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HALIFAX, N.S. —

We and everything around us are pretty much covered in fecal bacteria, but it’s nothing we should get worked up about, according to an infectious disease expert.

Jennifer Gardy, a senior scientist at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, says you shouldn’t worry about what microbial critters may be coating things we regularly touch.

A recent report out of the U.K. suggested the touchscreen ordering system at a fast-food chain’s restaurants were found to be harbouring fecal coliform bacteria. The Chronicle Herald was curious about whether the same would be true about something that pretty much everyone who buys food, goods and services outside of their home handles regularly: the hand-held debit machine.

“Literally everything in the world is covered in bacteria,” Gardy said in a telephone interview. “All of these studies that go and look and say ‘oh, we found fecal coliform bacteria on the touchscreens at McDonald’s, we found it on cafeteria screens, we found it on the ATM screens on the bank,’ — you can’t not find fecal coliform bacteria.

“I like to say that basically all of us are existing in a world that’s pretty much coated in a thin film of fecal bacteria. So pretty much every surface in our home is covered with these coliform bacteria. If you’ve got a toothbrush sitting out on your bathroom counter, your toothbrush handle’s going to be coated in it. If you swab the handle of your refrigerator, if you swab your kitchen countertop, the pet’s water dish, you will find fecal coliform bacteria everywhere.”

"All of these studies that go and look and say ‘oh, we found fecal coliform bacteria on the touchscreens at McDonald’s, we found it on cafeteria screens, we found it on the ATM screens on the bank,’ — you can’t not find fecal coliform bacteria." — Jennifer Gardy, B.C. Centre for Disease Control

Gardy, who is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics at the University of British Columbia, said stories like the one out of the U.K. bother her. She likens them to “microbial fearmongering.”

Most bacteria is common, natural and pretty much harmless to the average healthy adult as long as you regularly wash your hands.

“Occasionally, you do encounter a few pathogens out there, but, again, it’s nothing that a bit of soap, water and some common sense won’t deal with,” Gardy said. “A bit of regular hand-washing (is recommended), especially in winter when people tend to be a bit sicker, but people shouldn’t be terrified of touching things out there in the world just because they’re covered in bacteria.”

Gardy will be familiar to regular watchers of CBC’s The Nature of Things. She has hosted the science show on a range of topics, including one episode that focused on poop.

Our own bodies are hardly examples of pristine environments, she said, although what some consider contamination is actually vital to how it all works.

“We are covered in microbes,” she said. “They’re all over us. They’re inside of us and they’re an incredibly important part of our body and own sort of human ecosystem. Without the microbes on our skin, without the microbes in our gut and elsewhere on our body, we just wouldn’t be able to do so many of the things that sort of make us human. We wouldn’t be able to digest our food without microbes.

“And one of the things that we’re realizing is that exposure to microbes, especially those sort of harmless things that are just out there in the environment, is actually incredibly important for our immune system to develop properly.”

She likened it to a child completely sheltered from all conversations, books and media ending up with very limited language abilities when mature.

“That system is never going to develop fully,” Gardy said. “The same sort of thing can happen to our immune system if it’s bored when we’re growing up. If we’re too clean, if we aren’t out there eating dirt, getting licked by the family pet dog or getting our hands dirty and touching our faces, especially when we’re young, our immune system doesn’t have anything to do and it starts looking for other targets.”

Meaning instead of learning to recognize bad germs, it starts recognizing ourselves — our own bodies — as the enemy.

“And that’s why you start to see things like asthma, allergies, these sort of auto-immune diseases,” Gardy said.

“They’re the direct result of us growing up too clean. So not only is it ... not scary that there are bacteria everywhere but it’s actually good that we’re coming into contact with dirty objects like your touchscreen, like your debit machine, like your kitchen counter. It’s actually helping us out in the long run.”