Huh? I thought it was because Aunt Pearl smacked him in the mouth with a rolling pin for coming home late one night, drunk…

That Aunt Pearl… what a hellcat.

Seriously, though, I do need to replace my brush more often. But no, I don’t wait all that long between replacements! And my dentist does say my teeth are all right, thank you.

But, I really gotta do something about this spontaneous combustion crap; it’s driving my friends crazy. They’ve taken to pre-emptively throwing water on me, just in case. Any advice, Mother?

Some people just have better teeth genetics that don’t suffer from decay as much. They’re the ones with naturally straight teeth and those incisors. Or not.

Eventually they’ll come up with an injection that regrows your teeth. And won’t that be fun.

I am one of those who take care in washing my hands, avoiding the public bathroom’s door handle/knob, etc. (shirt sleeves or the paper towels help in this regard) because I hate being sick, but I’m also aware that being excessive about that can backfire. Wasn’t it said that using antibacterial soap can do more harm than good, since it’s only strong enough to kill off the benign stuff and allow the really dangerous microbes to flourish? And that, for it to actually work, you’d have to leave it on your hands (or the dishes, or the surface of whatever you’re cleaning) for two minutes or more? I think I’ll go look that up and verify…

I hate being sick, but even I remember my biology, and realize that we actually need infections to excercise our immune system. Neo, you’re right. We seem to be overcorrecting.

Ymarsakar: Off topic. I promise I’ll respond to that earlier Navy/piracy post on your site at some point. I’ve just been busy in an ugly way, and I’m tossing these postings off in between tasks at work (Whoops! Just admitted that I’m doing this from work ).

It starts out with people who are usually healthy - within seconds, formerly healthy people are writhing on the floor, fainting and/or hemmoraging. it gets worse from there. The culprits are usually innocuous things like ticks, termites or, in one case, unwashed brand-new jeans. It’s a good show, but it’s starting to make me nervous.

So in a competitive environment, getting sick young is a good thing. And it’s not even measles, mumps, or chicken pox the only diseases we protect against when older.

Short term vs long term in a way.

A healthy thing to do is to use mouth wash when flossing. Cause there’s some bacteria you don’t want to swallow, causes heart problems or whatever.

So you cannot reintroduce the virus to yourself, as far as I know.

You could reintroduce yourself I guess, if your immune system was weak as heck. But usually you beat it off early on, so you don’t notice any of the side-effects. I mean, I was a sick child. Had a lot of nose bleeds that wouldn’t stop, among other things. Now, since I didn’t die, my blood clots faster. I get colds but I am able to live with reduced effects without medication, after one good day of sleep and food. Fevers break in at max 2 days, with a lot of sleep, I’ve always had that, 2 days of fever then it breaks with a nightmare. Fevers were nasty. One time I had a nose bleed cause of cold water and it didn’t stop for a couple of hours. That was a lot of blood from my perspective. Wasn’t fun, in the least.

I did notice in school, that people got sick earlier than me. Meaning, they had runny noses in flu season. But I never missed any days as a child because I was sick, that just didn’t happen. It’s only weird now, because I realized that other children were missing school days because of sicknesses. But for some weird reason, my fevers started on Friday night, and ended Sunday morning. That wasn’t a coincidence, cause it kept happening.

And I was out at the bus stop in the morning, when it is fracking cold with wind shear. Sun wasn’t even up.

That moisture with the toilet thing… I’m not even sure water molecules in the air can sustain germs. It doesn’t seem likely they can breed up there, so it’s like, there’s not many of them. And so long as the body isn’t inundated with stress and lack of food, the immune system should be doing a crackdown on these foreign organisms.

There was always this mind-body connection I’ve been studying. Where you can influence your body with your mind, sorta of like Pavlovian response cycle. In that sense, if people are scared or worried about germs in the air, they can make themselves sick. Or at least decrease their immuno-defense system. Stress is a big immune system killer. People who are stressed, can’t get eat, eat the wrong things, don’t feel optimistic, are more susceptible to sickness.

Cold viruses mutate and change, and so each strain is different–but they don’t mutate while they’re sitting on a toothbrush.

We keep our toothbrushes in hydrogen peroxide when we’re not using them. We change it out once a week. We’ve noticed less transmission of illness between kids since we started doing this. Of course that’s purely anecdotal, but we’ve had many fewer colds and virii.

One recommendation I’ve seen that seems to make sense is to sterilize or throw out your old toothbrush if you’ve had a cold or other illness. It would make sense to me that the sickness germs would stick around on the brush, and there’s no point in re-introducing them to your system. Anyway, keeping the brushes in a cup of peroxide is cheap and easy to do, and a quick brush with the peroxide-soaked bristles helps keep the stains off my teeth.

I can’t see investing in anything more expensive or high-tech than that.

I agree, Junk Science sucks. It preys upon the ignorance of many people, who don’t tend to have much knowledge of logic, science, engineering, philosophy, or the dialectic. Engineers know better than this.

Bookworm had an post about germs too. Link

Steve, take a look at this, appropos of your last sentence.

The problem here, really, is selling a product. People don’t like dirt, they don’t want to smell, they don’t like germs: so, how far do you want to go with this? The answer is, if you are selling stuff, as far as you can.

Remember Dorothy Provine and her feminine hygiene spray commercials …..