Drop Dead Healthy A. Jacobs (good novels to read .TXT) 📖

clink the bottom of the glass, where the germ colonies are presumably sparser. And so on.)

Julie hates when I watch germ reports. She’s on the opposite end of the spectrum. Our society is too hygiene obsessed, she says, and it’s turning us into immunological pansies. Go ahead, she’ll tell the boys, play in the sandbox, despite what Daddy says about residual fecal matter. Drink from that water fountain. A few months ago, Zane was eating an ice-cream cone from the overpriced ice cream shop in our neighborhood. Then his scoop fell on the sidewalk. Amazingly, he didn’t get upset. Instead, he got down on all fours and started licking it off the pavement like a golden retriever. A woman walking behind him gasped, “Oh my God.” But Julie? She had no problem with it. New York is one big dinner plate.

Which is why she’s even less happy about the visit I’m about to make. I am meeting with the Ron Jeremy of microbial fetish videos: Dr. Philip Tierno, the director of clinical microbiology and immunology at New York University Langone Medical Center. Also known as Dr. Germ. You might recognize Tierno from his segments on the Today show. The one on pillows featured millions of skin-eating dust mites, and has made me lose at least a week of sleep. He’s the expert of experts.

“He’s an enabler,” Julie says. She might have a point.

But if my goal is to be the healthiest person alive, I have to figure out the best way to conquer these germs.

I arrive at Tierno’s midtown lab, where I find him studying a slide of toxic bacilli. He’s bald, with a neat white beard and round wire-rim glasses. He sticks out his hand to greet me.

What? Dr. Germ wants to shake hands? That makes no sense at all. I respond by offering him my elbow for an elbow bump.

“Ah, this guy knows what he’s doing,” says Tierno. I beam. We go back to his cluttered office, filled with a microscope, eleven bottles of cleaning fluids, and two thousand biology books stacked in towering piles. Bach plays in the background.

First, Tierno wants me to know that germs suffer from some bad PR. Most bacteria are harmless. In fact, human beings are mostly germs. We are walking around with 90 percent germ cells, and just 10 percent human cells with our DNA. Germs are in our gut, in our mouth, in our eyebrows.

We came from germs. The oldest sign of life on earth is a fossilized germ cell found in Australia from 3.5 billion years ago.

“There are 156,000 categories of germs around, but only a small percentage are pathogenic. Maybe two thousand of these.”

Ah, but those two thousand—you don’t want them anywhere near you. Consider that infectious disease is the second leading cause of death in the world after cardiovascular disease. Here’s a disturbing statistic: Every year, a hundred thousand people in the United States die because of infections they got at the hospital (they are called nosocomial infections). Another one: Every year, germs in food sicken an astounding 76 million people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Tierno started his road to germ whisperer when he was in eighth grade and read a biography of Louis Pasteur. I mention I’m a fan of Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who first developed the idea of sterile surgery.

“Semmelweis was an even bigger hero,” says Tierno, of the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. “He used to wash his hands after dealing with pregnant women, whereas most obstetricians just wiped their hands on their smocks, and killed patients by passing an infection from one woman to the other.”

Hand washing is one of Dr. Tierno’s passions. He thinks America needs a massive public education campaign on it, along the lines of our antismoking PR blitz. “It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health,” he says. “Eighty percent of all infections are transmitted by direct or indirect contact.”

The key is to do it well, which few of us do. Most of us are hardly better than the French aristocrats in the court of Louis XIV. Back then, says Tierno, doctors advised washing only the tips of the fingers, for fear that water transmitted disease.

Tierno—who says he hasn’t had a cold in four years—walks me down the hall to the bathroom for a hand-washing demo. He splashes water on his hands, squirts the liquid soap, and lathers up for thirty seconds before returning his hands under the water.

“Around the wrists. In between the fingers. Getting each nail.”

He squishes and slides his palms together. He digs under his nails with his thumb and flicks his wrist. It’s a virtuoso performance, like Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello or Al Pacino screaming obscenities. It’s a long way from the average person’s five-second dunk.

“Happy Birthday, Philly Boy,” he sings as he finishes up. “Happy birthday to you.” (For those who don’t know, you’re supposed to sing the entire birthday song during washing, to make sure you take your time.)

When we get back to his office, I grill him on the questions he gets from every John Q. Germaphobe:

Do Purell and other hand sanitizers work?

Yes. “You need to make sure you use enough. A quarter-size dollop.” Tierno, along with the CDC, recommends alcohol-based gels if you can’t wash your hands.

“I love it, but my wife hates the smell,” I tell him.

Dr. Tierno sniffs his hands. “What’s to hate? Tell her it’s like vodka.”

Incidentally, I spent some time on the Purell website, where you can find a list of ninety-nine places germs lurk (in-flight magazines, movie tickets, gas-pump keypads, hotel room a/c controls, and on and on). It’s hilarious and terrifying. The only place they don’t mention is the Purell dispensers themselves. You know they’re coated with germs. It’s one of health’s cruelest catch-22s.

Do Purell and antibacterial soap create supergerms? Like MRSA?

“No. Germs don’t develop a resistance to alcohol or antibiotic soaps. They can develop a resistance to antibiotics.” Tierno recommends against popping