“Kills 99% of all known bacteria!” “The Cleanest Clean it’s ever been! “The half-remembered advertising slogans of our youth, from companies promoting the bewildering variety of household cleaning products with which we scour and sparkle our homes. And for once, we think they have been doing a good job. No one, absolutely no one wishes to go back to the squalid homes of the pre-industrial world. A glance at a few Renaissance or Baroque masters will reveal the filthy disorder of ancient lives. And remember-the Della Francescas and Brueghels were paid to produce sanitised, rather orderly versions of what must have been an unpleasant reality indeed.
But what if we have been paying a hidden price for all this progress? What happens when all those bleaches, soaps and detergents go down the drain and out into the rivers, seas and lakes? According to Anastasia Theodosiou and Chrissie Jones, writing for the Conversation, there might be a problem. Two problems actually. The first is damage to the microbiome of the skin, that marvellous ecology of bacteria which covers us all and keeps us safe from things like asthma, obesity and cancer. The second, rather more pertinent to LSS and our raison d’etre, is that this outpouring may be unleashing antibiotic resistance among microbes in the environment. Which process will one day come back to bite us very badly indeed. And our crops. And our herds. Is that Biblical, or what?
Our thoughts? We know you like ’em. Well we don’t think we should give up things like washing and cleaning homes any time soon, as the mortality will be measured in hecatombs. But these ladies have a point, as does Baroness Natalie Bennett who is sponsoring a Bill on the whole matter through the UK House of Lords. As ever getting this right is a matter of balance, of careful navigation between the interests of all concerned parties. Another chance to show the angry partisanship of binary thinking is a very bad method indeed.
Incidentally, will Americans ever learn that last lesson?
#microbial resistance #antibiotics #pollution #environment #progress
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