This is something that makes me a little upset. Throughout schools, public buildings, and most houses can be found an inordinate quantity of hand sanitizing stations, which spritz some strong-smelling stuff onto your hands that allegedly kill some number of germs that has a lot of nines.
Well, killing germs is great - who wants to be sick? But what happens to the 1% or 0.1% that survive and why did they survive? Answer: because they're tougher than the others that got killed. Without the flood of the Hand Sanitizer of Accelerated Natural Selection, the germs would compete for existence in a way that did not involve resistance to antibiotics - probably for space or access to unsuspecting cells.
Also, the human immune system, like the rest of the body, needs to be kept in shape. If I was to sit in my chair all day, my muscles would lose mass because I wasn't using them; the body regulates nutrients to the parts of the body that require them. Similarly, living in a perfectly sterile environment will cause the immune system - which takes a lot of resources - to be shut off. This is why farm kids playing in the dirt all the time tend to be healthier than those who walk through apartment buildings all the time; they're exposed to light attacks that can be easily dealt with, but keep the immune system necessary.
Hand "sanitization" is no substitute for hand washing. Washing the hands with soap and water kills germs and gets them off the body. Quick sanitizers have their place, but they should probably not be nearly as commonplace as they are.
Thanks to my father for first teaching me how things like this work.
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