You Can Sanitize Our Cold Dead Bodies

In the late 1990's it was realized that smelly goop could be sold to germophobe suburbanites.  Immediately thousands of already healthy people began spreading hand-sanitizer all over their hands and letting it dry in ambient air several times a day.  One of our worst memories of high school is remembering the same girl rubbing in the foul, acrid gel every English class, without fail.  After all, its not clinically obsessive/compulsive if everyone does it, right?

The appeal of hand sanitizers centers on fears of germs coating every surface in world, free to attack our defenseless bodies and make us sick.  With swine flu panic, suburban people are sure to apply a thin layer of Purell up to their elbows five times a day; the ritual becoming a repurposed Adhan in the name of the god better safe than sorry and directed towards the holy city of I like buying things I don't need.  This trend belies two important facts:  the vast majority of humanity has an "internal immune system" in which one's own body! resists and fights infection, and that hand sanitizers smell like the inside of a 3-week-old rancid condom and annoy everyone around.

While the second point is self-evident, the first deserves some discussion.  Humans evolved from times in which hand sanitizer did not exist, yet managed to survive into this decade by possessing the ability to not get sick.  For instance, the entire staff of Das Bloggy Blog touches many surfaces in New York City like subway poles, hand rails, elevator buttons, etc, that are no doubt coated with an invisible layer of rat blood, roach shit, and santorum.  Despite this, we only get a cold once or twice a year.

At fault, really, are the shortsighted Medical Professionals who recommend H.S. to the greater populace under the simple principle that it lowers the risk of getting sick a little.  Given that Doctors work in museums of disease and regularly thrust their hands into the orifices of others, it is probably a good thing that they are focused on the slaying of 99.9% bacteria.  But for the average peon both the exposure and stakes are much lower.  Some believe that the rise of mysterious auto-immune disorders may be linked to humanity's increasingly super-clean existence; that the idle hands of our immune systems may 'go rogue' when given no windmills to charge. (This will likely never be proven or disproven)

Food for thought:  hand sanitizers don't kill viruses like swine flu (only bacteria), aren't a substitute for hand-washing, and are rendered useless the second you touch something else.  So why not simply keep your hands out of your mouth, and stop worrying so much?  Save the Howard Hughes routine for when you actually have a compromised immune system.