Chemical Weapons Come Home

by Stan Cox, April 25, 2008

The “vomiting virus” now sweeping across Britain may be spreading. At the same time, San Francisco is being hit with a new strain of the nasty bacterium known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)—this one responsible for “flesh-eating pneumonia.”

Meanwhile, four patients were recently isolated in the University of Maryland Medical Center, infected with a multidrug-resistant bacterium called Acinetobacter baumannii, which has attacked a number of Afghanistan war veterans. As one doctor said of that bug, “When these people get infected, you sort of say this is the last straw.”

Those new menaces, and more, are joining the usual biological villains. More than ever, we’re turning to the chemical industry for help in fortifying the home against microbial invasion. Few go as far as Jacques Niemand, a reclusive Briton who was killed last May by fumes rising from vast quantities of disinfectant that he kept in open buckets around his house to ward off infection. But lower-intensity chemical warfare on our invisible housemates is in full swing.

Many hospital patients and people with compromised immune systems depend for their very survival on large quantities of not-entirely-benign antimicrobial products. However, there appears to be widespread scientific consensus that for most routine home uses, thorough washing with soap provides sufficient protection.

In domestic use, there’s the possibility that some antimicrobial products could induce disease-causing bacteria to evolve antibiotic resistance. Then, as they flow down the drain into sewers and beyond, significant tonnages can accumulate in the tissues of wildlife and people, with potentially toxic consequences. And it could be that dramatic increases in asthma and allergy rates are related to immune-system distortion that comes from living in microbe-poor bubbles.