In 1988, a company in Ohio invented an alcohol-based hand cleaner, which was meant to be used by health-care worker; when soap and water were unavailable. Joe Kanfer, the company's C. E. O., told me recently, "there were a couple of other alcohol products out there, but they were really ugly. Either they were greasy   or they burned your hands white." Kanfer took a year and a half to develop this product which is visually appealing and does almost no harm to one's skin. Still. Kanfer lost money on it for more than a decade because people couldn't get what it was for. The product was called Purell. Today, you see it everywhere. My doctor uses it several times during every office visit. You can hear it in almost every office in the U. S. and school picnics would be impossible without it. The former president Grorge W.Bush was called a racist for using hand cleaner after first shaking hands with Barack Obama, but Bush also gave some of it to Obama and recommended it as a cold preventative  . What was once barely even a product is now a growing product category, worth hundreds of millions per year. The rise of Purell makes some health professionals uneasy. Some claimed that promoting hand cleaner may worsen "our culture's irrational   fear about bacteria." Still, the clear agreement among experts is that unclean hands pose a serious health risk, and are one of the main reasons in the spread of infections in hospitals. A 2007 study estimated that, in America in 2002, such infections resulted in more than a million and a half patient illnesses and caused or contributed to nearly a hundred thousand patient deaths - about double the number of U. S. deaths currently caused each year by AIDS and guns combined. However, I asked a food microbiologist whether clean hands might have a medical drawback. He said, "We might have a much healthier population if we adopted the kinds of condition that we see in many Third World countries, with poor-quality food and poor-quality water and lots of bacteria. If we did that, we would have adults who were very healthy and have very strong immune systems. Unfortunately, the price that we would pay would be extremely high child death rate. " What can we learn about the people in Third World countries?
They adopt healthy living habits. They have poor immune systems. They eat food with fewer bacteria. Their child death rate remains high.