Speaking as a person who, as a virgin, married a virgin, and remains happily married to her a quarter-century later, I’m tempted — tempted, I say — to thumb my nose and chant, “nyah, nyah, nya-nyah nyaaaaah.”

Or maybe to just observe: “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

I acknowledge: That response would be a bit petty. Sorry.

Still….

Once upon a time, there was a widespread notion that you should only sleep with a person if you were interested in being married to them, being the other parent of their children, and ultimately being the doting and spoiling grandparent of their grandchildren. That particular notion — setting aside any questions of divine sanction or whatnot — evolved to a settled practice over a quarter-million years of human social evolution.

And then, like a bunch of French Revolutionaries instituting a 10-day week, we started abolishing all that starting around 1930 or so at the Anglicans’ Lambeth Conference (a much more consequential event then than now), and coming to a climax sometime around the Summer of “Love.”

So. How’s that workin’ for ya’?

For most of life – use water & soap. Water alone will get rid of nearly all bacteria, the soap just improves on that efficiency.

Antibacterials are bad, because:
– they contain alcohol, which dries out the skin, and can cause cracking and other damage, leading to surfaces susceptible to invasion by microbes.
– when they wipe out ALL bacteria, they also wipe out the GOOD bacteria. That leaves a void in the ecosystem of your skin, and makes it vulnerable to colonization by BAD bacteria.
– they increase bacterial resistance.
– they are costly.

The only time such measures should be used is when a bacterial infection has entered the environment, causing illness. When the flu hits, yes, use anti-bacterials. Once the infection abates, return to normal procedures.

Overpopulation
Polution
Income inequality
Depletion of the Ozone Layer
HIV/AIDS
African Killer Bees
Soil Depletion
Y2K
Ebola
Global Warming
Etc…

This is nothing new. About two hundred years ago there was an article produce by a “Naturalist” named Thomas Malthus. He predicted the end of human civilization due to overpopulation. He even calculated an approximate date (1920). He based all of this on population projections, the amount of arable land on the planet, and the amount of food that could be produced per acre. Needless to say, his predictions did not pan out. But, at the time, they had a lot of people worried and there were demands for immediate and drastic action by the government.

And this is always the common thread of such claims: “There is a dire threat and therefore we need government money and action to study this further and look for solutions.” This, in turn, is used as the reasoning to increase taxes and concentrate more power in the hands of government.

Anyway, so far, I have survived all of the “end of the world” predictions and the only thing that happened was that taxes increased and government got bigger.

Chemosynthetic bacteria were referred to in my high school biology class nearly 40 years ago. I don’t think it’s a new discovery.

Lately, I believe that I’ve seen articles talking about current research showing that bacteria can survive on metal surfaces (kitchen and otherwise) for quite some time–don’t know about the alcohol though.

I’d guess that these bacteria could be a mild version of some of the newly discovered “extremophile” bacteria, discovered existing in the boiling water over deep ocean lava vents, or deep within Arctic soil, where the temperatures are way, way below zero.

This discovery of extremophile bacteria has major implications for the search for extraterrestrial life, since it widens and tremendously expands the conditions under which life could evolve and live i.e. the potential number of planets (and perhaps other celestial bodies as well) on which life of some kind could possibly evolve just grew by several orders of magnitude.

The Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico website says that, as of now, they estimate that there are somewhere between 130-160 habitable planets in our neck of the woods i.e. within 33 light years of the Earth.

Expand the search out to our “stellar neighborhood” of around 27,000 light years within our Milky Way Galaxy, and that estimated number of habitable planets increases to around 50 billion planets.

This, of course, runs into “Fermi Paradox” i.e. if there are so many planets that may have developed life, and on some of those planets a civilization has arisen (and survived) that is sufficiently developed to have the ability and the drive to leave their solar system, and to explore, (maybe) we haven’t run into them, or them us.

So, as Fermi asked, “where is everybody.”

I never could understand how, in some–I don’t know how many that might still be–countries, you can just stroll into a “pharmacy,” and pick stuff off the shelves that a pharmacy in the U.S. would never sell to you without a prescription.

Self diagnosis and self medicating? Not a good idea.

Have you seen all the ads on TV for increasingly powerful drugs–with many and horrific side effects–for what, in many cases, are not life threatening illnesses, but almost seem–at least to me–more like annoyances.

But, of course, if you think you have an illness/condition, it can seem like the most horrible thing in the world to you, can dominate your thoughts; a condition that you will do almost anything to banish, try any supposed cure, if it will rid you of the problem.

That’s why it’s good to go to a Doctor, so you get someone who is objective to evaluate the seriousness of whatever ails you, or to reassure you that it’s normal, and nothing to worry about.

At that same military dispensary in Japan–right in the middle of a base housing thousand’s of military wives and their families–we used to dread each new monthly Readers Digest, because almost inevitably there would be an article in one of those months about a new “miracle cure” that had been discovered–monkey glands, say.

And it was pretty likely that someone would come in, waving the article, asking how come our doctors didn’t have this latest, cutting edge “cure.”

[Harry] Lime had been stealing penicillin from military hospitals, and selling it on the black market diluted so much that many patients died. In postwar Vienna, antibiotics were new and scarce outside military hospitals and commanded a very high price.

–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man

Back then, the thought was that, since you could go off base some places in East and SE Asia and buy Penicillin at pharmacies without a prescription, or pick some supposed “Penicillin” up cheaply on the black market, a lot of these GIs were avoiding the embarrassment of showing up at our dispensary for our weekly “VD Clinic” by self medicating with what they thought was “Penicillin” but wasn’t, or the “Penicillin” they got was cut to increase the seller’s profits, so they didn’t get the full dose they thought they were getting, or, if they got the real deal, they didn’t follow the dosing directions, and stopped treatment too early.

All this added up to strains of venereal diseases that were increasingly resistant to Penicillin.