Whoever said “cleanliness is next to godliness” would think pretty highly of modern-day America. Never before has a population so committed itself to rubbing, scrubbing, sterilizing and disinfecting itself from the grit and grime of the natural world. And for good reason: global trade and travel have allowed viruses to hop from country to country via innocent workers and tourists.
But while our zeal for cleaning is well-intentioned, our efforts are often misguided. In the case of antibacterials, we may be doing ourselves harm.
“Somehow, through marketing or misinformation, we’ve been led to believe that if we get rid of bacteria, we’ll improve our lives and our health,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University and author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. “In fact the opposite is probably true.”
Microbiologists are fond of pointing out that your body contains more bacteria than anything else; microorganisms populate your skin and gut by the trillions. “We live in a bacterial world,” Blaser says. “And the vast majority of those bacteria are neutral or beneficial. Very few are harmful.”
source：April 22, 2015 Time