Word: showering
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...Singapore government. Equally important, by using so much of its land to capture rainwater, Singapore has made its citizens environmental stewards who take responsibility for conserving resources. "It's a passion," says Albert Phee, a 49-year-old IT expert who has persuaded his family to turn off the shower while shampooing and reuse the water he washes his car with for flushing the toilet. "Once I've started, I can't stop...
...Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Pace dispersed a team of undergraduate students into 45 bathrooms mostly in New York City and Denver to swab and test the inside of showerheads; bacteria tend to accumulate in dense communities there, forming thin, gooey "biofilms." When you run the shower, germs are ejected out of the showerhead in the spray. Inhale the fine water droplets and M. avium gets a direct passage to your lungs where it proceeds to wreak havoc if your immune system isn't strong enough...
...does this mean you should turn off the shower and go back to old-fashioned baths? Not exactly. "If you are an otherwise healthy person, there is no cause for alarm," says Dr. Lynn Connolly, a practicing clinician and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who has treated patients with M. avium infection. Connolly is quick to add that if you have AIDS, chronic lung disease, cystic fibrosis or an immune system disorder, then there is some cause for concern. In such patients, the bacteria can cause lung diseases, and in some extreme cases infections in other...
...soil outside our homes. If you receive municipal water, then you're getting about 10 million of these and other microbes per liter of tap water, says Pace. And while it's possible that some people's disease may be specifically related to the bacteria that comes from the shower, the only way to know for sure is to genetically match the pathogen in infected patients with the bugs in their showers. A few such studies have been done in the past, but each time with a tiny sample of one or two patients...
...avoid a face full of bacteria each morning (Pace's team identified more than a dozen microbes other than M. avium in the showers they tested), let the shower run for a while before getting in. And remember to keep one eye open for zombies...