5 places in your home that are breeding superbugs

Your daily dose of paranoia: Mara Grunbaum on the 5 places in your home that are breeding superbugs. There's some serious besorgniserregend going on in this article. You'll walk away feeling both educated and an intense need to wash your hands.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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songofsixpence

I’m a bit of a neat freak and everything I own is kept clean.

Some people may argue with my definition of ‘clean’, though. I haven’t really used soap on my body in over a decade (a scrubbing after I’m exposed to something that makes me actually *appear* dirty does happen, though).

And when I do home cleaning, my biggest concern is making sure everything is rinsed off more than hitting surfaces with some kind of cleaner or disinfectant.

I don’t even have handsoap in my bathrooms (which has led to interesting remarks on the rare occasion that I have a visitor).

This is all leading up to this: I never get sick. Never. If I do feel as though I may be developing a cold, it’s gone within 12 hours. And that’s it.

More than an aversion to germs I have an insane aversion to chemical cleaners. The smell of someone using bleach or even dryer sheets a mile away is enough to cause me to fly into a fit of manic unhappiness. I can’t use other peoples’ washing machines because of the smell that their soap leaves in the machine, which gets and stays on my clothes and then gets on my body driving me bonkers.
- Anonymous
  
  “This is all leading up to this:”
  “the rare occasion that I have a visitor”
  
  Fixed. (more like sorted)
JulianR

“besorgniserregend” is an adjective… At least in German. It means “Beorgnis erregend” -> “concern-generating” -> “alarming”.

It’s quite funny to see how German vocabulary is creatively incorporated into other languages. Like “Kindergartners”, which is much closer to the german word for “preschool-teacher” than to the “child at a preschool”.
caipirina

I also stumbled over the German word … in this case it should have been either ‘There is some Besorgniserregung going on’ or ‘There is something besorgniserregend going on’ …

Gesundheit :D
Zadaz

Actually I walk away feeling educated and the need to wash my hands less.

Each one you kill makes them stronger.
bmcraec

When I realized it was Popular Mechanics, I didn’t bother going through the whole thing. The mechanics they make popular involve fear, surprise and a fanatical devotion toâ€¦ well, a new world order.
Saint Fnordius

Aye, Julian, you are correct. Even though I am tickled that Maggie used the term I provided in an earlier comment thread, it’s one of those words that doesn’t work as a noun.

Maggie, how about “Sorgenfutter”, a compound word meaning food for worry/concern?