​At one time at our office we had a day care. It was complete with a classroom, an area sectioned off for indoor play, kitchen, and outside playground. There was a full-time monitor/teacher and lots of little munchkins around the office interrupting us during the course of the day.
 
It was great for moms and dads to be able to interact with their children during the day. If you own a business, think about doing this. If you are an employee, get together with coworkers to see what you can do to help the business you work for get one established. We operated ours for almost a decade, until most of the youngsters grew up. Several of them have even come back to work with us as young adults. We became like a home away from home.
 
I was the official sliver surgeon for all the kids. Our office is in a wooded area and we had wooden playground equipment, so almost every week there was a sliver drama. That's when I got to perform my magic with terrifying instruments like a scalpel, forceps, needle, and magnifying glasses. My little patients tried to be real brave and fight back tears but their dilated pupils and clammy trembling hands revealed the true life threatening state they found themselves in. All the other kids were a wide-eyed and awed audience for these major surgical events. Once my patient's survival was assured, there were lots of hugs and thanks. Then off they would all skip, relieved that their friend had survived one of life's dire calamities. They could be heard around the building all abuzz with, "Did it hurt?" "I saw the blood!" "You were brave!" "How big was it?" "Glad that wasn't me!"
 
Actually, everyone would be pretty brave about this except my own kids. To listen to them when I was removing a sliver not even visible except with magnification, you would swear I was working on a two by four with vice grips, or sawing their limb off with a chain saw. No need to be brave when it's Dad who's working on you.
 
As I would work on sweaty, grubby little hands, it brought to mind the wonder of how kids ever survive childhood with all the filth. If germs were really the true cause of disease, how could any of us survive?
 
Contrary to popular belief and commercial propaganda, germs are not kept at bay by washing with antiseptic soap, disinfecting toilet seats and telephones, wearing surgeon-type face masks on the streets, or getting vaccinated. One E. coli bacterium (a resident of our digestive tract) in the evening can produce four billion offspring by the next morning. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and parasites are ubiquitous throughout nature in air and water, and on surfaces, skin, food, and ground. Just one gram of soil contains over a billion microorganisms. In a small pile of one cubic meter of dirt, 35 pounds of it would be these microscopic critters.
 
Some microorganisms are pathogens, others are necessary for our survival. Without bacteria to consume garbage, for example, we would have long ago been smothered under the refuse created by nature and us. Good bacteria (probiotics) on the skin, in the mouth and intestinal tract actually help thwart the bad bacteria. Over fifty percent of the dry weight of feces is comprised of microorganisms. The number of such organisms in the digestive tract outnumbers the total cells in the body by 100 fold. The thing that it seems medicine is trying to achieve—no bacteria at all—with obsessive disinfection and sterilization, is neither possible nor beneficial. Germs are not the problem.
 
Disease-causing pathogens can even exert a beneficial effect by stimulating immunity. In one study of the relationship between stillbirths and urinary infections in the mother, it was found that pregnant women who had such bacterial infections while pregnant were 70% less likely to have a stillbirth. Evidently, the antibodies the mother produced in her blood in response to the infection were passed to the fetus to exert a protective effect.1
 
In another example, scientists attempting to rid chickens of salmonella (food-borne pathogens) tried a sterile environment. The result was that mortality increased because the chick's immune system could not develop properly without exposure to the pathogens it needed to be protected against. Germ-free (gnotobiotic) chickens were fine so long as there were absolutely no germs around. But since that would never be possible, once exposed to the pathogens, the chicks easily succumbed to disease. They didn't just get sick—they'd die. The solution was to feed baby chicks the salmonella-infested droppings of the mother hens. After all the sterility failed, the cure was in the filthy poop!2
 
It is commonly thought that we would be dropping like flies from the plague and other epidemics if it weren't for medicine. There is no doubt that infectious disease can be devastating. For example the 1918 Spanish bird flu pandemic which began among military recruits in Haskel, Kansas, spread throughout the U.S. killing 675,000. It then moved across the Atlantic killing millions of soldiers and on to colonial India taking 20 million lives. Contrary to popular belief, however, diseases like the flu, polio, measles, and typhus were not conquered by humans. Note in the accompanying graphs that the vaccines or chemotherapeutic agents that are credited with vanquishing the scourges were introduced after the majority of the decline in the diseases had already occurred!3 For modern medicine to claim responsibility is like a person taking credit for dropping the level of the ocean by bucketing water out as the tide was receding. Infectious diseases have a natural ebb and flow and so does the general immunity of the population. That is the reason epidemics decline, not because of human intervention.
 
We can't even eradicate the mosquito, a creature which we can see and for which we can examine every life stage in detail. How are we going to eradicate microorganisms, which, if crowded side-by-side, would require numbers in the trillions to occupy the space of one mosquito? Creatures in the wild thrive in filth. Rabbits eat their stool, vultures eat rotten carcasses, and dogs will roll in the most putrid, decaying material they can find and then lick themselves clean.
 
Children constantly have their fingers in their mouths after wallowing on the floor, playing in the toilet, or exploring the garbage pail. We adults aren't exactly sterile in our habits, either. Up until relatively recently, a bath once a year was considered plenty in western society. That frequency of bathing, or less, is common elsewhere in the world to this day. Billions wipe themselves with their fingers (usually with the left hand, a reason it is customary to shake with the right) and yet live in societies that rank higher on health scores than nations with bidets, perfumed toilet paper, disinfectant aerosols, and soaps.

⌕ Click to enlarge

​Don't buy the simplistic germ-based view of how we get disease. True, certain pathogenic organisms can be associated with disease, but likewise so are crows and buzzards associated with road-kill. Buzzards are not responsible for road-kill, neither are pathogenic organisms responsible for disease. They are both opportunists. They wait until prey is weakened and then they dive in.
 
The resistance of healthy tissue is demonstrated by the effective medical use of maggots to clean infected and necrotic tissue from wounds. These revolting little creatures will digest all the rotting tissue but leave the healthy tissue intact. In microcosm, infectious disease is like the carnivore-prey drama occurring throughout nature. Predators always choose the easiest meal: the unfit, the weak, and disabled.
 
We are not victims. Germs do not 'get us.' Well, yes, they potentially can, but they will find a far less willing host if we take care of and boost our defenses. No matter how much money we give experts (who have a vested interest in our illness), they will not protect us from the dark germ forces in spite of their Star Wars antiseptics, vaccinations, antibiotics, and chemotherapeutic agents.
 
We are in control of our own defenses. We either create the setting for health or the meal for pathogens. It is our choice.