In my case, it was the pencil that broke the camel's back. I was in the McGill bookstore for my bi-annual office supply purchase, when I came across a shocking new product-the PaperMate anti-bacterial mechanical pencil. With a label that proudly touts both the pencil's patented "Flex-Grip" technology as well as the innovative bacterially resistant coating, this is one writing implement that every germophobe, hypochondriac and obsessive-compulsive on campus can't afford to be without. Unfortunately, nothing is more shortsighted and paradoxical than our society's obsession with cleanliness. In fact, our proclivity to include antibiotic agents in every consumer products is perhaps the greatest public health menace of our generation-and poses an especially lethal threat to children.
Common sense dictates that a child raised in a relatively sanitary environment will be a healthy child. Parents go to great lengths to keep their children safe from germs, viruses, and bacteria of all stripes. So ingrained is this revulsion to bacteria that corporate marketing departments play on parents' worst fears, cynically marketing household cleaning products (and now even pencils) designed to kill any and every microbe that might give Junior the sniffles or the sneezes. In fact, Hasbro, maker of Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, has just introduced a line of anti-bacterial toys, and other leading toy companies are sure to follow.
However, this instinctive fear of bacteria and other germs is predicated on a colossal misunderstanding of human biology, and the development of the immune system. Bacteria are not monolithically harmful. In fact, in a recent paper in Nature Biotechnology, one scholar noted that 'good' bacterial cells in the human digestive tract actually outnumbered total human cells in the body. Five-hundred different species exists, consisting of 100 trillion cells-whereas our human cells only number a mere trillion. In response to the study, one writer keenly observed, "The human genome does not carry enough information to determine key elements of our own biology."
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