Bonzer Words!: Soap And The Superbug
"I believe that if everyone stopped using soap the alarming problem of the antibiotic-resistant 'super-bug' would resolve overnight. Overmonth, anyway,'' says Michael Grounds.
Australians' fondness for showers is notorious. As soon as we're old enough to stand in the shower cubicle we shower every day.
The shower used to be over the bath, with a shower curtain which sent water onto the floor if you put it outside the bath, and clung to your legs (because of the updraught from the warm steam) if you kept it in. I remember that the standard shower rose was about 25 cm wide with big holes all over it, but I don't remember ever living in a house with sufficient hot water pressure to put water through all the holes, so it was always a miserable downpour from the lower edge of the disk (it was never quite horizontal).
Modern showerheads spray out from the wall using much less water. You can stand in the shower cubicle with the water warming your back until the hot water runs out, unless there's someone else waiting. The result is that the skin of the back loses its natural oils and gets red and itchy. I've had to tell many a young woman to take shorter cooler showers, and they've mostly taken it as kindly as an alcoholic advised not to drink.
People don't often use soap on their backs, but you can remove the skin oils elsewhere in a short cool shower with just a face-washer and soap. Some people feel the need to be especially vigorous in the groin area, defatting the skin enough to make it vulnerable to fungal infection. Then they see the need to be even more vigorous, and so the fungus happily spreads. I used to tell patients that if they stopped washing it, it would go away, but a little antifungal cream from the pharmacist would help it along.
There's another more sinister effect of soaping the skin. The nasty Golden Staph, Staphylococcus aureus, does very well on defatted skin. It can sit there for ever without doing any harm, but when you have a wound or a splinter it does even better. It's what causes the pus to develop round a neglected splinter, and makes small wounds sore and red. It's what causes infected surgical wounds and ruins hip replacements. It kills people.
My wife and I decided some decades ago to see how we got on without soap. Would we smell? Would our hands get grimy? Would we get boils or anything? The answer was NO, NO, and NO. We are assured by friends and doctors that we are not smelly. Our hands come clean with just water, and maybe a scrubbing brush (inky reminders on the palm of the hand included). We've had no skin infections; quite the contrary, we have to dig out every single splinter because they no longer float to the surface in a convenient bead of pus. We have been swabbed for the golden staph on admission to hospital, and we never have it. We feel free.
I believe that if everyone stopped using soap the alarming problem of the antibiotic-resistant 'super-bug' would resolve overnight. Overmonth, anyway.
We still like our nice warm shower every day, though. We're Australians.
© Michael Grounds
Michael writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
