BREAKING NEWS! ALERT! ALERT!
YOUR MORNING SHOWER COULD KILL YOU!!
The shower you take to limit offensive body odor and get a refreshing morning wake-up call could be dangerous to your health, and could kill you. Non tuberculous mycobacterium (causative of lung disease) and streptococcus (implicated in strep throat, meningitis, or necrotizing fasciitis [it is as ugly as it sounds]) can build up in your showerhead, make you sick, and possibly lead to your death. If you value your health, you should never take a shower again! Or so, that is what the news media would like us to believe.
A study from our friends and colleagues at the Boulder campus published this week in PNAS demonstrated that water coming out the business end of the shower head is dirtier than the water going into the shower head. Mycobacteria and other pathogens can build up in shower head bio-films (a fancy word describing an aggregation of microorganisms in a self arranged matrix), and are then aerosolized in the hot and pressurized water you treasure in the morning. The aerosolized microbial life is then inhaled into the deep lung, where it can release malignant fury. Thus the conclusion that dirty dangers lurk even when you think you are getting clean.
So everyone should stop talking showers, right? Wrong. Fortunately for us young, strong, and healthy grad students, we need not worry, we can continue our normal morning routine of a shower and coffee before the onset of the daily grind. Why? Captain Immunity to the rescue! What the media fails to mention with their attention grabbing headline is that our immune system has been exposed to many if not all of these pathogens previously. As Prof. Cohen mentioned in our first class, you don’t have to look hard to find bacterial flora in and on our bodies. Moreover, the toilet and kitchen counter (and other more typical bacteria laden surfaces) have done a fairly effective job of exposing us already to these pathogens (if you don’t believe me, believe MythBusters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeAOC3A0xJ8. All together now: ewwww!). As we all know, once our body has been exposed to a particular invader, it normally does a decent job of clearing out subsequent invasions by the same pathogen before we get to feeling sick.
The people that need to be worried about this news (and make it a morning bath instead) are those with compromised immune systems. As an example, AIDS causes a reduction in CD4+ helper T cells, resulting in a reduced ability to bind and kill pathogens. As such, even though an AIDS patient may effectively recognize the pathogens inhaled from a showerhead, they lack the ability to fully protect themselves from the pathogen. The incomplete protection will lead to varying severities of illness, and possibly, in the unfortunate case, death.
So, while it is a bit disturbing to think that you are bathing in bacteria, what you see falling isn’t the sky, life will go on, and for the sake of all of our noses, please, continue showering.
For those of you interested in reading the full article it can be found at the following URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/09/11/0908446106.full.pdf+html?sid=368e5e90-7301-4346-b3b5-3ccfe88e7d2a
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That's quite interesting. Leave it up to the news media to leave out the important detail, however. Anything to sell clips I suppose. Ironic to think that the media discouraging people from showering would actually remove them from the very exposure that helps them not get sick. Remove the shower, remove the exposure that drives the immune system, remove the ability to fight off that bacteria when you do run into it.
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