These days advertisements for household cleaners are big on the fact that choosing a particular product will keep me (and my family) safe from all known germs and other microbiological life forms. Not just clean, I'm told, but deep down clean, cleaner than I've ever been before.
In checking out my local supermarket to discover exactly how clean I can be, I learned that I can buy anti-bacterial hand-wash (by which I presume they mean soap), washing powder, washing-up liquid, floor-wash, toilet-cleaner and "wipes". (Though what could be still living that needed to be wiped at this point is beyond me.)
I thought back to my childhood and remembered that a splash of Dettol in the bucket whenever the floors were being washed and a regular dose of bleach down the loo was about as far as my mother would go in her efforts to rid our home of all known germs.
We had a dog who wasn't allowed to walk across the kitchen table but who certainly wandered in and out of the house at will without someone wiping his dirt-ridden pawmarks at every opportunity. And - this is the scary thing - we only had baths once a week. What's more, as children we shared the bath water. When I was small the bath was for splashing around in with a cursory attempt at washing behind your ears and getting the grime from a day in the garden from beneath your fingernails.
We were obviously walking wounded, and our house was a bacterial playground. In the places you could see and in the places you couldn't, all sorts of little life forms were happily breeding and doing whatever it is bacteria do while we carried on with things, blissfully unaware that this parallel universe even existed. And did it do us any harm? Not that I know of.
I'm possibly not the best person to judge because I do have asthma which is usually the result of an allergy and often aggravated by house dust mite and pets. Newly mown grass made me sneeze a lot more than playing in the dirt, and I doubt the fact that my mother never used an anti-bacterial washing-up liquid had any effect on my childhood wheezing.
More to the point, I never got sick from picking up a sweet from the floor and popping it into my mouth despite the presence of the dog, nor did the fact that I didn't put healing plasters on every scratch and cut cause me or my mother any sleepless nights.
A number of years ago a friend brought her son to the doctor and he asked her how often the child had a bath. Daily, she told him. And what do you put in the bath? the doctor asked. My friend proudly told him she laced it with one of those gentle anti-bac cleansers to keep the boy clean and germ-free. The doctor's advice was to stop. The child needed bacteria, he said, otherwise how could his body learn to fight illness?
The bacteria debate has widened in the past few years, although this is mainly because there has been a lot of talk about superbugs which have become resistant to antibiotics. Patients who don't need antibiotics are contributing to the problem as they demand them for illnesses which don't respond to antibiotics in the first place, although I don't understand why doctors are so compliant as to then prescribe them.
It bothers me, though, that companies whose job it is to provide something with a little more elbow grease than hot water and soap to help us keep our homes reasonably clean have apparently decided that they'll now provide us with enough anti-bacterial products to possibly exacerbate the situation. If you're killing 99 per cent of bacteria in the house then surely the ones which survive are going to evolve stronger than before.
According to the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, resistance has become an increasingly pressing problem in the US and bacteria which have been killed by particular anti-microbial agents for decades have now developed resistance to the newer agents. Other bacteria have developed resistance to new antibiotics almost as soon as the drugs have been marketed, but bacteria have a natural ability to become resistant to drugs through mutation.
The oldest fossils known, nearly 35 billion years old, are of bacteria-like organisms, and we seriously think that a few drops of anti-bacterial soap are going to get rid of them? Besides, do we really want to? For every disease-producing type of bacteria, there are hundreds of others which we need. They convert plant and animal remains into humus. They help the fermentation process, and who wants to prevent that? They're omnipresent in all sorts of dairy products, they live in our guts and help us to digest food. (So whatever you do, don't swallow the washing-up liquid.)
According to Dr William Reville in this paper on Monday, scientists are now trying to identify naturally occurring bacteria as well as develop new ones to help to break down synthetic toxic wastes, which could include that damn supermarket plastic bag. (And the bottles that all those anti-bacterial washes come in, too?)
Yet soap-manufacturers want to get rid of them, and they want to persuade us that that's a good thing. They want us to spend more money on something anti-bacterial so that we can tell ourselves that we're doing our children some good, while at the same time the level of allergies in the Western world is continually increasing.
When H.G. Wells wrote The War Of The Worlds, he envisaged the Earth being conquered by Martians. The aliens were cleverer than us, with fighting machines we were powerless to overcome. Earth belonged to the Martians, and there was nothing we could do about it, until they started to die off, attacked by bacteria. Wells was clearly thinking along the right lines, but if he wrote it today, he'd have to have the Martians being driven off by a bunch of householders armed with anti-bacterial wipes.
A wonderful image, perhaps, but it doesn't have quite the same dramatic affect, does it?
Sheila O'Flanagan's latest novel, Far From Over, was published in May by Headline