Kuwait Times

Published Date: September 12, 2008
By Ruth Riegler, Staff writer

When did Obsessive Compulsive Disorder become the norm rather than being considered a debilitating social phobia? I've been wondering this while watching a supremely irritating ad that's apparently never off the blasted telly. Featuring one of those improbably lovely, constantly grinning and deeply creepy families who seem to laugh a lot at nothing, it extols the virtues of a bacterial handwash (and possibly Prozac, though that's not mentioned).

Going outside one's clinically spotless, surgically sterile home environment these days, screams the ad's subtext, is apparently fraught with lethal dangers - touching door handles, shelves, shopping trolleys etc is just asking for contamination from ghastly germs and before you know it you'll be on the isolation ward with your limbs falling off while you cough your spleen up through your nose.

As long as you pack the handy, pocket-sized handwash, however, you and your loved ones can be protected from the typhoid, leprosy, dengue fever or Ebola carried by the last disease-ridden wretch to touch the trolley, door handle or other object. It may slow you down slightly stopping every ten seconds to scrub away at everyone's mitts like a manic Lady Macbeth, but hey, what's a little gibbering psychosis when it's saving you and the kids from plague and pestilence?

Now, I realize that observing decent standards of personal hygiene, washing one's hands before meals, after visiting the bathroom, etc are simply basic cleanliness and health protection measures - not to mention common courtesy - and to be commended and encouraged. And there are, of course, environments in which anti-bacterial handwash and possibly a full chemical warfare suit complete with independent oxygen supply might be handy accessories - ask the swimmers off Salwa who found themselves surrounded by
chemical effluent a few weeks ago, for example.

But the Ebola virus really is highly unlikely to be lurking on the door handle of the Sultan Center and, if you truly are that obsessively neurotic about bacteria, the dirtiest everyday objects around are innocuous old banknotes and coins - think of how many hands they pass through daily and where those hands have been...so if you're really keen to avoid contact with hideous nasty bacteria, just give up the cash - I'll be perfectly willing to take it off your hands for no fee whatsoever. Sheesh, sometimes
my crazy, impetuous generosity leaves even me speechless with admiration.

Anyway, the way things are going in our phobic world, it seems like it can only be a matter of time till the commercials for surgical scrubs and disposa-gloves for the family around town appear in between the shampoo and fabric conditioner ads (Michael Jackson truly was a style leader, after all) - maybe this is just the first step in an ingenious Big Pharma marketing campaign designed to see us all kitted out in biohazard suits and facemasks on setting foot out the front door.

This demented anti-bacterial neurosis is a relatively recent development. In my youth, for instance, (cue images of pterodactyls swooping majestically over herds of grazing stegosauruses), this sort of fanatically obsessive behavior was treated with sedatives and a long stay in a low security psychiatric unit. Unless you were rich, of course, in which case it was simply regarded as a charmingly quirky eccentricity that kept hotel staff busy (viz. Howard Hughes). Now, however, it's those of us who aren't m
anically scrubbing our hands raw with a wire brush and Dettol every time we brush against something that are regarded as beyond the (clinically spotless) pale.

Like most of her generation, my much-missed fiercely house-proud gran, who was no slouch in the scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting, polishing and general domestic hard labor department, was fond of saying "A little dirt won't kill you" and it seems that she and her peers were spot on in this assessment. With doctors increasingly linking soaring rates of asthma, hayfever, allergies and even diabetes to our fetish for 24/7 surgical sterility, it appears that being exposed to healthy amounts of good old-fashioned
muck gives kids more bacterial immunity than their peers raised in a germ-free laboratory atmosphere.

Which is good news, not only for those of us who agree with Quentin Crisp on dusting ("After four years, the dust doesn't get any worse."), but for a generation of scrubbed, disinfected and gleaming hot-housed children who now have the perfect excuse to go outside, run around and get gloriously grubby - 'It's good for me.'

Ruth@kuwaittimes.net