Remember the scenes of spraying streets and sidewalks with chemical disinfectants? How about the recommendation to wipe your groceries with sanitizer to prevent inadvertently catching COVID-19?
Turns out, all of that was a waste of time and money. There is very little evidence that surface transmission of the virus occurs, with a risk of only one in 10,000. It still makes sense to wash your hands for 20 seconds after being out in a public place.
COVID-19 spreads through inhaling respiratory droplets from an infected person’s cough or sneeze. Thus, wearing a mask will have much more preventive effect than wiping down surfaces. It makes sense to assume that we can spread it through a handshake with someone infected and then touching our nose, since this is a known mode of transmission for colds and flu.
By eliminating close human contact and wearing masks, we saw a dramatic decrease in colds and flu this past winter. Perhaps handshaking might best be permanently replaced by the elbow bump.
What is the harm in using these chemical disinfectants? Aside from the hazard of exposure to the chemicals themselves, we can wipe out the good bacteria in our environment and on our bodies that protect us from disease. Recall that each human has billions of bacteria in and on our bodies, mostly in our intestinal tract, that are critically important for keeping us healthy.
We are now learning that these good bacteria serve a major role in maintaining our gut health and even our cardiovascular and brain health. An April 25 New York Times article by Markham Heid explains this in detail. If we kill too many of the good bacteria that protect us, we might pave the way for a pathogen (bad bacteria) to invade and cause disease.
The familiar story of Clostridia Difficile (C. Diff.) illustrates this best. Due to our indiscriminate and inappropriate overuse of antibiotics for colds and problems that resolve on their own, we can kill off our healthy gut bacteria and allow for this pathogen to take over and produce a toxin that causes severe diarrhea that can be fatal. The best treatment is a fecal transplant of “healthy” stool with many good bacteria to restore the balance.
A healthy gut flora may have a protective effect against many chronic diseases. The best way to maintain gut health is to eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and fermented foods such as sauerkraut and yogurt, and to minimize the number of processed foods consumed.
The “hygiene hypothesis” was first proposed by David Strachan in 1989 and argues that bodies need exposure to bacteria for their immune systems to function properly. Lack of this exposure might be an explanation for why we have seen an increase in asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders. It is also one explanation why the populations of Africa have been so little affected by COVID-19. They may have much healthier immune systems because of their exposure to many bacteria over their lifetimes, which has “programmed” their immune systems to fight infections effectively.
We have made great progress in our fight against COVID-19 by administering 274 million doses of vaccine and fully vaccinating 45% of our adult population. The vaccines are amazingly effective and extremely safe, and some will likely soon receive the Food and Drug Administration’s approval for use in young children. The Pfizer vaccine is now approved for kids older than 12.
You can find out where to get the now readily available vaccine by visiting the Vaccinate.Virginia.gov website or by calling 1-877-829-4682. Two weeks after finishing the vaccine series, you will be highly protected against this deadly virus, which is profoundly more effective than any sanitizing you have been doing.
Dr. Bob Newman, a University of Virginia Medical School graduate and U.S. Navy veteran, spent more than 15 years in private practice in rural Virginia and 17 years teaching family medicine, most recently at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.
