Germs.. Has the world gone mad??

xmaslolly76

As somebody who likes clean hands there is all sorts of soap scattered around my bathrooms and kitchen for the purpose of washing Most of which i pay no more than say £1 for.

I have just watched an advert for a no touch soap dispenser and i just can't believe that people fall for the utter rubbish and pay out £10 for soap just to wash their hands with. They say that the dispenser pump is riddled with germs. This may be so but if your dispensing soap onto your hands then they are already dirty and obviously need washing so any germ transfer from the pump would be washed away ( if there product works as they say and kills 99.9% of germs) and also if your anything like me i always rinse the said dispenser under the hot tap when cleaning the bathroom to prevent clogging and voila a clean dispencer at a cost of absolutely nothing.

Why oh why do these companies insist on trying to push complete sanitation of every surface in our homes its not good for us no matter what they say our immune systems need to come into contact with a certain amount of germs or we dont build any immunity to them.

The answer as always i fear is MONEY!

So i for one will be pocketing the £9 saved and sticking with my £1 soap pump. Anyone else feel the same way ??

Britwife

I'm not too bothered by germs myself but have to admit if I lived in a household where everyone was getting sick all the time, I would probably buy it. I also think it's good for the elderly if they have limited mobility and those who have delt with life threatening illnesses.

So, nope, don't think the world has gone mad in this instance. It's just one of those things you either like it or you don't.

izzybusy23

xmaslolly76 wrote: »

As somebody who likes clean hands there is all sorts of soap scattered around my bathrooms and kitchen for the purpose of washing Most of which i pay no more than say £1 for.

I have just watched an advert for a no touch soap dispenser and i just can't believe that people fall for the utter rubbish and pay out £10 for soap just to wash their hands with. They say that the dispenser pump is riddled with germs. This may be so but if your dispensing soap onto your hands then they are already dirty and obviously need washing so any germ transfer from the pump would be washed away ( if there product works as they say and kills 99.9% of germs) and also if your anything like me i always rinse the said dispenser under the hot tap when cleaning the bathroom to prevent clogging and voila a clean dispencer at a cost of absolutely nothing.

Why oh why do these companies insist on trying to push complete sanitation of every surface in our homes its not good for us no matter what they say our immune systems need to come into contact with a certain amount of germs or we dont build any immunity to them.

The answer as always i fear is MONEY!

So i for one will be pocketing the £9 saved and sticking with my £1 soap pump. Anyone else feel the same way ??

My mum would probably buy it! She lives in the USA and has become very americanised over the 19 years she has been there.. she is so fanatical about germs it does my head in. When using a public toilet she will wash her hands, then grab some toilet paper, open the handle of the toilet door with the paper then re-sanitize her hands with a handbag sized gel thingy.

Drives me nuts! We need germs to help us build up our resistances... irradicating them altogether will mean we will be ill all of the time.

Britwife

izzybusy23 wrote: »

My mum would probably buy it! She lives in the USA and has become very americanised over the 19 years she has been there.. she is so fanatical about germs it does my head in. When using a public toilet she will wash her hands, then grab some toilet paper, open the handle of the toilet door with the paper then re-sanitize her hands with a handbag sized gel thingy.

Drives me nuts! We need germs to help us build up our resistances... irradicating them altogether will mean we will be ill all of the time.

What does living in the states have to do with wanting to be germ free? You're going to get that in any country and the product was seen on the telly here. I'm American, born and bred but have been here for 4 years. You go into any hospital or doctors office here and there are signs yelling out to you to wash hands first or sanitize. Didn't have that where I was in the states. And if you ever watch proper hand washing, your mom is doing it the correct way. Has nothing to do with becoming "Americanized". Sorry, but I find that a bit offensive....just a bit.

BitterAndTwisted

I don't think the world has gone mad yet but manufacturers devising ever more and clever ways to encourage us to buy stuff we don't need might just tip some of us over the edge if we're not careful, me included. Advertisers are clever, much cleverer than we are and there's no avoiding them.

As any sane and moderately aware person knows we are more at risk of germs and viruses when we're on the bus than we are from our own germs lurking on our own soap-dispensers at home. Also, some folk feel the need to chuck bleach or anti-bac stuff all around their homes when some soap and hot water would do the job at a fraction of the price purely through very clever and cynical advertising. If soap and hot water didn't work our own grannys wouldn't have survived to raise their own families as that was all they had for the most part. I seem to remember stuff like Dettol and Jeyes Fluid being treated like a precious and scarce resource when I was a nipper. Which it was because it was expensive.

I think there might be an interesting debate to be had about why it appears that some us feel the need to be completely and utterly risk-averse. If we all lived in a country with no effective sanitation system then I could understand the unease, but we don't thank the Lord.

xmaslolly76

This product isnt aimed at people with limited mobility or a life threatening illness though it is aimed at the general population. In both cases you have stated i can see how the product would be of help but making the average house wife feel guilty because they dare to not live in a completely germ free environment is not good for us.

As for the hospitals yes they do promote hand washing I for one had to learn to wash my hands correctly when going to visit my now passed mother for infection control purposes especially during her dialysis treatments. This is understandable and does not strike me as extraordinary in anyway as you are entering a place where we could be passing on all sorts of germs to the vulnerable. However i do feel that some of the superbugs we are now faced with fighting are of our own making due to bringing up a generation of people to frightened of a bit of dirt that bleach every surface to within an inch of its life and who demand antibiotics at the first sign of a sniffle.

These companies are preying on fears that they implanted and are completely unnecessary in the name of profit.

LJM

hmmm the world has gone a tiny bit mad yes cleaning/washing hands is hygenic but remember back to your own childhoods i used to be digging in the garden palying in the mud etc and eat my food without washing hands,may sound gross to some of you but as a child i never had half the colds/bugs/viruses that are going around my children now i think we are going a bit ott in being too clean

fiscalfreckles

I think we worry far too much about germs; they have always been around and are not nearly as devastating (to most people) as advertisers would have us believe. They do try & guilt you into stuff. I keep my house fairly clean & tidy, but am not a clean freak - I just don't have the time to disinfect my entire kitchen and every door handle in the place every day.
And I think you can overdo it; so many parents are fanatical about dousing everything their child touches in Milton and so many kids now have terrible immune systems, asthma, eczma,etc. I like to think that my kids have had minimal health issues because they are used to a bit of dust & bacteria.
Basic handwashing ought to be enough.

gonzo127

ha this is so true the world is going mad with cleanliness

yes in a hospital thats great since most people in them already have a illness which their bodies will be fighting but most other places it is silly

i cant wait till they start pushing the infrared sensor operated taps for your home due to germs - which would make sense from one point of view since you go to the toilet, turn the tap on so putting germs on it, wash your hands, and then turn the tap off again by touching the bit you have just touched with your 'dirty' hands.

but i agree with the above, my mum never lets me forget the time when she left me out playing in the garden when she had to pop inside to get something, ocming back out again a few seconds later to find me eating a worm and i still do not get ill very often.

so i say 'let them eat worms' to build a good immune system, just a shame my little one is a bit of a wuss, she gets really upset if she gets dirty, although that might just be because its a excuse to get a cuddle and a kiss

Jesthar

Right with you on this one, xmaslolly!

OK, hygiene is important. Poor hygiene (particularly in regard to water sanitation) is a major cause of some very nasty diseases and epidemics. And I definitely like to invest in effective cleaning products, mainly to reduce the amount of time I spend in Marigolds wielding a scouring pad. But all the current advertising obsession with ever more extreme cleaning scare scenarios is ever so slowly doing my head in...

For example, it used to be enough that a toilet cleaner (formerly known as 'bleach') cleaned the toilet. Then someone decided it was a good idea to push the killing of germs too - fair enough, although goodness knows how much of an improvement over regular bleach these things actually were. After that we moved on to 'oh, and you *have* to get under the nasty, filthy rim too!', so we started to pay extra for bottles with funny shaped necks.

At this point they seemed to run out of ideas for a while, and concentrated on fragrance and ever bigger and better rim blocks for that purpose, before playing the 'but these things we have been selling you are actually germ magnets!' card to persuade people to buy the latest 'no cage' versions. Which brings us right up to the modern era, where the latest lethal enemy is the potentially deadly germ factory that is limescale.

And don't get me started on some of the other stuff - someone mentioned Dettol, and I seem to recall their latest advert is all about 'your surfaces might have allergens and pet dander on them! Think of the children!!!' Well, yes - if you live in the real world and have a pet, that goes without saying. In fact, it goes without saying even if you *don't* have a pet. We just didn't worry ourselves too much about it until you started scaremongering just to market some new product we never thought we needed...

Incidentally, anyone else wonder if the huge increase in allergies and intolerences in recent could partly be related to the modern drive to sanatise *everything* about our environ?

~Jes

January20

Xmaslolly, another one who agrees with you! Complete madness this fear over germs and bacteria that advertisers and various companies put into us! We need germs to build up our immune system and as for bacteria, we would not be alive without it!