"So anybody who happens to have a compromised immune system gets to fight your personalised microbes, perhaps fatally? How very ... Darwinian ... of you."
What a sadly unscientific and ignorant answer.
There are literally MILLIONS of types of bacteria. We REQUIRE millions of bacteria to simply exist and live as human beings.
Not all bacteria is evil and will kill you. Most won't! In fact, if you kill all of your personal awesome bacteria, the harmful stuff can move in because you don't have any anymore. (Well if you "killed all of your own bacteria", you'd very likely be dead as well...)
You get to fight my bacteria, and every humans bacteria, every day of your life. It's as normal as breathing air and eating food. Your mother colonizes you with bacteria at birth and through feeding. Our foods help us build immunities. Our friends and being outside and playing and working and everything we do exposes us to bacteria. Being exposed to bacteria isn't evil or wrong. Being weak to bacterial exposure is like being weak to sunlight-- it is going to dramatically change your life and make you very "abnormal" as a human. That's not our fault.
"Soap and water have saved more lives than any medication, ever."
Proper hygiene has saved those lives, of which soap and water played a role. You put the cart before the horse. HYGIENE saved lives -- soap and water was the mechanism used to achieve hygiene.
" I take daily antibiotics, possibly forever. As a society, we don't just cleanse ourselves for our own well-being, we wash for others."
This article isn't about giving yourself leprosy and then infecting immunocompromised people.
For you to conflate "bad" bacteria with "good" bacteria is ignorant and massively hurtful to the cause of human health.
If you had read the article, you would know that they're supplementing personal flora with Nitrosomonas eutropha.
If Nitrosomonas eutropha can hurt you, you need to be in a bubble and NEVER exposed to any air, or the outside, or dirt, or any other humans.
Herd immunity won't save you from something so common, normal and helpful to humanity. And hurting all of us just to help you, denying us the necessary and amazing flora that makes our lives possible, is selfish and Darwinian in it's own way.
PLEASE respect that bacteria is ESSENTIAL to human life, and managing our own flora is ESSENTIAL to health and thriving. Just because someone wants to be healthy doesn't mean you have a right to accuse them of attacking you. If you're that sensitive, you need to protect yourself with heavy isolation. We're humans, not hermetically sealed robots. We are alive because of bacteria. Period.
Why do you think we wash our hands after toilet usage?
It's not because touching your own genitals, urine or even faecal matter will make YOU ill. You are most probably clean to yourself. We promote the habit because if we all do it, we are much less likely to make each other ill.
Same goes for infectious diseases. You wash your hands because even though you might have a healthy immune system (as do I), some of my colleagues might not. Or my grandma. Or in fact some random person I shake hands with.
The concept of herd immunity doesn't just apply to vaccinations. We do keep clean for others.
The article is about surface external bacteria - which are very, very different to the bacterial colonies which live inside your digestive system (and also only there - if any of those get inside your circulatory system that's where most "flesh eating bacteria" horror stories start from).
There's a naturalistic fallacy heavily at play here, because humans have never before lived in such close proximity in such high density dwellings as they do today. The idea that this doesn't merit some forward thinking on how we manage personal hygiene standards is ridiculous.
Do you have any evidence for your beliefs? Skin flora is largely beneficial to hosts. Like internal bacteria, it can be disrupted and become pathogenic.
Do you know of any studies that show that frequent washing with soap decreases pathogens and promotes beneficial skin flora?
The anecdotal experience of people like me who stop washing with soap is that we smell better. This suggests that soap was disturbing our skin flora.
I'm willing to be proven wrong on that point, but you need actual evidence. Calling something "a naturalistic fallacy" without evidence of your own is a perfect example of a fallacy fallacy.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not just saying I smell good. Women spontaneously tell me "you smell good!" without knowing about my non-soap habit.
A naturalistic fallacy is simply appealing to "this is way it is before we do anything". Others have presented the counter-evidence - i.e. human hygiene and life-expectancy and disease rates got way better with the introduction of hand-washing and soap.
I'd think carefully about your anecdotal evidence. The social contract is we don't comment on matters of hygiene directly, and I know I couldn't smell how bad me and my schoolmates smelt after a couple of days field-trip out camping. That didn't mean we didn't.
I edited my response to clarify that I've had spontaneous compliments on how I smell, particularly since I switched. This is without people knowing I don't use soap.
And I thing hand-washing is good. We have clear evidence it works.
But is there any evidence that washing the whole body with soap on a daily basis is beneficial? The counter-evidence you speak of refers only to hand-washing.
Wikipedia distinguishes them, and that's in line with my understanding, although I don't know that my understanding wasn't derived at some point from Wikipedia or a descendent source.
As Wikipedia (and, apparently, G. E. Moore) would have us believe, the "naturalistic fallacy" is believing that you can reduce good/bad to natural states, and seems more closely related to Hume's "is-ought problem" than to the "appeal to nature". I actually think this comes down to disagreement about what is meant by "good/bad" more than substance, though.
Clearly, some do use "naturalistic fallacy" to mean "appeal to nature", and I'm not certain the original use of the term is worth preserving as distinct from Hume, but I'd encourage "appeal to nature" for clarity since that seems to have no ambiguity.
You get to fight my bacteria, and every humans bacteria, every day of your life.
Not to a significant extent. In cases where people are exposed to other people's bacteria in quantity, they generally become (mildy) ill quite quickly while developing immunity - see fresher's flu etc.
If you had read the article, you would know that they're supplementing personal flora with Nitrosomonas eutropha.
And HOPING that N.Eutropha will out-compete their dangerous-to-others bacteria.
And hurting all of us just to help you, denying us the necessary and amazing flora that makes our lives possible, is selfish and Darwinian in it's own way.
I'm not suggesting you shower in bleach, just that you wash yourself with something more effective than fairy dust.
"Not to a significant extent. In cases where people are exposed to other people's bacteria in quantity, they generally become (mildy) ill quite quickly while developing immunity - see fresher's flu etc."
Again with the ignorance and nonscientific answer.
Fresher's flu is what happens when LARGE GROUPS of people from GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPARATE areas come together. All kinds of new bacteria are introduced. And again-- this is normal. This is humanity. This is us, there is no other way to handle the complexity that arises from our biological systems. That's the facts. Fresher flu isn't curable, it's the integration of bacterial culture. It's natural, and its inevitable. To use it as a negative is ignorance: it's a byproduct of our nature and evolution itself.
Even so, it is in no way equatable to you meeting ONE person or normal meeting of people from similar areas. Not on any level. Also your "not to any significant extent", I reject that. I'm sorry but you're wrong about that too.
"I'm not suggesting you shower in bleach, just that you wash yourself with something more effective than fairy dust."
This is simple: There is one human being alive responsible for your safety. You'll find him in a mirror. I, and every other living being is absolved of responsibility for your health.
I'm sorry, but if your personal defects make it dangerous for you to be near humans in a normal social setting, I suggest protecting yourself instead of a) blaming others or b) suggesting others protect you on your behalf.
You might find this weird but attempting to enforce a monoculture of hygiene because you think it's right is draconian, impossible, and naive to me.
Those situations are also where they are exposed to viruses and pathogenic bacteria. I don't think you make a very good case that exposure to a "healthy" but unfamiliar skin biome is likely to lead to illness.
What a sadly unscientific and ignorant answer.
There are literally MILLIONS of types of bacteria. We REQUIRE millions of bacteria to simply exist and live as human beings.
Not all bacteria is evil and will kill you. Most won't! In fact, if you kill all of your personal awesome bacteria, the harmful stuff can move in because you don't have any anymore. (Well if you "killed all of your own bacteria", you'd very likely be dead as well...)
You get to fight my bacteria, and every humans bacteria, every day of your life. It's as normal as breathing air and eating food. Your mother colonizes you with bacteria at birth and through feeding. Our foods help us build immunities. Our friends and being outside and playing and working and everything we do exposes us to bacteria. Being exposed to bacteria isn't evil or wrong. Being weak to bacterial exposure is like being weak to sunlight-- it is going to dramatically change your life and make you very "abnormal" as a human. That's not our fault.
"Soap and water have saved more lives than any medication, ever."
Proper hygiene has saved those lives, of which soap and water played a role. You put the cart before the horse. HYGIENE saved lives -- soap and water was the mechanism used to achieve hygiene.
" I take daily antibiotics, possibly forever. As a society, we don't just cleanse ourselves for our own well-being, we wash for others."
This article isn't about giving yourself leprosy and then infecting immunocompromised people.
For you to conflate "bad" bacteria with "good" bacteria is ignorant and massively hurtful to the cause of human health.
If you had read the article, you would know that they're supplementing personal flora with Nitrosomonas eutropha.
If Nitrosomonas eutropha can hurt you, you need to be in a bubble and NEVER exposed to any air, or the outside, or dirt, or any other humans.
Herd immunity won't save you from something so common, normal and helpful to humanity. And hurting all of us just to help you, denying us the necessary and amazing flora that makes our lives possible, is selfish and Darwinian in it's own way.
PLEASE respect that bacteria is ESSENTIAL to human life, and managing our own flora is ESSENTIAL to health and thriving. Just because someone wants to be healthy doesn't mean you have a right to accuse them of attacking you. If you're that sensitive, you need to protect yourself with heavy isolation. We're humans, not hermetically sealed robots. We are alive because of bacteria. Period.