Germs

I went to a training workshop this past weekend. I'm going to be teaching preschool this year (next Tuesday is my first day!) and I need to have these classes. This one was called Communicable Disease. It should have been called Germaphobe training. I'm STILL scratching my head after the lice talk! I've never been too worried about germs. I've heard that you need germs that kids need to get sick to build up their immunity to other things. I watched my oldest suffer through 6 months of a day care center with a runny nose and MULTIPLE ear infections telling myself that he was going to be a healthier Kindergartener for it (and he WAS a pretty healthy kindergartener!). And then I went to this class. As I've said, I do everything I can to protect my kids. And then I hear about all these horrible diseases they can get. I was just about to home school by the time the class was over! The reason this is relevant to my Green blog is that I started to worry that my green cleaning wasn't doing a good enough job. After all, I don't want to have to see the purple rash that means bacterial meningitis creeping over my child's skin. So I thought I'd do a little more research on my best green cleaning friend: Vinegar. I found a site that compares bleach and vinegar. It pros and cons both and then ends with telling you to use vinegar. It also says you should use hydrogen peroxide with vinegar (not mixed, let one dry before using the other) to really disinfect. I had been doing this, but got away from it. I'll have to start again. It also says to use hot soapy water to disinfect, which I know sounds odd, but I actually WASH my toilet sometimes. I use hot water and Dr. Bronner's castille soap and scrub the whole outside of it, then use a washcloth to rinse it down. Then I spray it with Vinegar just to be sure. I found another site that states this: "

This article cited scientific studies from 1997 and 2000 showing that vinegar (along with other natural cleaning products) did disinfect some microbes, but not all.

Therefore, the article concluded, "These mixtures will probably reduce the number of bugs in your kitchen, but, again, there's no reason to believe claims that these mixtures are "just as effective as conventional" (i.e., EPA-regulated) disinfectants."

The good news -- you generally don't need to sanitize and disinfect things, just clean them and reduce the number of germs down to a more reasonable level."

I'm ok with that. I know bleach kills more stuff, but it's also killing me any my family so I'd rather use vinegar. Now if it only killed my imaginary lice and scabies...(and pinworms...ugggg!!)