The American obsession with cleanliness.

My husband once told me a childhood story that, for better or worse, is permanently seared into my neural pathways.

When he was around 10, his two best friends were identical twin brothers (we’ll call them Stink and Stinkier). The pair had the utterly bizarre quirk of running home to change if they passed noticeable gas. Not just their underwear, but their entire outfits. Immediately. Was it because something mistakenly came out? Was it because they believed the scent from their fluff had left an indelible mark on their bottoms and transferred to their clothing? Or, just possibly, was this an unfortunate case of parental shaming?

We’ll never know for certain, but Stink and Stinkier are far from unique when it comes to our society’s extreme compulsion to smell “good.” It’s more than just cleanliness; this is aggressive de-scenting. Supermarkets and box stores proffer many ways for humans to strip themselves of indigenous odors on our persons and in our environments: Lysol wet-naps to clean cart handles, anti-bacterial hand cleansers in every imaginable dispenser tool to scare off bacteria, flushable wipes to improve upon toilet paper, antiperspirant to transform us into cucumber mints and peach cobbler breezes, Axe to manifest chick magnet glory (make that delusion) for teen boys.

We shower more than anyone anywhere, we wash our clothing after just one wear, and we slather a multitude of scents on our body, from shampoo to conditioner to lotion to perfume to deodorant – anything, in fact, but au naturel.

Bromidrophobia, or fear of body odors, is relatively common in modern society. About.com says of it: “Today’s emphasis on cleanliness has led to the belief that bodily scents are dirty or taboo. This can lead to an unhealthy obsession with ensuring that our regular odors are removed or masked.”

Run a quick Google search of Bromidrophobia, and you’ll see stories of people washing their hands until they’re raw, showering three or more times a day and yes, cleaning their clothes just as often. Bromidrophobia can also refer to a fear of others’ body odors creeping up on us when we sit close on public transportation or even (gulp), the next TED talk you attend. Stink and Stinkier, indeed.

According to Vadim Bolshakov, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, our need to wash away scent is actually taking away our ability to tell others (without opening our mouths), that we are having a response to them.

Bolshakov wrote in her proposal for an MIT installation that, “In the West, smell is thought of in ‘aesthetic terms – pleasant or unpleasant,’ whereas in other cultures, body smell is an important personal defining feature. Since our representations of the world are most of the time scentless, this indeed reinforces the social drive for deodorization of the world.”

But what are the consequences for our need to be clean? In terms of clothing, this means an exorbitant over-usage of water and the wasted time to do overwhelming amounts of laundry, not to mention fueling obsessive compulsive behavior – and consumption of products to “fix” it all.

Kelly Drennan of Fashion Takes Action writes in a recent EcoSalon article: “The average North American household washes 400 loads of laundry per year. This accumulated number of washes requires 13,500 gallons of water to complete, and is equivalent to how much water it takes to fill a standard above-ground pool.”

And what of that “extra cleaning power” you often see advertised in laundry detergent? Those cleaners often come with a potent chemical cocktail that is not only harmful to groundwater but to your body, emitting a carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting additive so that you can combat the scent of the low-rent restaurant you were just dining in or, yes, the gas you just passed. With our socially-approved penchant for washing items after just one wear, you have to wonder what all this lather is doing to our bodies and brains.

And then there’s the other fabric taking on entirely too much sulfate: the social fabric. Being squeaky clean means more than a health and ecological hit. It may also interfere with our ability to select appropriate mates, or sniff out trustworthy friends, or sense danger, say evolutionary biologists. So ask yourself: when was the last time you stopped and smelled the Joneses?

Images: Sean Rogers1, Prayitno, jbcurio

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Last year, it was widely reported that drinking water in many major metropolitan areas was contaminated with trace amounts of drugs. All types of drugs – everything from over-the-counter pain medications to antidepressants to prescription medication for high blood pressure and heart disease.

The drugs we ingest pass right through our bodies and are expelled in our urine. These drugs aren’t removed in the water treatment process and the water is released into our rivers and lakes, which serve as our water supply.

The chatter eventually died down with assurances that the amounts were so small they couldn’t possibly impact human health. But how do we know that for certain? The truth is, we don’t know enough about the effects of prolonged exposure and possible interactions between all the different drugs we ingest in our drinking water.

Drugs given to animals enter our water supply in the same way. Not only does this practice contaminate the water with steroids, hormones, and antibiotics, but because antibiotics are overused (given to healthy animals to prevent disease and increase growth) there is a high likelihood of deadly, drug-resistant infections that can be passed onto humans.

Of particular concern is a staph infection called MSRA which is killing more than 18,000 Americans a year and, as was recently reported, is showing up on hog farms.

Another recent story outlines how river fish in urban areas are contaminated with trace amounts of drugs, simply from living in the rivers through which our treated sewage flows. River fish in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando were all tested and compared to fish from a river in New Mexico into which no treated sewage flows.

The fish were tested for 24 different pharmaceuticals and 12 chemicals found in personal care products. Trace concentrations of seven drugs were found in fish at all five of the urban river sites. None were found in the fish from New Mexico.

These issues are part and parcel of the same problem. The drugs we take, dump down the sink or toilet or give to animals end up in the water supply because there is no “away”. When we throw things away or flush our toilets, our stuff has to go somewhere.

Last month, Congress introduced a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. It aims to prohibit farmers from feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals. This is great and long overdue, but it won’t entirely solve our drug problem.

We must also shift our thinking. Planners, policy makers, corporations and individuals all need to remember that we are connected to one another and all things are part of the web of nature. Everything we do has some effect downstream. We must all begin to think less linearly and more holistically about our actions.

In the meantime, you can start by finding out more about the antibiotics issue here.

Image: publik15

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