The Plumbing Problem

Cleanliness is next to godliness. A principle high amongst the canonical statements of modern medicine. Handwashing, clean clothes, sterile environments. These things save lives, preventing transmission of the great beasts of the hospital, the resistant nosocomial infection. When we wash our hands, clean our coats, spray down the keyboards we protect everyone we interact with from the hybridized super-strep that plagues the old and the infirm in hospitals worldwide.

It is good that we do this, as we do see a myriad of folks whose immune systems and bodies are poorly equipped to handle a new round of infections. But, oddly enough, it seems counter-productive for this obsession with clean to spread to the general population. Hundreds of years ago, Polio was endemic, but not problematic. Everyone had it, everyone had been exposed in their early childhood, when the maternal gift of a temporary immune system had served as a gold plated shield. It spread through the unappealingly named fecal-oral route (as do a number of diseases that we have ALL had...disturbing as that thought may be), and in the days before modern plumbing, everyone was heavily exposed.

It was with the advent of modern plumbing that polio emerged as the disease we know today, the paralytic invader leaving crippled children in its wake. Without constant exposure, people were not encountering polio until after the maternal antibodies had worn off, leaving them a virgin field, just waiting for polio to colonize. Oddly enough, it was the widespread improvement of sanitation, then end of defecating in a hole in the ground, that sparked an epidemic of crippling disease.

They call this the hygiene hypothesis now, the concern that our over-hygenic society may be protecting infants from disease precisely when they should be encountering it the most, at the peak of their childhood immune potency. We are born with a surfeit of antibodies, a gift from our mothers, but they fade, leaving an undeveloped system behind. Polio is only one example of the viruses that once went ignored, and now cause epidemics. Perhaps, this theory posits, we should let our children wallow in the muck.