Accountability

How Important Is Cleanliness?

According to Wikipedia, cleanliness is the absence of dirt, including dust, stains, bad smells and garbage. The term cleanliness derives from the meaning absence of odour, avoidance of and to avoid the spreading of dirt and contaminants to oneself and others. In the case of glass objects such as windows or windshields, the purpose can also be transparency. Washing is one way of achieving cleanliness, usually with water and often some kind of soap or detergent. In more recent times, since the germ theory of disease, it has also come to mean an absence of germs and other hazardous materials. However, dirt may play a useful role in our immune systems. This shift in thinking can be traced back to 1989, when David Strachan put forth the "hygiene hypothesis" in the British Medical Journal. Strachan looked at the records of 17,000 British children and found that the greater number of older siblings they had, the less likely they were to come down with hay fever—a disease which, despite its name, is far more common in the city than the country. Strachan wondered if the older children were bringing home more viral infections to their younger siblings, priming their immune systems so they could better tolerate pollen. The "hygiene hypothesis" has now been linked with asthma, allergies, intestinal diseases including Crohn's disease, childhood leukemia and atopic dermatitis. There is increasing evidence that the less germs people are exposed to as a child, the more likely they are to get sick as adults.

Cleanliness means different things to different people. For instance, when a little boy is told by his mother to wash his hands and face, he may think that holding his fingers under a running faucet and wetting his lips is enough. But Mother knows better. She takes him back into the bathroom and scrubs his hands and face with plenty of soap and water—despite his loud protests!

Of course, standards of cleanliness are not the same around the...