Edge on Health Blog

Here’s how to clean up your act—inside and out.

While Americans take pride in their high standard of hygiene, in many unsuspecting ways our homes are actually filthy.

Super bugs like staph are lurking where you would least expect them. Before you draw yourself a nice, hot bath to wash off unwanted pathogens, consider this—the bathtub is, ironically, the dirtiest of all places in most homes.

To be fair, nearly 90% of all surfaces recently tested in American homes were actually squeaky clean, but the remaining contaminated surfaces are enough to make anyone really sick. For example, one-quarter of households sampled in a recent survey had never ever cleaned their computer keyboards—a great repository for germs. Staph has even been found on 11 percent of our keyboards and computer mice.

But super bugs are not all we need to be aware of.

The neighborhood raccoons foraging around your garbage cans can leave more than a mess. They commonly spread roundworm, a parasite increasingly found in humans in this country.

And a new study in Parasitology Research shows that parasites—particularly nematodes and trematodes—are invading more fresh water fish. That’s a problem, especially since physicians in this country aren’t very good at recognizing parasitic infections.

Dr. Ann Louise’s Take:

It’s relatively easy to protect against super bugs—as long as you know where the “uninvited guests” may be hiding.

It’s a good idea to clean your keyboard and mouse regularly with an alcohol swab or very diluted bleach and water. Do you clean the seal where the tub meets the tile? Instead of trying to clean up germs every time you take a bath or shower, maybe it’s time to get out the caulking gun and seal away germs! And of course, it wouldn’t hurt using Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotic Soap whenever you wash your hands in the house to maintain the anti-bacterial acid mantle of your own skin!

The Parasites Among Us
Keyboards and bathtubs aside, let’s look inside our own bodies for the next type of uninvited guests—the parasites among us. Amazingly, more than half of all Americans have parasites at some time or another. Unfortunately, mainstream doctors rarely recognize the signs, as a study in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology shows. “Surveys suggest that physicians test when parasites are unlikely and fail to order appropriate testing when suspicion is high,” study authors say.

As I’ve explained to clients for decades, there are numerous warning signs:

• Allergies (parasites irritate and sometimes perforate the intestinal lining, increasing bowel permeability to large undigested molecules and activating the body’s immune response, causing allergic reactions)

• Anemia (if enough parasites are present, you can lose enough blood to cause iron deficiency or anemia)

• Constipation (some worms, because of their shape and size, can block the bile duct and intestinal tract, making elimination difficult and infrequent)

• Gas and bloating (some parasites live in the upper small intestine, making persistent abdominal distention a frequent sign of uninvited guests)

• Irritable bowel syndrome (parasites can inflame the intestinal cell wall, leading to various GI symptoms and malabsorption of vital nutrients)

• Joint and muscle aches/pains (some parasites can migrate and encyst in joint fluids and muscles, leading to chronic inflammation)

• Skin condition (parasites can cause allergic skin reactions: eczema, hives, rashes, sores)

If you or anyone in your family shows signs of parasites (and your health care practitioner lacks experience with these kinds of infections), you may want to test at home with the Parasite Test Kit. Just call 800-888-4353 to speak with a knowledgeable staff member.

Clean Up from the Inside Out
Research shows that a number of natural ingredients—black walnut, bromelain, butternut, cranberry, grapefruit seed, slippery elm, sweet wormwood—can help combat parasites and other pathogens.

Based on over 40 years of combined experience and research with thousands of people, My Colon Cleansing Kit offers one of the most advanced, but safe and gentle, internal cleansing methods available today.

Using all natural ingredients, these complete cleaning formulas help eliminate parasites and worms, yeast (like Candida so prevalent with all the holiday sweets), and wastes from your system. My Colon Cleansing Kit even adds beneficial bacteria back into your digestive tract to fight pathogens and ward off future toxins.

Sources:
Guess What Came to Dinner? Parasites and Your Health
The Gut Flush Plan
www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/aboutparasites.htm
www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/parasites_and_foodborne_illness/index.asp
www.healthiertalk.com/dirtiest-places-your-home-2771
www.NaturalNews.com/z027875_pumpkin_seeds_parasites.html
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21107861
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21106798
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21029553
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20981446
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20976185

Tags: allergies, anemia, bacteria, bloating, cleansing, colon, constipation, gas, IBS, infections, irritable bowel syndrome, parasites, pathogens, roundworm, staph, Super Bugs

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Cleansing/Parasites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.