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Hospitals mislead you: Today the cafeteria served what they called a six-bean soup, yet in the pot were thousands of beans! And at the door and every other door there hung a soap dispenser. As if germs are always bad.
If you are conscious and breathing one could understand why you may be thinking that germs are bad. Have you read Love in the Time of Cholera? It's an allusion to the gut convulsing, dehydrating, life-ending microbe Vibrio cholera. Do you remember hearing about the Black Death? That particular pandemic delight is caused by a flea-borne intruder called Yersenia pestis that according to one infamous quotation causes its victims to "eat lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors."
But absolutes are always bad, which may seem an ironic way to state the position, but it's true: Absolutes obscure subtlety. They conceal complexity and truth. And so it is with germs.
So what's the truth about germs? Germs are living, breathing, tiny animals that have their own agendas. As they strive to thrive, have babies, and indulge in pursuit of whatever makes them happy, they need certain things: Oxygen, glucose, protein, and the like. Sometimes they make their own from raw ingredients. Sometimes those raw ingredients are us. So when a bacterium enters our skin, for example, it can feast on things we want for ourselves, such as oxygen. And in response, our immune system can fight it, which can cause unsightly pimples and pus.
Yet sometimes bacteria are essential to our health. Notice what happens when you take antibiotics to clear up your pimples: You get diarrhea. Why? Because the tetracycline has wiped out the good germs in your gut and the bad ones and even fungus takes over. So then what do you do? You eat yogurt with Lactobacillus. Sure, you call it probiotics, but it's germs, the good kind. Like the germs living in a warthog piglet's duodenum that allow it to digest the shrubbery, these are the germs of our lives. We need them.
Sometimes, as with fancy yogurt, germs are purely medicinal. Like the kind of good germs that permit doctors to fight urinary tract infections by putting specific strains of bacteria into the incompletely emptying bladders of patients with recurrent urinary tract infections.
No, do not run to your doctor after your next urinary tract infection begging for germ injections. That's not the point. The point is that in germs, as in weight control and hydration, balance is good. On the other hand, the next time the nice nurse gestures at the soap dispenser, raise your brow and instruct her: My karma depends on my germs and my germs are in perfect alignment.
