Spring cleaning

With the lighter mornings and warmer days come the cleaning chores. Apparently, now is the time to jiggle the feather duster and shakedown the curtains because the spring winds help to blow away the dust and cobwebs. Some religious types claim that spring cleaning is a hangover from the Jewish tradition of sprucing the house before the Passover festival (roughly the same time as Easter). Me? I think it’s just because it is the first time in six months that you can actually see the accumulated fireplace filth and layer of grime behind the fridge. No longer does winter hide our housekeeping sins.

But before you unscrew the multipurpose cleaner, leaving the beach under the sink would be a wise thing to do, if results of newly published research are to be believed. Scientists from Finland recently announced that children probably get more infections when their parents regularly clean the house with bleach. Rather than cleansing our lives of nasty pathogens, they suggest that sterilising our floors and worktops gives kids a weaker immune system.

Of course, the idea that kids need to play in the muck isn’t new. Over a hundred years ago, doctors first noticed that posh kids suffered more allergies than “the farming class”. Now called the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, the theory is that stopping children from catching germs prevents their immune system from developing normally. And today, the finger of blame is firmly pointed at cleaning-obsessed parents. (It’s always the parents’ fault, right?).

The Finnish research quizzed thousands of parents from three countries (Spain, Finland and the Netherlands) about how often their youngsters were poorly. Among other questions, they were asked: “Do you or anybody else use bleach to clean the child’s home at least once a week?”. And the mums and dads who answered “Yes” also had kids who had more often suffered tonsillitis or had flu in the last year.

It sounds straightforward: bleach is bad for kids. But having scrubbed through the actual data, there are several grubby problems with this ‘discovery’. The actual differences in infection rates is small and some results simply make no sense; apparently bleach is linked to a single bout of the flu, but not to ear infections, sinusitis, bronchitis and pneumonia. The researchers asked lots of questions and I suspect that the apparent link between to bleach, flu and tonsillitis is just down to chance. And if not, who is to say that parents clean more often because their children are unwell – I know that I would mop more often if I had children who were sick.

In summary, I certainly wouldn’t suggest pouring all the bleach down the loo just yet (unless you want a super-shiny toilet bowl, that is). These scientists say that many of us disinfect too much – something that may well be true. It is undoubtedly good to let kids get grubby but there is some way to go before we can blame bleach specifically for sickly kids. Good hygiene and improved sanitation have probably saved more children’s lives than any other medical advancement in all of history. Moreover, the UK Hygiene Council say that we should actually work toward having more hygienic homes if we are to prevent spread of dangerous infections and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Knowing where to draw the line between too much and not enough cleaning doesn’t have a straightforward answer. My personal approach is to clean as regularly as possible, being particularly careful in the kitchen and bathroom, but to stop before the house smells like a swimming pool. And remember that, no matter what they may tell you, teenagers are never right when they tell you that a dirty bedroom is good for them.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.2011.03933.x/abstract