One of the big selling points for many commercial cleaners is their claim to kill 99% of germs in minutes. Since we discovered germs, we’ve realised why keeping our houses clean is so important. Dirt harbours germs, and germs make us sick. This is why we clean our toilets, plates, and clothes. We don’t want to get ill with some horrible germ.
Blindly relying on expensive wonder-products is not the solution. While they may effectively kill germs, these commercial cleaners can harm the environment and introduce toxins into your home, posing a threat to your body’s systems. It’s crucial to pause and consider the best approach to germ control, and the true purpose of home cleaning.
What Makes Germs Dangerous?
Understanding the life cycle of germs is essential. Your immune system swiftly handles a single germ. The challenge arises when germs proliferate to a point where your body struggles to combat them, leading to symptoms like vomiting, diarrhoea, and fever. Therefore, the key to effective domestic cleaning is to create an environment that hinders germ reproduction.
The ultimate goal is to prevent germ reproduction. Damaging germs’ cellular structure or depriving them of their basic needs, food and water, are effective strategies. Any cleaning routine aimed at hygiene should focus on these two approaches.
How To Prevent Germ Infestation At Home?
Depriving them. This is the harder part of cleaning. Grime is food for germs, so anything you do to remove it will deprive them of their food. Cleaning that deprives germs of food involves vacuuming, general scrubbing and wiping to remove grime, dusting, carpet cleaning and doing the laundry. It also involves flushing the loo and scrubbing/wiping away debris. Don’t forget to deprive germs of water, too.
Drying dishes, clothes, and other items to be stored minimises water and makes it harder for germs to reproduce. This may also be why salt can be used around the home as a germ-killing cleaner: it desiccates germs by drawing water out of them.
Damaging germs is a bit more straightforward. The only real problem is that the substances that can denature germs will also attack your skin cells (and other cells). However, your body, being a multi-cellular organism, can easily sacrifice a few cells for the sake of the whole being. So, the secret is to use things that will damage the germs but won’t damage too many of your cells.
Heat is one of the simplest forms of denaturing the proteins inside bacteria and viruses so they can’t reproduce. This is why hot water and steam cleaning are so effective. Not only does this remove grime, but it also kills germs. Boiling (pasteurisation) is an excellent sterilisation method, so if you need to shift germs and the item to be cleaned can stand it, boiling water works! The high temperatures in dishwashers also help kill germs. Fire also sterilises, but it has some apparent drawbacks! The only place you can use fire as a germ-killer around the home is for sterilising a needle for lancing boils or digging out thistles.
You can also chemically dissolve germs’ cell walls by disturbing their pH. This can be done with acid (in the form of vinegar) or with alkali (in the form of soap). Other substances also seem to break down bacteria by unravelling or dissolving their makeup, with alcohol being one (it’s a solvent)—vodka, whisky, rubbing alcohol, or methylated spirits all do the job of killing germs around the home.
Do Organic Products Work Against Germs?
One of the reasons many people are hesitant about switching to natural products, even if they have sensitive skin that flares up, dries, itches or flakes when they use proprietary cleaning products, is the issue of germs. Do natural cleaning products manage to kill germs adequately? How can you protect yourself against food poisoning, dysentery and all those other bacterial diseases?
This belief is understandable. In the past, when natural homemade cleaners were the only option available, cholera and all that ilk were much higher. However, it wasn’t the cleaners that were at fault. The real problem was that germs were unknown to science at that stage (or practically unknown). As late as the mid-1860s, when Mrs Isabella Beeton was writing her landmark tome on household management – which included recipes for cleaning products – “germ theory” was still hotly debated (Mrs Beeton, incidentally, did believe in germs, and some of her theories reflect this, despite some carpet cleaning recipes calling for ox-gall as an ingredient). This was an era when doctors cheerfully wore the same apron for a week while doing surgeries, and they could go from performing a post-mortem to delivering a baby without washing hands in between.
Even earlier, people believed bathing was unhealthy and that wearing linen underclothing would keep you healthy… as long as you changed it about once a week and used plenty of eau-de-cologne.
Many of the bacterial diseases that were rife in the past were cleaned up adequately with what was recommended by pioneers like Lister, Pasteur and Florence Nightingale: fresh air, sunshine, regular washing hands, etc. soap, and sterilising things that need it (e.g. surgical implements) with boiling water. Add in decent plumbing throughout cities so you’re not drinking water that somebody has emptied a chamber pot into, plus modern vaccination programmes and antibiotics, and you eliminate even more causes of bacterial disease.
The modern trend to have unique anti-bacterial, disinfectant and germicidal ingredients in nearly every household cleaning product on the market comes largely from the efforts of the advertising world. While it does indeed make sense to have a higher standard of hygiene in a hospital setting, our homes do not need to be quite that germ-free. We are not trying to perform surgeries in our bathrooms, after all. However, in the early 20th century, marketers saw their opportunity as knowledge about germs and bacteria spread. They fed the general public (mainly middle-class housewives who had their occupation limited to keeping house, had money to spend and had appearances to maintain) the idea that the tiniest germ lurking in the most obscure part of your house will bring down your children with some fearsome disease – and so you should spend money on Brand X to “protect” your family and fight “hidden dirt”.
However, most natural cleaning products are more than adequate at getting rid of germs. Soap and alcohol are relatively effective disinfectants, as is boiling water. Vinegar kills mould spores and bacteria—the reason it is used to pickle vegetables. Essential oils, especially oregano, lavender, tea tree, and pine, are even better disinfectants when used in concentrated form than hospital-grade lab-created disinfectants.
All you need to do to kill bacteria (aside from poisoning them with alcohol or soap or denaturing their proteins with boiling water) is to remove one of the things they need to survive and reproduce. Bacteria are living creatures and require food, water and warmth. Remove the food (in the form of dirt – and we’re talking about ordinary visible dirt here, not mysterious “hidden dirt”) and the water (by thorough drying and by regular airing), and the germs will starve to death.
Indeed, your environment will not be 100% germ-free. However, your body has adequate defences to fight off invading bacteria. Suppose we stopped using commercial cleaners, stuck to good old natural cleaners like soap and water, and ate a diet rich in immune-boosting fruit and vegetables. In that case, we’d be better off if we kept eating muck food, stressing out about germs, and sloshing disinfectant all over the show.
