A few good germs

“But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.
So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes.”

– Bob Berman

I have never much minded washing dishes by hand (plus time in the water helps clean the dirt so often accumulating under my fingernails), so the following study – about dish washing and allergies and germs – is an easy one for me to glob onto.

A new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, suggests that parents who wash their dishes by hand, rather than in a dishwashing machine, may unwittingly lower the likelihood that their children will develop allergies.

The researchers followed 1,029 children aged 7 to 8 years old, and their parents, living in two areas of Sweden.

This nytimes wellness blog summarizes: “They investigated behaviors…Then they examined whether the children had allergic conditions including asthma, eczema, and hay fever. Ultimately, the researchers found that children raised in households where dishes were always washed by hand had half the rate of allergies. They also discovered that this relationship was amplified if the children also ate fermented foods or if the families bought food directly from local farms.”

This is only an association, not causation. But the speculation – of Bill Hesselmar, an assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the study – is that some behaviors expose children to innocuous bacteria, which can help strengthen their immune systems. In their words, from the Pediatrics Article Abstract, “We speculate that a less-efficient dishwashing method may induce tolerance via increased microbial exposure.”

A take away

Exposure to some microorganisms can be good for us, and is not to be avoided at all costs. In fact, “germs” of the good variety or in the best combination (ecosystems with many species are generally more resistant than systems with few species), are even a part of a therapy to counteract some bacteria gone bad; such as when a single species of bacteria becomes too prominent and causes inflammation in the gut as can happen after taking an antibiotic. This bizarre-but-fascinating therapy replenishes the gut microbiome through Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT), or in more common vernacular, through “poop transplants.”

Are you intrigued? Follow this link for a great 3-minute video that is both informative and funny (with a “don’t try this at home” thrown in, and an ending quip of “From your C diff to recoup, choose someone else’s poop”) or see this article (thanks, Charlotte, for passing it along).

"I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt." – Eartha Kitt

Back to a little dirt. Connecting to the natural, including many of the microorganisms in our world, can be a grand choice (see Dee’s Dirt blog posts “Eat dirt” and “About germs).

Maybe – when we finally have a thaw in these northern climes – we can pick up some dirt and appreciate the microorganisms residing there?

May you find opportunity this month to wash a few dishes by hand and be exposed to a few good germs.

I am wishing, along with you, for spring and thaw and no allergies and all sorts of good health.

 “…you started out as dirt, you’ll end up dirt.”

– Genesis 3:19b – The Message paraphrase

 “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”  ― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

A VISION

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
To stand like slow growing trees on a ruined place,
Renewing, enriching it,
If we will make our seasons welcome here,
Asking not too much of earth or heaven,
Then a long time after we are dead
The lives our lives prepare will live here,
Their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides,
Fields and gardens rich in the windows.
The river will run clear as we never know it,
And over it the birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be green meadows,
Stock bells in noon shade
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest,
An old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music risen out of the ground.
They will take nothing out of the ground they will not return,
Whatever the grief at parting,
Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove,
And memory will grow into legend,
Legend into song, song into sacrament.
The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds,
Will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.
This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility.

Wendell Berry