Many people are worried that all this focus on handwashing, sanitizing and disinfecting will weaken their immune system.
The question is are we weakening our immune systems through excessive handwashing and disinfecting everything?
The answer is probably not.
Can we be oversanitizing and lowering our immune systems?
Dr. Lisa Pickett, chief medical officer at Duke University Hospital, answers: “That’s a great question. In the long term, we don’t know. In the short term, certainly the benefit of cleansing everything outweighs the risks. This is a monumental and sort of surreal time where the risk of getting infected and getting ill are very high. So, really keeping everything around you quite clean, keeping your home clean, the surfaces at work clean, being good about hand hygiene and again, wearing masks and staying six feet apart from people is definitely the best way to stay safe and healthy for you and your family.”
“There are some hypotheses that exposure to different and mostly harmless pathogens can help us build up our immunity,” said Alain Simard, a professor of immunology at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. “But I would not say that sanitizing our hands and keeping a certain distance weakens it in our current scenario. ”
Steve Theriault, a virologist specializing in infectious disease in Winnipeg, said that there are “cases where people who have been away from populations and have had constantly clean areas have not shown that the immune system gets compromised.”
There are no studies on the impact of fastidiousness and our immunity, most experts agree that we’re probably not hurting our immune systems by practising physical distancing and disinfection.
