Covid-19 and The Problem with Sanitising Everything
Facing a potentially deadly virus, the tendency is to sanitise everything, but how is that effecting the safety of our workplaces?
Earlier this year for the first time ever, the New York City subway system was closed each night and the 6000 carriages on the system were disinfected.
But how effective was it on cutting down on the spread of the virus? “It’s all theatre!” said Jack Gilbert, a professor and microbiome researcher at the University of California at San Diego. “You bleach the subway; the bleach dries up and becomes inactive”. If just one person who has Covid-19 interacts with that surface, the four hours of effort have no effect. We now know Covid-19 is most often transmitted through the air, so cleaning efforts of this magnitude seem futile.
There is a serious risk that attempts to sterilise our surroundings can kill off bacteria critical for human health—or, even worse, inadvertently help the survival and evolution of more dangerous bugs, including antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
If we are obliterating all bacteria in our built environment including friendly bacteria that would normally be in circulation, then we risk creating environments where bad bacteria like MRSA, can thrive.
Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Business Week says “Wiping out good bacteria along with the bad has also been linked to chronic health problems. One often-cited series of studies, begun in 1998, examined the relationship between cleanliness and disease in the Finnish-Russian border region of Karelia, where people share similar genetics. On the wealthier, cleaner Finnish side, people were as many as 13 times more likely to suffer from inflammatory disorders as on the Russian side, where the majority live in rural homes, keep animals, and cultivate their own gardens”.
After taking a course of antibiotics, you’re encouraged to eat yogurt to replenish your gut with probiotics. In the same way using probiotic cleaning agents can help to replace friendly bacteria in recently sanitised buildings. Especially modern buildings in which windows were permanently sealed.
Being able to open windows, can result in far more microbial diversity throughout the building including species found on plants and leaves. Research has found that there was also a significantly lower chance of encountering pathogens.
In a hospital in the U.S. Prof Jack Gilbert is investigating whether adding harmless bacillus bacteria into medical facilities reduces the prevalence of pathogens, including multidrug-resistant bacteria and viruses. “If you don’t have anything on a freshly disinfected surface, and you cough your virus-laden bacteria onto the table, it will survive there,” Gilbert says. “But if there’s a high enough abundance of bacillus, then the bacillus will outcompete and exclude other pathogens that land on the surface.” Similar studies have been done in the past, with encouraging findings, but Gilbert’s is more rigorous.
Whilst research on artificially reintroducing natural bacteria and outdoor microbes into office buildings continues, in the short term the use of probiotic cleaning agents could go some way to restoring the balance.
Further information on this subject see:
Dirt is Good, by Prof Jack Gilbert
The Great Indoors, by Emily Anthes
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49235669-the-great-indoors
Healthy Buildings, by Joseph G. Allen & John D. Macomber
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3 年Th next generation of facility/estates managers are probably going to need a degree in chemistry to unravel the information to realise the benefits of Probiotics.. there are still "old school" cleaning managers using bleach in abundance.