Elevator buttons: dirtier than a toilet seat. Photo © Dan Taylor, via creative commons and flickr

Nature Boy recently scaled back using his hands.

He stopped coughing and sneezing into them during the SARS outbreak in 2002. He now spews his sputum and microbes into the insides of his elbows. This prevents him from spreading his viruses to everything and everyone he touches.

It’s all part of his civic/civilized duty, he says.

Then he cut back on direct contact with certain fixtures in public and semi-public spaces—toilet-flush levers, washroom and drink-fountain taps, and telephones that he hasn’t personally sanitized.

Too much television prompted the escalation of Nature Boy’s no-hands policy. According to MythBusters, the popular Hollywood-effects show where the hosts shoot and blow up things—all in the name of proving or debunking common wisdom, each square centimetre on an office telephone can harbour more than 10,000 microbes, while a square centimetre on a public water fountains can hold as many as one million bacteria.

By limiting direct contact with those fixtures, Nature Boy limits the microbes he picks up from those surfaces. He instead enlists go-between materials, such as tissue for the washroom fixtures, or pencil or pens to call out from telephones. As for holding telephones—“I prefer the speaker function,” he says, waving the eraser end of a pencil at me.

This squeamishness is entirely out of character for Nature Boy. He does, after all, spend his time handling dog-poo-eating banana slugs, being peed on by turtles, and swamping around for bullfrogs. He also knows there’s more to him than himself—his body contains many more bacteria than human cells.

Nonetheless.

He recently added elevator buttons to the no-touch list….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

 

Cockroach brains may provide the next super-antibiotic. Photo © Sigurd Tao Lyngse (Malakith, flickr)

Cockroach brains may provide the next super-antibiotic. Photo © Sigurd Tao Lyngse (Malakith, flickr)

“Don’t do it,” I advise Nature Boy every time we travel in less-fortunate foreign parts. “If you eat that, you’ll get sick.” I remind him of what happened in (fill in the blank with any south Asian or Latin American country we’ve visited). “They had as many cockroaches running about as they do here.”

“But those vegetables look so good.”

Nature Boy usually risks it.

Then we spend days bound by his bowels to our rooms, or until his antibiotics nail the sick-making critters he ingests.

Somehow, he doesn’t learn.

He has, however, learned to bring a full course of antibiotics with him when he travels. The drugs limit his quality-illness toilet time, and permit him to learn all over again not to eat leafy greens or other suspect food when visiting countries with lower levels of sanitation.

Just one century ago, common illnesses like the food poisoning or typhus Nature Boy insists on courting frequently killed. Other diseases, such as whooping cough, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis, also often carried death sentences….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist….