Finally, a good reason to slack off on your spring cleaning: Trying to purify your home might be harming your immune system.
That’s the word from Elizabeth McCormick, the author of the new book Inside OUT: Human Health and the Air-Conditioning Era.
McCormick, an assistant professor of architecture and building technology out of the University of North Carolina, explains we all should have some “good bacteria” in our homes.
In fact, the naturally occurring “microbial network,” she explains, “is an inevitable and essential component of both human and non-human life.”
Not sterilizing and sanitizing every single square inch could help prevent your kids from getting sick, or suffering from allergies and asthma, in fact.
At issue is the so-called “hygiene hypothesis,” which states that our overreliance on sterilizing stuff — and taking antibiotics for everything, even when not needed — means our kids grow up not encountering microbes, and therefore their immune systems can’t naturally learn to deal with them.
That’s why scientists who embrace this theory think so many kids in the U.S. today are so allergic to things.
“Advertisements for hand soaps and detergents, for example, underscored the fear of germs, while advertisements for prescription drugs also emphasized visual representations of germs,” McCormick said in a statement.
This in turn “induced a culture of excessive cleanliness and urban germaphobia.”
Byram Bridle, an associate professor of viral immunology at Canada’s University of Guelph, tells Newsweek, “The basic concept is that the lifestyles of many people have become excessively clean. At its core, the idea is that exposure to safe molecules and microorganisms in our environment promotes the development of immunological tolerance, especially during early childhood.”
So maybe you can put the Swiffer down for now.