My laundry tips

Why is germ-free laundry important? 

Most of the time, it is not important to kill every germ in your laundry. We have all been living with bacteria in our clothes our entire lives and most of us are perfectly fine. In fact, we have lots of good bacteria living in our skin all of the time. Much of the bacteria in our clothing is probably harmless bacteria from our skin. I am in no way suggesting that we all need to bleach (and ruin) all of our clothes. Nor am I suggesting that we need to kill all the germs in our lives and live in a bubble. Even though we need to accept that our laundry has germs, there are a few occasions where being able to get laundry really clean would be helpful. For example, the bacteria in the cloth that you used to wipe up raw chicken, is unlikely to be good bacteria. Germs in your underwear when you have a stomach bug are going to be bad germs. If someone in your house has a contagious stomach bug and you are washing vomit covered laundry, it would be nice if you could get the germs out of that laundry. Otherwise, the "clean" laundry will still contain the virus and it will spread to other members of the house. Also, if you are having recurrent infections such as vaginal infections, staph infections, or athletes foot, you might want to consider using chlorine bleach in your underwear/sock load and see if it helps get rid of those infections. Hospitals and nursing home laundry needs to be sterilized or they will have outbreaks of c.diff, staph, and norovirus. The scrubs that hospital workers wear are usually brightly colored and can't be bleached. I wouldn't be surprised if even the clean ones are full of nasty germs. 

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