When I was a kid, my parents told me that everyday items are always filled with bacteria, such as banknotes, tabletops, keyboards, smartphones, floor (pick up your fallen food within 5 seconds or it will be infected with bacteria), I grew up told there are millions of bacteria under the fingernails all the time, is this really true? How can they be always there and survive that long if they are on the floor, banknotes etc.? They are living organisms, need to eat something, right? For my thinking there is nothing to eat on the banknotes normally. Can anyone bust this myth or confirm? Thanks in advance.
In: Biology
It’s true, everything is colonized with bacteria. But our body is very good at fighting most of the popular ones.
Be careful of excessive cleaning though. Of course, cleaning things will kill the bacteria from a surface. But cleaning does something else as well: it resets the biotope for bacterias to colonize the surface again. This is a competition between the popular ones and the aggressive ones. Usually the popular ones win (they are the popular ones for a reason).
If you don’t clean again this is essentially harmless, as your body knows too damn well how to fight the popular ones.
But once in a while, the aggressive ones win the colonization race. Now if you don’t clean the surface again you get a full colony of aggressive bacteria, getting ill.
The solution is paradoxial: don’t clean so much so that the colonization race doesn’t start from scratch again. Give the popular bacteria a head start so they win the race. The one bacteria type your body doesn’t mind.
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