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What's Hiding on Your Floor?
Bacteria, Germs and Viruses That May Be Lurking Where Baby Crawls
By Kelly Burgess
Furthermore, Dr. Gerba says, children can get sick from the germs tracked into the house. He gives as an example going to a daycare center and walking around, picking up a rotavirus on your shoes and coming home and tracking it onto the carpet. Children, especially babies and toddlers, not only are lower to the ground, they're more intimate with their environment. Dr. Gerba says the germiest hands in your house are those of kids returning from playgrounds.
"Children around 2 years of age put their fingers to their faces almost 50 times per hour," Dr. Gerba says. "They don't have the sense to wash every time they touch they ground. At that age, they're always touching the ground."
Dr. Asriani Chiu, an asthma/allergist at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, agrees with all of this – in theory. In practice, however, she says kids are a lot tougher than we give them credit for, and points out that most research indicates that a certain ongoing, natural exposure to germs, viruses, bacteria and all that other yucky stuff is probably a good thing.
"I would be of the perspective that children are going to be exposed to germs of all different kinds from infancy and it's part of our natural experience," Dr. Chiu says. "If the child has a competent immune system the exposure will be appropriate to develop antibodies to help them develop lifelong immunities."
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