Well, I am truly speechless about this. Katie Dahlhausen, a graduate student in my lab, pointed me to this last week SQUIX | Innovative Germ Fighting Products and I have been wondering what I could possibly say about it. So I think I am just going to not write anything else but I will post …
There is a wonderfully essay by Tal Abbady coming out in tomorrow’s New York Times (and available online now). A few years in Spain, and my mother’s last days, helped me see the futility of a sterilized life. Source: Less Disinfectant, More Rioja The essay is about many things, including differences between cultures (pun intended …
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is finally cracking down on products that tap into the neurotic tendencies of extreme germophobes. In this recent Consumerist article, Chris Morran discusses the penalties Zadro Health Solutions and Angel Sales had to pay for false advertising of their disinfection products. Without a single lab experiment, we can already deduce …
Wow. This is one of the worst germophobia driven articles I have seen in a long long time: 7 Everyday Items That Are Harboring Germs. Brought to you from GrandParents.Com — by Linda Rodgers — and posted at the Huffington Post. This one is loaded with really just silly stuff like: “But there’s a slew of stuff …
When I first saw this headline: Fox 25 Investigates: Hidden hospital germs I geared up for YASS – yet another swab story (this is a bit of a play on the “swab story” complaint Mark Martin uses for stories that report on microbes found by swabbing. Nooooooooooo- there are bacteria in our homes —- run run run — aaarrgg …
It seems that any time a holiday comes around in the US, the press starts to ramp up the writing of stories about evil microbes that are lurking all around us. And Halloween appears to be no exception. I am now planning on referring to this attitude as “microbophobia” rather than “germophobia” because to some …
Well, just saw this: Gadget Lust: Keeping the Germs (and the Hypochondria) at Bay. I know this article is partly an attempt to be funny (which I think it succeeded at) but even so, the level of germophobia is pretty astonishing. Actually, though I cringe at germophobia many of the things discussed in this article are perhaps …
Oh my. This story is littlered with so much over the top germophobia I do not know where to begin: The Dirt on Your Sponge – NYTimes.com. The story, by Penelope Green, discusses how Tod Maitland and Matthew Flannery have developed a sponge cleaning system called “SpongeBath”. This is going on sale on Amazon and Bed Bath and …
In the 2011 paper “Microbial Biogeography of Public Restroom Surfaces” Noah Fierer and others found that some of the toilet flush handles had similar microbial communities to those of the restroom floor, suggesting evidence of the germaphobic practice of flushing the toilet with a foot. I was curious to know if we could find other microbial …
Imagine you have a camera with a special “anti-macro” lens. This lens scrubs from any image all plants and animals and other “macro” organisms. And this lens also highlights the remaining living things – the microorganisms – anywhere in the frame (including those that were in or on the macro organisms removed from the image). …