Are Antimicrobial Soaps Breeding Tougher Bugs?
Our culture’s cleanliness obsession has been fed by a booming business in household products that promise the virtue of sterility. According to estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency, our antimicrobial crusade has us spending almost $1 billion annually on soaps and detergents, toys and cutting boards, bedsheets and toothbrushes, all of them treated with chemical compounds designed to kill the germs that cling to them. At the forefront of this product niche is the antimicrobial hand wash, commonly fortified with the bug-battling chemical triclosan. It may be a dangerous, germ-filled world out there, but with your little bottle of — choose one: Dial, Safeguard, Palmolive — you can stroll worry-free through it. Or so you may think. How Soaps Work and How to Wash Properly Clean, by the Books The problem about our obsession with killing germs, some scientists and public health advocates warn, is that it may ultimately do us more harm than good. Chief among those skeptics is micr
