Antibiotics, Cleanliness and Moliere

Someone posted a comment to the post about Semmelweis and it got me thinking, well the anti-bacterial kitchen surface cleansers did.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing personal against anti-bacterial kitchen sprays - I use them myself and some of my best friends are bottles of kitchen spray - but it seems we've got ourselves in a right twist, a real 'horns of a dilemms' situation with our 21st century obsession with cleanliness. It might be next to Godliness but I really don't think we can use that as much of an excuse nowadays.

(I was going to point out that nobody believes in God anyway so why is coming second such a big thing. Then I realised. Actually a goodly proportion of the world's population actually do believe, or at least purport to, so........Crash and burn! Sometimes reality can be soooooo inconvenient. Never the way you want it! In an ideal world Laura Morante would be just gagging for the chance to anti-bacterialise my kitchen work surfaces........but it is not, sadly, an ideal world. Just in case you hadn't quite noticed.)

Anyway, where was I? Yes, the horns of a dilemma. You see, this obsession with cleanliness, creating a 'germ free environment', killing all known bugs, creepie crawlies, pathogens, bacteria is all very well, and is to be lauded if you have infants, suckling children, with ill-developed immune systems, but what is it actually doing?

From the development of antiseptic in the 19th century through to the myriad of harmless (to us) substances to combat germs. Through the tentative probings into Salvasan (funny how the first 'magic bullet' was used to treat syphyilis, back in the days after the first world war; just goes to show how common it was, a lot more common then trench foot), through to the sulpha drugs of the '30s and all the way to natural penicillin of the '40s and '50s and onwards to the synthetic antibiotics and bacteriacides common today.

But what is it doing?

Well it is doing three things (at least). One, it is saving lives. Two, it is seriously compromising our own immune systems. If the immune response, don't you just love the idea of 'Killer T-cells', rampaging Rambos of the blood stream, the Chuck Norrises of the cellular world, beating the crap out of any bacterium that strays into its territory, doesn't get to practise, how the hell is it going to recognise a pathogen? And, three, just as importantly, bacteria breed very rapidly and crucially they do it by cell division. No messing about with sexual reproduction here and all that goes with it; the 'mess', the grunting, and more importantly, the uncertainty (and not whether you get to orgasm or not). Maybe your genes squeeze a way in there, maybe they don't; and if they don't, you don't get to pass on whatever advantage you've got. Sexual reproduction is a lottery, remember that! 'Advantageous, but a lottery nonetheless. No, cell division means there is no mistake. If you have acquired immunity to an antibiotic, all your offspring will acquire it too. Unless they mutate away your advantage.

So where does that leave us?

In an escalating arms race which I fear we cannot win. Nature is far too canny!

Please believe me, I do not wish to return to the days, not so very long ago, where life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (thank you Hobbes, always good for a quote) but I do think we have to rein in our expectations and more importantly give our bodies the chance to do what evolution has equipped them for. We don't need antibiotics for a common cold, (useless anyway, it's a virus) we don't need antibiotics for the 'flu. We don't need ibuprofen because 'you might get a headache'. We can cope! We don't need our meat so stuffed full of antibiotics that it might as well be pure antibiotic; I always thought that the chicken tasted funny. We don't need all this stuff until we get really ill when it might prevent our dying before our time. And is there a pre-ordained time for our dying? Might it not be then? But we never want to believe that, do we?

And, in the end, isn't this the problem? We are so used to the medical profession over the last fifty years giving us the illusion that we can live forever that we believe it? Even though it's not, can't ever, be true?

I'd like to end on a more optimistic note. Any men out there who fail to fall in love with Laura Morante after the scene in 'Moliere' in which Romain Duris 'mimics' the 'dog' which Jourdain is, and after the two have quite obviously just made love, is either made of clay or doesn't have a clue!

Oh, were my idiocies so well recieved!