almost impossible for chemists to
build from scratch or even synthesize, and that we rely
(04:49):
on nature to design these molecules for us, and the
majority of these antibiotics come from other microbes. So she
makes this case of saying that they have novel, unique
structures and we are at a place where we really
exploited a lot of resources here. Yeah, that's one of
the things that that can be really mind blowing about this,
(05:09):
and can be a kind of a startling and frightening revelation,
is that any any bacterial agents out there are an
exhaustible resource. What have we done. We've gone in the
natural world, like you said, we've gone underground, and we've
we've we've looked at things in the soil, all right,
what this can be used to fight a bacterial infection?
This can be used and then eventually we've we've drafted
everyone into the war against bacteria. So we have to
(05:32):
go to increasingly more exotic locations to try and find
those new keys to UH to unlock and unravel our
bacterial adversaries. That's a good way to put it, because meantime,
in the meantime, you know, the clock is ticking, and
we have all these antibacterial resistant microbes emerging. And we
see this with MERSA and that it's actually named sequentially
(05:55):
after the antibiotics. It's resistant too, and we see that
it's responsible for thousands of deaths annually. This is, of course,
methoslin resistant Stephococcus arius, right, And then you have other names,
less familiar emerging. We have carpet Penham resistant enter A
size c R E. We have van Kommassen resistant enter
a caucus v R E. And closter Ridium deficially we've
(06:17):
seen that before, we talked about it. See diff no
one on the street. So all of these things are
emerging and in the meantime, you have this exhausted potential
market forces for for new drugs. Right. In fact, Barton
makes the point that the last novel novel drug that
came to the market was discovered in and it took
nearly twenty years to enter the marketplace as something called
(06:39):
cubasin and then which we discovered on the side of
a volcano. I know, it's not that amazing. That was
another one we had to go where we've drafted everyone
in the immediate vicinity, where are these soldiers that we
haven't found yet? And that was one. Yeah. Another one
was anthrosamysin, which could be effective against MERSA and anthrax,
and that was actually found in deep ocean sediments. So
(07:00):
you can see again that clock ticking and you know,
trying to find new drugs to conquer this while the
more other microbes are getting stronger and stronger and more
and more resistant. In fact, in March of this year,
Dame Sally Davies, she's the u K's Chief Medical offers
she said, hey, microbial antibiotic resistance is a threat that's
on par with global warming and terrorist attacks. Let's take
(07:22):
this really seriously. Yeah, because just look at Merca whereas
MERCAS showing up showing up in hospitals like the place
you don't want really dangerous anti bacterial resistant um agent
to show up because you have all the people in
weakened states or immune systems are weakened. And uh, in
two thousand five, almost ten percent of hospital door handles
were shown to contain MERCA. So and and that's not
(07:45):
even getting into the whole handwashing situation that has been
a problem in many hospitals, you know, but the whole
situation with doctors surgeons not washing their hands um, which
is again a whole another issue. But but we'll get
to that. We'll get to that, of course. Uh. In
the meantime, just kind of have to look and see
what we can do right now. Now, Barton says, Hey,
(08:05):
since we have to go to these more remote locations,
let's begin to consider caves as a possible area of
exploration for these microbes, because she says, they're extreme environments,
they lack sunlight, they have scant resources, and it makes
an ideal place to hunt for antibiots since microbes have
(08:25):
to be particularly hardy in order to survive. Yeah, I'd
like to use the drafting analogy this is the equalency
of of just heading out into the absolute boondocks and
finding like the Family of Hillbillies and saying, hey, here's
some able a whole bunch of able bodied boys here
work in the farm. You guys can come and fight
the fight, but you have to really go far. And
like like you said, this is we're almos talking about
(08:47):
an alien environment, just one that's kind of entombed within
our own. We you see really exotic forms of life
at the visible level and then also at the macrobile
level as well. Yeah, and what I love about this
is that you can just amount and all these microbiologists
bull lunking into these caves and coming up with these samples,
and they're screening the genetic code of thousands of these
micro organisms for novelty. Again, that's that novel compound that
(09:10):
they're looking for. And then what they do is they
take that and they give it to analytical chemists and
they use technologies like liquid chromatography mass spectromedy and ion
mobility mass spectromeddy and that hones in on that novel
and unusual compounds. So we have the means of finding it,
and we have the technology. It's just again racing against
(09:32):
that clock. Yeah, and the possibility is really encouraging. Uh.
It's reading that just one bacterium from one of these
isolated cave systems could be found to have some upwards
like thirty eight antibacterial compounds within. So so the payoff
is pretty crazy, the payoff potentially. Yeah. All right, we're
gonna take a quick break and we come back more
(09:53):
about the war against the bacteria and we'll get back
to the fist punk a little bit. Yeah. Alright, so
we're back and we are talking about this microbial world
that we dwell in and how to better negotiate our
(10:14):
way through it, especially when you consider the antibacterial resistance
stuff out there. So what do we do we change
our behavior? Right? Yeah, yeah, I mean if you can't,
if you can't make the big advances against the enemy,
you try accumulate all the small advances you can make.
I mean that's how wars are one anyway, right, just
you build up all the little petty advantages. And one
(10:34):
petty advantage. Uh. The argument is to be made is
to start relying more on that fis bump as opposed
to that handshake, especially in a hospital environment. That's what
you're saying, is I need to ease off of the
hot breath hugs. Yeah, and do something that's perhaps not
quite as skin to skin contact. Fine, right, well, now
(10:54):
the studying question. Didn't we look at the hugs because again,
the hospital environment where generally people knowing off that you know,
you're not gonna have a big, giant, you know, stereotypical
Russian hug every time you encounter somebody. But this particular
research was publishing two thales and thirteen by the Journal
of Hospital Infection. Surgeons at West Virginia University, UH decided
they were going to see if they could reduce the
(11:15):
spread of infection just by fist bumping instead of shaking hands.
The lead researcher on this was Tom of Cleveland, and
he's a West Virginia plastic surgeon, and uh it was
a really a small statement, but remarkable in their findings. Yeah,
and we'll get to that in a second. But let's
back up and look at why this is important. First
of all, even if your doctor is washing his or
(11:35):
her hands, or you run and wash your hands soon
after you clasp hands with another person, eighty percent of
individuals retained some disease causing bacteria after washing. Okay, most
people are doing it wrong, right. I mean, that's the
whole adage that when you wash your hands you should
do the ABC song twice through, and most people don't
do that. I mean most of the time when I
(11:56):
go to the bathroom, I don't even hear anybody singing. Now,
physicians are probably a little better about this, right, because
they're more aware of it. Um. But here's the thing.
They kind of have to have some sort of interaction
with you, physicians, right, because if you think about it,
if you are going to see a medical professional, you're
probably there in what is usually a tense situation or
(12:16):
stressful situation. You don't usually go to the doctor when
you're feeling great, right, So this can be a situation
where you have to have that that sort of touchy
feeling moment to create a sense of trust between the
doctor and the patient. So this is why the doctor
always engages you in a handshake. Right. Might seem sort
(12:36):
of ridiculous because this is what I think every time
my doctor reaches out of her hand, like please, don't
I know if you've been doing this to people all
day long who are sick. But again, it is that
social contract. So yeah, you want your surgeon, your doctor, whoever.
You want some sort of human connection so that you
don't feel like a piece of meat, you don't feel
like a number. You want them to. You want to
at least there to be an illusion that they care
(12:57):
about your life. So this is why those surgeons thought, Okay,
this is a very important thing here. This is not
just hey, let's sit around and fist bump each other
and and just grow out all day. Let's actually see
if we can reduce the amount of junk that gets
spread around. And this is how it went down. So
small group again, they just started doing the fist bumps
(13:20):
instead of the shaking. Now they cultured the bacteria grown
on their hands, and they found that the handshake exposed
more than three times as much skin surface area as
the fist bump, and the contact average two point two
point seven times longer, so more bacteria was transmitted as
expected with the handshake versus the fist pump, where you
have just you know, very small amount of skin. I mean,
(13:41):
they're not even if you if you take your your
fists and sort of bump them, you'll see that they're
they're they're not made to interlock. It's not like the handshake,
which is kind of like the mating of two fleshy squids.
Fleshy squid slushy squids of course, not too squid of
the same species, the two different species squid. That's why
I want squids. Well, I like this because I'm not
a big handshake person anyway, Like I said, I'd rather
(14:02):
hug um. And I do find it awkward sometimes because
you know, you don't know whether or not to employ
the super aggressive shake or the you don't want to
do like a limp fish shake either. You also, you
can have different galvanic skin responses, right, so there's more
sweat on your hands sometimes than others. It can be
uh odd, especially when you find yourself with with cold
(14:23):
dead hands like me, and you have to apologize every
time you go to shake someone's hand. Well, one thing
they pointed out in the study too, is that the
social contract of it is beautiful because all right, so
let's say you're you're on a no shaking hands roll,
like that's your goal for the day. Then what do
you do when somebody extends to hand If you say, oh,
I'm sorry, I can't shake hands today, or I'm not
(14:44):
gonna you know, how do you politely get out of that.
You're gonna on some level feel or or look like
a jerk that you're gonna be dead in the water
if you don't have some sort of response. Right, But
if they extend that hand for the shake and then
you respond by extending that hand for the fist bump wall,
all they have to do is just curl that's squid
up into a fist and bam. Now, the study did
(15:04):
not go into whether you should explode the fist at
that point, if you you should do the peace sign
and form the snail, or any of the other add
on bonuses that you may employ in your fist pump. Now,
I would say that within maybe your social group, your friends,
your family, you can do some of those variations and
and risk a little bit more surface contact, right because
(15:27):
most likely you're going to share some of your microbial
colony with them. Yes, But outside of that straight on knuckles, Yeah,
Like with my son, I do the fist pump, but
then I have it explode and drew Polver's face, So
so there's a lot of like contact that way. You know.
I have to say that before you had sent me
this study. I didn't notice that in school the fist
bump was being encouraged by by my daughter's teacher. And
(15:50):
I don't know if that was just my daughter's teacher
or what, but you know, there's a lot of hacking
going on, spreading of germs among that group. Well, that's
interesting that maybe they're encouraging him or the fist bump
in addition, of course to the Dracula elbow cough, which
I saw a parent encouraging that on the playground the
other day and I was like, yes, which is just
fun to say to a kid anyway, Yeah, Dracula up there,
(16:12):
drack up. Maybe I don't know better terminology. Alright, So
envision the future when we have a better understanding of
the microbiome and uh, the threats, the inherent threats, and
the beauties that come out of it. Right, we've talked
about that. Do we just do away altogether with any
(16:32):
sort of contact? Well, no, not. We don't want to
do away with with contact. But I mean that's why
this is beautiful. It's the it's finding and finding out
what we can lose and uh, and you know how
we can sort of meet meet people halfway not actually
see ourselves up in bubbles and refuse to to to
touch each other. But but also not just just say hey,
(16:53):
we're not hugging it out, then we're not human. You know.
I can't remember the exacts of this article that right,
but there was sort of infestation of this woman and
her family's house and I don't know if it was
lies or something, but demons, demons, it was some sort
of critter. And what happened is that they all sort
of had to stop hugging. And she said they became
(17:15):
very adept at doing this sort of smile eyes hug
and she would stare at her son and sort of
smile at him and try to hug him with her
eyes and he would do it back. And she said
it was really kind of beautiful because they just slowed down,
and of course they couldn't embrace, but they had that
sort of communication. Could an air hug like where you
(17:35):
don't actually touch for you kind of air hug the
other person kind of, It's just I don't know that's
in the realm of air guitar playing air sex. That's
the thing. A thing, all right, Well, there you have it.
It's kind of a shorty, but it's a shorty that
might save your life in some small way, and you
can feel better about fis pumping instead of instead of
(17:56):
shaking hand instead of high fiving. Uh, And then you
don't have to feel like you're doing something those those
too browish if you will. Yeah, it should go out
of the brow sphere into the mainstream, I think, yeah,
the brow sphere. Yeah, so hey, let us let us
know about this. We'd love to hear your thoughts on
the fist bump versus the handshake, versus bacteria versus hugs.
(18:18):
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including diving down into deep caves for bacterial soldiers that
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your
my My My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
Would do what your preferred method of greeting, Uh, just
a big bear hug, you know, the twenty second hug,
(00:23):
counting it down slowly and maxuriously right into the person's ear.
Let's see, that's that's a very personal mode of of greeting.
You know. Some people prefer the handshake, which I was
I was reading just a few minutes ago about how
there's this theory that the handshake evolves from a day
when you had to prove that you didn't have a
weapon in your hand. It seems a little outdated and
(00:44):
it's wrought with complications anyway, hand pressure, hand, a texture
of your hand, all that. Um Me, I'm getting more
and more on this fist bump badwagon. Oh yeah, yeah,
I know, there's it has this kind of like a
brow stigma apparently, which I was knowing not I'm aware of,
but I mean, you have limited contact with the other person,
(01:05):
which is especially great with like if I'm interacting with
my sister, who's even more standoffice than I am. It's
like the only way that we can like physically acknowledge
each other because like hugs are out, handshakes are out,
but the fist bump works and that's like only like
the corner knuckles, right, Like you guys don't even do
four knuckles. No, no, no, you can just I mean,
you know what way you can almost kind of have
like a you know, just a slightest touch and it
(01:28):
does the job. Grazing, grazing, a grazing, close fisted high five.
Is it sometimes called? Okay? Well, this may be a
really good microbial strategy because, as we know from other
podcasts and according to Stanford microbiologists Stanley Falcow, the world
is covered in a fine patina of feces. Yes, And
(01:50):
I think about this every time that I get to
this particular restaurant and there's a bowl of candy there,
and my daughter always reaches for it, and I always
kind of corral her away from it, because I think, no,
the batilla of pieces is covering at least a couple
of pieces of those candy, and if she ingests that,
surely the next day will be seeing diarrhea. Well yeah,
I mean it's it's I think a certain level of
(02:12):
fear regarding the bacterial world around us is is sensible. Uh,
And that's why you know, you get into this area
of the fist pone, this concern over the fist pond
being possibly a better means of greeting ban that fully
bear hug. Yeah, because think about it right now, you're
marinating in about a hundred truly in microbial cells from
head to foot and mouth gut on your skin. That
(02:33):
stuff gets around, and as we had discussed in our
roller Derby microbiome, when you come into contact with people,
it's very easy to transfer your microbial colony to another person.
In fact, we saw that with those roller Derby teams
that after matches they would swab the skin and find
that one team's microbiotic which was the same by the way,
(02:54):
because they shared a similar profile of microbiome, would begin
to try to colonize the other ones. So you really
do have to be defensive about the microbes in the world. Yeah,
they're good microbes out there, they're bad microbes out there,
But this is the community move you've built, and we're
understandably a little xenophobic about other people's microbial communities merging
with our own, because it can lead to all sorts
of complications. Well, especially when you begin to wonder whether
(03:18):
or not we're entering into a post antibiotic era. Yes,
because for the longest you've had your antibiterial soap, like
you know, big vats of it, big clear just columns
of it with a giant pump on top. Right, and
and and I've been guilty of this as well. At
the slightest excuse, be it dirt or you just you
just think of something a little dirty, You head over there,
(03:40):
get like two squirts of the pump and just completely
lathered down your hands, and you feel better and supposedly
you're you're cleaner well. And then of course you see
this in a hospital setting at large, right, because you
have to make sure that your surfaces are clean, that
your skin is clean. And by the way, there's a
lot of microbes in hospitals and they become antibacterial resistant,
(04:03):
which is where we are today. But let me before
we jump to that, I just wanted to mentioned that
Hazel Barton, she's a professor of microbiology and geology at
the University of Ankron in Ohio. She has a really
good article on Slate about this, and she talks about antibiotics,
and she says their chemical keys. They're constructed to mimic
seingular patterns to block, bind, and even collapse critical structures
(04:27):
within the microbial cell. They do amazing things. They're really specific.
They can kill one bacterial cell in a sea of
human cells, and she calls it a magic bullet. But
she says that they are much more complex than anti
cancer or anti viral drugs, and their complex structural nature
and high specificity make them almost impossible for chemists to
build from scratch or even synthesize, and that we rely
(04:49):
on nature to design these molecules for us, and the
majority of these antibiotics come from other microbes. So she
makes this case of saying that they have novel, unique
structures and we are at a place where we really
exploited a lot of resources here. Yeah, that's one of
the things that that can be really mind blowing about this,
(05:09):
and can be a kind of a startling and frightening revelation,
is that any any bacterial agents out there are an
exhaustible resource. What have we done. We've gone in the
natural world, like you said, we've gone underground, and we've
we've we've looked at things in the soil, all right,
what this can be used to fight a bacterial infection?
This can be used and then eventually we've we've drafted
everyone into the war against bacteria. So we have to
(05:32):
go to increasingly more exotic locations to try and find
those new keys to UH to unlock and unravel our
bacterial adversaries. That's a good way to put it, because meantime,
in the meantime, you know, the clock is ticking, and
we have all these antibacterial resistant microbes emerging. And we
see this with MERSA and that it's actually named sequentially
(05:55):
after the antibiotics. It's resistant too, and we see that
it's responsible for thousands of deaths annually. This is, of course,
methoslin resistant Stephococcus arius, right, And then you have other names,
less familiar emerging. We have carpet Penham resistant enter A
size c R E. We have van Kommassen resistant enter
a caucus v R E. And closter Ridium deficially we've
(06:17):
seen that before, we talked about it. See diff no
one on the street. So all of these things are
emerging and in the meantime, you have this exhausted potential
market forces for for new drugs. Right. In fact, Barton
makes the point that the last novel novel drug that
came to the market was discovered in and it took
nearly twenty years to enter the marketplace as something called
(06:39):
cubasin and then which we discovered on the side of
a volcano. I know, it's not that amazing. That was
another one we had to go where we've drafted everyone
in the immediate vicinity, where are these soldiers that we
haven't found yet? And that was one. Yeah. Another one
was anthrosamysin, which could be effective against MERSA and anthrax,
and that was actually found in deep ocean sediments. So
(07:00):
you can see again that clock ticking and you know,
trying to find new drugs to conquer this while the
more other microbes are getting stronger and stronger and more
and more resistant. In fact, in March of this year,
Dame Sally Davies, she's the u K's Chief Medical offers
she said, hey, microbial antibiotic resistance is a threat that's
on par with global warming and terrorist attacks. Let's take
(07:22):
this really seriously. Yeah, because just look at Merca whereas
MERCAS showing up showing up in hospitals like the place
you don't want really dangerous anti bacterial resistant um agent
to show up because you have all the people in
weakened states or immune systems are weakened. And uh, in
two thousand five, almost ten percent of hospital door handles
were shown to contain MERCA. So and and that's not
(07:45):
even getting into the whole handwashing situation that has been
a problem in many hospitals, you know, but the whole
situation with doctors surgeons not washing their hands um, which
is again a whole another issue. But but we'll get
to that. We'll get to that, of course. Uh. In
the meantime, just kind of have to look and see
what we can do right now. Now, Barton says, Hey,
(08:05):
since we have to go to these more remote locations,
let's begin to consider caves as a possible area of
exploration for these microbes, because she says, they're extreme environments,
they lack sunlight, they have scant resources, and it makes
an ideal place to hunt for antibiots since microbes have
(08:25):
to be particularly hardy in order to survive. Yeah, I'd
like to use the drafting analogy this is the equalency
of of just heading out into the absolute boondocks and
finding like the Family of Hillbillies and saying, hey, here's
some able a whole bunch of able bodied boys here
work in the farm. You guys can come and fight
the fight, but you have to really go far. And
like like you said, this is we're almos talking about
(08:47):
an alien environment, just one that's kind of entombed within
our own. We you see really exotic forms of life
at the visible level and then also at the macrobile
level as well. Yeah, and what I love about this
is that you can just amount and all these microbiologists
bull lunking into these caves and coming up with these samples,
and they're screening the genetic code of thousands of these
micro organisms for novelty. Again, that's that novel compound that
(09:10):
they're looking for. And then what they do is they
take that and they give it to analytical chemists and
they use technologies like liquid chromatography mass spectromedy and ion
mobility mass spectromeddy and that hones in on that novel
and unusual compounds. So we have the means of finding it,
and we have the technology. It's just again racing against
(09:32):
that clock. Yeah, and the possibility is really encouraging. Uh.
It's reading that just one bacterium from one of these
isolated cave systems could be found to have some upwards
like thirty eight antibacterial compounds within. So so the payoff
is pretty crazy, the payoff potentially. Yeah. All right, we're
gonna take a quick break and we come back more
(09:53):
about the war against the bacteria and we'll get back
to the fist punk a little bit. Yeah. Alright, so
we're back and we are talking about this microbial world
that we dwell in and how to better negotiate our
(10:14):
way through it, especially when you consider the antibacterial resistance
stuff out there. So what do we do we change
our behavior? Right? Yeah, yeah, I mean if you can't,
if you can't make the big advances against the enemy,
you try accumulate all the small advances you can make.
I mean that's how wars are one anyway, right, just
you build up all the little petty advantages. And one
(10:34):
petty advantage. Uh. The argument is to be made is
to start relying more on that fis bump as opposed
to that handshake, especially in a hospital environment. That's what
you're saying, is I need to ease off of the
hot breath hugs. Yeah, and do something that's perhaps not
quite as skin to skin contact. Fine, right, well, now
(10:54):
the studying question. Didn't we look at the hugs because again,
the hospital environment where generally people knowing off that you know,
you're not gonna have a big, giant, you know, stereotypical
Russian hug every time you encounter somebody. But this particular
research was publishing two thales and thirteen by the Journal
of Hospital Infection. Surgeons at West Virginia University, UH decided
they were going to see if they could reduce the
(11:15):
spread of infection just by fist bumping instead of shaking hands.
The lead researcher on this was Tom of Cleveland, and
he's a West Virginia plastic surgeon, and uh it was
a really a small statement, but remarkable in their findings. Yeah,
and we'll get to that in a second. But let's
back up and look at why this is important. First
of all, even if your doctor is washing his or
(11:35):
her hands, or you run and wash your hands soon
after you clasp hands with another person, eighty percent of
individuals retained some disease causing bacteria after washing. Okay, most
people are doing it wrong, right. I mean, that's the
whole adage that when you wash your hands you should
do the ABC song twice through, and most people don't
do that. I mean most of the time when I
(11:56):
go to the bathroom, I don't even hear anybody singing. Now,
physicians are probably a little better about this, right, because
they're more aware of it. Um. But here's the thing.
They kind of have to have some sort of interaction
with you, physicians, right, because if you think about it,
if you are going to see a medical professional, you're
probably there in what is usually a tense situation or
(12:16):
stressful situation. You don't usually go to the doctor when
you're feeling great, right, So this can be a situation
where you have to have that that sort of touchy
feeling moment to create a sense of trust between the
doctor and the patient. So this is why the doctor
always engages you in a handshake. Right. Might seem sort
(12:36):
of ridiculous because this is what I think every time
my doctor reaches out of her hand, like please, don't
I know if you've been doing this to people all
day long who are sick. But again, it is that
social contract. So yeah, you want your surgeon, your doctor, whoever.
You want some sort of human connection so that you
don't feel like a piece of meat, you don't feel
like a number. You want them to. You want to
at least there to be an illusion that they care
(12:57):
about your life. So this is why those surgeons thought, Okay,
this is a very important thing here. This is not
just hey, let's sit around and fist bump each other
and and just grow out all day. Let's actually see
if we can reduce the amount of junk that gets
spread around. And this is how it went down. So
small group again, they just started doing the fist bumps
(13:20):
instead of the shaking. Now they cultured the bacteria grown
on their hands, and they found that the handshake exposed
more than three times as much skin surface area as
the fist bump, and the contact average two point two
point seven times longer, so more bacteria was transmitted as
expected with the handshake versus the fist pump, where you
have just you know, very small amount of skin. I mean,
(13:41):
they're not even if you if you take your your
fists and sort of bump them, you'll see that they're
they're they're not made to interlock. It's not like the handshake,
which is kind of like the mating of two fleshy squids.
Fleshy squid slushy squids of course, not too squid of
the same species, the two different species squid. That's why
I want squids. Well, I like this because I'm not
a big handshake person anyway, Like I said, I'd rather
(14:02):
hug um. And I do find it awkward sometimes because
you know, you don't know whether or not to employ
the super aggressive shake or the you don't want to
do like a limp fish shake either. You also, you
can have different galvanic skin responses, right, so there's more
sweat on your hands sometimes than others. It can be
uh odd, especially when you find yourself with with cold
(14:23):
dead hands like me, and you have to apologize every
time you go to shake someone's hand. Well, one thing
they pointed out in the study too, is that the
social contract of it is beautiful because all right, so
let's say you're you're on a no shaking hands roll,
like that's your goal for the day. Then what do
you do when somebody extends to hand If you say, oh,
I'm sorry, I can't shake hands today, or I'm not
(14:44):
gonna you know, how do you politely get out of that.
You're gonna on some level feel or or look like
a jerk that you're gonna be dead in the water
if you don't have some sort of response. Right, But
if they extend that hand for the shake and then
you respond by extending that hand for the fist bump wall,
all they have to do is just curl that's squid
up into a fist and bam. Now, the study did
(15:04):
not go into whether you should explode the fist at
that point, if you you should do the peace sign
and form the snail, or any of the other add
on bonuses that you may employ in your fist pump. Now,
I would say that within maybe your social group, your friends,
your family, you can do some of those variations and
and risk a little bit more surface contact, right because
(15:27):
most likely you're going to share some of your microbial
colony with them. Yes, But outside of that straight on knuckles, Yeah,
Like with my son, I do the fist pump, but
then I have it explode and drew Polver's face, So
so there's a lot of like contact that way. You know.
I have to say that before you had sent me
this study. I didn't notice that in school the fist
bump was being encouraged by by my daughter's teacher. And
(15:50):
I don't know if that was just my daughter's teacher
or what, but you know, there's a lot of hacking
going on, spreading of germs among that group. Well, that's
interesting that maybe they're encouraging him or the fist bump
in addition, of course to the Dracula elbow cough, which
I saw a parent encouraging that on the playground the
other day and I was like, yes, which is just
fun to say to a kid anyway, Yeah, Dracula up there,
(16:12):
drack up. Maybe I don't know better terminology. Alright, So
envision the future when we have a better understanding of
the microbiome and uh, the threats, the inherent threats, and
the beauties that come out of it. Right, we've talked
about that. Do we just do away altogether with any
(16:32):
sort of contact? Well, no, not. We don't want to
do away with with contact. But I mean that's why
this is beautiful. It's the it's finding and finding out
what we can lose and uh, and you know how
we can sort of meet meet people halfway not actually
see ourselves up in bubbles and refuse to to to
touch each other. But but also not just just say hey,
(16:53):
we're not hugging it out, then we're not human. You know.
I can't remember the exacts of this article that right,
but there was sort of infestation of this woman and
her family's house and I don't know if it was
lies or something, but demons, demons, it was some sort
of critter. And what happened is that they all sort
of had to stop hugging. And she said they became
(17:15):
very adept at doing this sort of smile eyes hug
and she would stare at her son and sort of
smile at him and try to hug him with her
eyes and he would do it back. And she said
it was really kind of beautiful because they just slowed down,
and of course they couldn't embrace, but they had that
sort of communication. Could an air hug like where you
(17:35):
don't actually touch for you kind of air hug the
other person kind of, It's just I don't know that's
in the realm of air guitar playing air sex. That's
the thing. A thing, all right, Well, there you have it.
It's kind of a shorty, but it's a shorty that
might save your life in some small way, and you
can feel better about fis pumping instead of instead of
(17:56):
shaking hand instead of high fiving. Uh, And then you
don't have to feel like you're doing something those those
too browish if you will. Yeah, it should go out
of the brow sphere into the mainstream, I think, yeah,
the brow sphere. Yeah, so hey, let us let us
know about this. We'd love to hear your thoughts on
the fist bump versus the handshake, versus bacteria versus hugs.
(18:18):
Everything in this in this episode is up for grabs,
including diving down into deep caves for bacterial soldiers that
we haven't ushered into this war just yet. You can
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