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Comment by kovrik | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting indeed and I appreciate the amount of work done, but honestly I don't see the point.

Yes, germs are everywhere (surprised?), so what?

First, you can't bleach all you house.

Second, even if you could, why do that? Our body seems to fight nasty stuff pretty well. If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures.

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> I don't see the point.

>If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures

Did you even read the article? That's exactly what she says she is doing. When there's a stomach flu or other harmful bug going through the household, she is using targeted washing methods to rid those germs.

I have a hard time buying the idea that if you are going to catch stomach flu, it will be from germs from "clean" laundry. Most germs just get washed away, and you can't completely eliminate germs elsewhere in the environment, so that seems like one of the least likely vectors.

Sorry, but this just seems like OCD disguised by a bit of science.

Exactly what I meant. Yes, you can bleach all your clothes, but not your whole house.

Then, if you already have stomach flu, then I don't see how bleaching your clothes might help here. Take a medicine.

Finally, reading about stomach flu (I'm not a doctor), it doesn't look like a serious problem: > Most people with the stomach flu require no formal treatment. The key to a rapid and safe recovery at home (home remedy) is proper hydration.

If it gets more serious then take a pill or/and go to a doctor.

you see news articles about norovirus all the time in the context of cruise ships because these are enclosed spaces with stable populations who infect and re-infect each other through fecal contamination and aerosolized vomitus. full decontamination (to stop the spread) without clearing everyone off the ship is very difficult.

imagine a house with small children (who are not good at personal hygiene) as a tiny cruise ship which you can never fully disembark, and then when the cooking/cleaning staff (parents) get sick, things get really ugly.

it's generally easier to clean the hard surfaces in your house (with harsh stuff like bleach wipes) than to clean the soft surfaces. that's presumably why she focuses on the laundry infection vector.

It is still unpleasant and if you have deadline in work or have to care about relatives or have any other duties or train a sport or are paid by hour + have bills, then you don't want to stay home in bed vomiting unnecessary. Also, if you have one sick kid, you probably don't want two sick kids and you sick at the same time on top of it. It is cool that it is not dangerous, but you still need to find baby sitting or stay from work.

If you are high school student who dont like to go to school, getting sick is fine. If you are anybody else, you want to avoid it even if it does not require formal treatment.

It's a serious problem for the 70,000 people who get hospitalized for norovirus every year in the U.S. It's even more serious for the 800 people who die.

And given there's not "a pill" you can take for it, I don't see how a couple capfulls of bleach is more problematic.

Kids get all sorts off of weird diseases that are hard to diagnose. The game of guess the critter whilst sleep deprived is awful. Bed bugs? Hand foot and mouth? Fleas? Skin sore? Chicken pox? You reach the stage where you are contemplating binning all soft furnishings. A tested way of washing things isn’t a silly idea.

Honestly, if you've got norovirus rolling through your household, the CDC's recommendation is to pretty much bleach as much of your house as possible.

And laundry as a source of transmission is pretty well known in infectious disease epidemiology. One of the biggest issues is not that people get it from clothing, but that the person who handles contaminated clothing is also quite likely to be the person who preps food. Norovirus only needs a very small number of viral particles to make you sick, and a kid sick on either end is shedding a lot of virus.

In a household full of disease you should be disinfecting (I mean with ethanol, not with soap) your hands before you handle the food anyway.

Soap works better against a number of pathogens, most notably sporulated C. difficile.

And while yes, you should, multiple different pathways to reducing your fomite exposure are better than relying on a single point of failure.

Well they handle the dirty laundry when putting it in the machine don't they? How does this help with that?

Another recommendation is "Wash your hands after handling laundry".

>Second, even if you could, why do that? Our body seems to fight nasty stuff pretty well. If you have some specific condition or disease, then just take targeted measures.

"Many people are confused and think that I want to kill all the germs in the world. This is not true. There is good bacteria in our bodies and our environment that is extremely important. I consider myself a "norophobe" and not a "germaphobe". " -- http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/about-the-scientist#TOC-My-....

And yet even the bad ones are important, because without them your immune system can't keep building immunity. If you have an immune system deficiency then by all-means doing research on this is important, but there's really no point in trying to get rid of all the "bad" germs just to get rid of them, because eventually that will weaken your immune system.

Synthetic fibers haven't been around long from an evolutionary point of view. Are you sure they don't encourage a novel pattern of bacteria growth that could be harmful to some humans? Anecdotally, synthetic fibers are known to easily start smelling bad. I often clean things with synthetic microfiber cloths, and I occasionally wash them in diluted bleach, because I noticed they can start to smell bad if I don't.

so, when my daughter has bronchitis and has been coughing in her pillow for several days, you don't see the point of making sure that pillow case is clean before using it again after she's better? Like, you don't think she might get a second infection?

because in my experience, kids get sick again and again, sometimes it takes a month to get through the cycle

If the immune system has 'won', you can't get a second infection from exactly the same germ again.

(The only exception I know of is HIV: this virus fools your immune system)

in the optimistic scenario, I guess. i have doubts that things work out so well in practice.

No, that's how the immune system works. It produces antibodies. Unless you've got some crazy mutating thing, recovery and immunity are synonymous.

It should be noted that for a number of "specific conditions or disease", the most effective measures aren't targeted. Things like...bleaching your clothing, washing your hands, etc. work well.

That's why things like that are pushed so heavily.

You can use Norwex detergent and Lysol laundry sanitizer together. Those two specific brands had the only bleach-like results.

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