Excessive restroom cleanliness?

You’ve probably heard about how we might be becoming too clean in the United States. Some researchers think the rise in the number of kids suffering from allergies and asthma might be because they aren’t exposed to the sorts of irritants that would allow their immune systems to develop robustly. It’s called the hygiene hypothesis.

“The Amish basically live as if it were 1860,” Holbreich told me. “They’re very clean. They have indoor plumbing. Their houses are immaculate. Their children get vaccinated, but they spend time — and their mothers spend time when pregnant — in the barn around all kinds of things: cow manure, food for the animals .?.?.”In other words, these aren’t the kind of people who go everywhere with a bottle of Purell in each pocket. For whatever reason, the Amish have a very low rate of asthma and allergies when compared with the rest of the population.

Not that things were necessarily better in the 19th century. “Look at what it was like in 1860: people dying from dysentery, typhoid fever, diphtheria, polio, measles,” Holbreich said. “The upside is, through hygiene, better public sanitation and immunization, we’ve essentially eliminated the major killers of the 1860s, which were infections. The trade-off is, yes, maybe by having a cleaner environment and fewer infections, we’ve brought on more allergies.”

Please note that Holbreich is not saying that parents shouldn’t immunize their children. They should. The Amish do. He just wonders what exactly it is about the Amish lifestyle that translates into fewer allergies and whether it’s replicable for more modern Americans, short of keeping a cow in our living rooms.

But you are no doubt wondering about my research. It is based on careful observation in men’s rooms over the past 30 years. Back in the 1980s a typical restroom had, in addition to toilets and urinals, a sink or two, some soap and a towel.

At the low end, the soap may have been a scary-looking, grayish slab of Lava resting on the sink’s cracked rim. The towel may have been one of those continuous roller things that you pulled down on, exposing what you prayed was a clean section of fabric but suspected was just a bit someone had used before you that was finally rotating back around.

Then certain pantywaists among us decided that the real problem with the public restroom was the doorknob you touched on the way out. About 15 years ago, I noticed the floors of restrooms starting to become mysteriously littered with paper towels just near the exits. Men (and I assume women) had decided that it was safer to open the door with a paper towel and then scoot out, even if that meant leaving a mess behind.

At The Washington Post, janitors started positioning a trash can near the door, so these germophobes could at least toss their waste in a bin.And now it’s come to this: Not long ago, I was in the restroom of a fancy office building. In addition to a trash can on the floor near the door, there was a wall-mounted dispenser full of squares of paper towel. These towels were too small to dry your hands with and existed only to use in grasping the door handle. This was a sanitary door-opening system.

My God, people, are you that afraid of bacteria? What’s next in the anti-infection arms race? Disposable gloves that you put on after washing your hands, then remove and dispose of in an incinerator after leaving the bathroom? A Barbicide emergency shower and eyewash station?

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