What Makes a Germophobe?

What Makes a Germophobe?
by Steve Templeton at Brownstone Institute

The following is an excerpt from Steve Templeton’s book, Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe.

Germophobia, also known by the more clinical term, mysophobia, isn’t generally considered a condition all by itself. Instead, it’s usually associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. Germs just happen to be one thing that people on the OCD spectrum tend to obsess about and use to justify compulsive behaviors. Not all people with OCD are germophobes, but it’s much safer to say that most, if not all, germophobes are further along the OCD spectrum than most.

How do people with OCD tendencies become germophobes? In the case of my sister, she became a nurse and worked in a cardiac surgical team. As anyone knows, the threat of nosocomial, or hospital-acquired infection, is a serious one in patients that undergo open-heart surgery. Basically, it was a part of her job to obsess about the possibility of contamination and infection in her patients, and obsessively clean and disinfect everything near and in contact with them to prevent potentially-life threatening infections in a vulnerable population.

The problem is that the more she worked in this demanding job, the harder it got not to see every room like an operating room. Unfamiliar places like hotel rooms became especially suspect—God knows who had been there and what they were doing—and how bad a job cleaning the housekeeping staff was doing. A germophobe doesn’t need to see the deadly germs; they simply know they are there, ready to infect unwitting people, and everyone is vulnerable.

A common thread among germophobes seems to be an inciting event of terror-inducing infection or exposure—something that drove them from mere OCD to full-on mysophobia. In the 2005 book Germ Freak’s Guide to Outwitting Colds and Flu, self-described germophobe Allison Janse recounts the effect of birthing two twins seven weeks premature on her sense of their vulnerability. She observed the compulsively clean environment of the NICU and, upon the discharge of her twins, was told to stay away from “obviously sick people.”

But that turned out to be impossible, as she found herself in line at a pharmacy with a coughing and sneezing “obviously sick person.” Two days later, she became one herself, and was thus terrified of infecting her own children, possibly not realizing that her own immune system would also provide protective antibodies through her breast milk. But a doctor made an already bad situation worse by prescribing Ciprofloxacin (useless for a likely viral infection) and telling her to stop breastfeeding because the antibiotic would be secreted in her breast milk. It didn’t help, and only scared the hell out of her, causing her to wear gloves and a mask when she handled her kids for a week. As she put it, “a germ freak was born.”

The rest of Janse’s book contains a lot of obvious germophobe tips that wouldn’t have impressed my sister, like how to avoid handshakes and touching anything in public places to use of products like a UV-light toothbrush sanitizer. Pretty much every situation outside of hiding under your covers had a fail-safe method to prevent being exposed.

Yet the most interesting parts of the book were where Janse managed to acknowledge the truth about our bacterial environment, while still failing to understand the limitations of her “the only good germ is a dead germ” mentality. She admitted that antibacterial soap isn’t more effective than regular soap and might have other drawbacks like “unnatural selection” of disease-causing variants. She also dismissed the utility of masks for healthy people: “You’re not that much of a germ freak—plus unless your mask fits perfectly it’s useless.” Finally, she conceded that the boatload of germs found in places like gyms and daycares probably weren’t all that harmful to healthy adults and children, and in some circumstances, might even be beneficial. Even as she failed to apply these nuggets of realism to the rest of the book (this would obviate the need for the book), their mere existence suggests that some germophobes might actually know the truth about their microenvironment, yet remain in denial when it comes to the actual practice of living in a real world bursting with microbes.

What Makes a Germophobe?
by Steve Templeton at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society