Microbe Fear Mongering: The Selling of Poisons

We have become a society of people who fear the hosts of microbes that make their homes on and in us. The result of this fear is ingestion of poisons that not only destroy our health, but also destroy who we are.

by Heidi Stevenson

We live with microbes constantly our entire lives. We require them to exist, even though some can be disease-inducing. The fact is that we live constantly with all sorts of microbes that have the potential of inducing disease. Streptococcus bacteria thrive on our skin—and normally do so without causing us any harm.

So why are people so afraid of microbes today? It’s because of fear mongering. Marketing has become highly skilled at directing people’s thoughts, whether we like to believe it or not. It isn’t simply advertisements, but messages—sometimes subliminal, sometimes direct—included in magazine articles and news media reports, spoken by paid professionals from medicine or simply famous and trusted, product placements in movies and television shows, and pseudo science published in journals beholden to corporate sponsors. We are bombarded with these messages.

One of them has been that we need to be fearful of germs. We’ve been programmed to believe that we’re under constant attack and will become horribly ill if we don’t protect ourselves. So, how do we protect ourselves from these marauding microbes? With antimicrobic products, of course! Like triclosan, which has now been shown to destroy heart muscle.

If it seems farfetched, consider that most people did just fine before the advent of antimicrobial products—and that these products appeared at the same time that the fearmongering started.

Of course, we need to be reasonable. It isn’t healthy to live in filth. On the other hand, it’s not healthy—it isn’t even possible—to live in a state of sterility, either.

Somewhere along the line, we learned the lesson of not living in filth, so we cleaned up our cities, which had been festering cesspools of disease. Once that happened, the worst of infectious diseases largely became history. Unfortunately, it happened at the same time that oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies became massive and powerful. Working together, they created false images to sell their products. In some cases, those images were of a personal sense of self-worth or beauty or power. In others, they fomented fear, including the fear of disease-causing microbes.

Fear of disease is a powerful motivator, and it’s been distorted. In the case of microbes, the fear mongering has flamed near panic. Those who don’t partake are deemed irresponsible. People flock to so-called antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral products out of the well-fostered but mistaken belief that they’ll be saved from disease.

Trusting the agencies designated for protecting us—the alphabet soup of FDA, USDA, NIH, CDC, and EPA—people assume that the products declaring that they’ll protect us from germs are both effective and safe. They rarely realize that these agencies have become little more than arms of the corporations they’re supposed to protect us from.

Science is subverted to adhere to the fear mongering and act as little more than promoters of the products designed to quell those fears until they’ve been used up or have fallen apart. Standards are changed, and we’re all expected to adhere to them.

Time-honored ways of doing things are declared unsafe. We’re expected to cook meat until it’s lost most of the flavor and nutrition, avoid eating raw fruits and vegetables, and focus on the worst sources of nutrition, like grains.

We believe the nonsense promulgated by those who should know better, so that we come to believe that health can be found in a pharma-designed drug, while anything that comes from nature is suspect and treated as dangerous. We even come to believe that we can’t make our own decisions about our own bodies. We’re expected to simply hand them over to self-styled “professionals”, follow their orders, and let them do whatever they wish without question.

We survived for millions of years, meeting dangers, thwarting them, and taking over the world. Now that we’ve accomplished it, we seem to have found a far greater danger: ourselves. If the natural world can’t destroy us, then we’re bound and determined to do it to ourselves. All in the names of progress and health, of course.

Photo by nikkijw.

Tagged marketing, marketing microbes, microbes, microbes disease, politics