Earth Matters: Stop cleaning! You’re making it worse.

The Island Now

By Lynn Capuano

Today we all know the importance of washing our hands to prevent spreading disease.

If the ubiquitous signs every winter about washing your hands to prevent the spread of colds and flu have not reached you, certainly the admonition to wash your hands to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has.
What is not as clear though is the benefit of washing, or more accurately cleaning your house, your office, the subway and every other space we occupy and touch.

Early on, our understanding of how COVID-19 spread was limited, but in the last year it has become clear that regular cleaning of surfaces is not key to preventing the spread of the disease, and when done long term can have some very damaging effects.

But we are still doing wholesale cleaning of every surface and object we come in contact with.
The idea that cleaning could be bad is counter-intuitive. We are a society that is almost obsessive about cleaning. And we talk about cleaning and being clean as though they are easily understood words.

But after listening to Rob Dunn, an applied ecology professor at North Carolina State University, on WGBH and PRX’s Innovation Hub, I am no longer clear on what clean means. I am also not certain I want to pursue cleanliness per se.
What I learned seems obvious now that someone explained it to me, but it never would have crossed my mind before. Consider those popular cleaning products that promise to get rid of 99 percent or more of all germs.

Ask yourself about the 1 percent or less of germs that are left. What can we say about them and the danger they pose to us?
We can say that they are the strongest, most anti-bacterial resistant germs around. They can survive our toughest cleaning products. They are likely able to resist our strongest antibiotics as well. And they have an advantage over all other microbes (a catch-all for beneficial and dangerous microorganisms) in our homes which are relentlessly being attacked by our cleaning.

In our effort to clean, we disfavor some species and favor others. The species we disfavor are the beneficial ones, and we leave behind the ones the chemicals we spray cannot kill. As a result, we have tipped the balance in favor of the stronger and potentially more dangerous microbes. (And did nothing to protect ourselves from COVID-19 which is a virus, not a bacteria.)
The fact is, as professor Dunn explained, our homes are absolutely full of microbes. As soon as we clean a surface, the cleaning solution dries, its effects disappear, and microbes fall from the air and cover that surface again. Though our efforts may be fruitless, they are not without consequences.

Though we cannot eradicate the microbes in our homes, every time we clean, we reduce the diversity of microbial life. The result is that instead of making our homes safer places to be, we are making them incubators for drug-resistant bacteria, and are inviting disease and other health conditions into our lives.
We have evolved to live in partnership with the microbes we confronted. As we moved indoors and placed more emphasis on cleanliness, we disrupted that symbiosis by reducing our contact with microbes and instead exposed ourselves to more health issues caused by our immune systems overreacting to our own bodies.
Maximum biodiversity in everything indoors and out is significantly better than the alternative. If only because biodiversity means more chances of good microbes being present to control the spread of more dangerous microbes.

More biodiversity is a sign of a healthy system, not of a dirty one. According to Dunn, we are setting ourselves on a path to more autoimmune disorders like asthma, multiple sclerosis, allergies and inflammatory bowel diseases (like Crohn’s) because of our obsession with cleaning. As he stated, “We’re trying to make our houses like hospitals and it’s bad news.”
There are things we can do even while we continue to be in our homes for much longer periods than before COVID-19 appeared. We can make and eat fermented foods which may help to maintain healthy gut bacteria, and we can get outside, a welcome alternative especially these days.

Let the outdoors in by opening windows and get close and personal with outdoor microbes by gardening. The benefits of getting outside and gardening are many; it is unquestionably time well spent for your health and well-being.
We cannot count on rebuilding the microbial systems we destroy with our over-ambitious cleaning efforts.

We need to rethink what cleanliness means and recognize the value of microbial biodiversity for all our sakes. Instead of trying to kill all the living things around us we should try to expose ourselves to as many sources of (microbial) life as we can.

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