Lori Williams is addicted to hand sanitizer.
Since the swine-flu scare, she keeps a bottle in her purse, one in her car and another on her desk at work, which is sprayed daily with Lysol.
“I’ve gone pretty nuts with the antibacterial goop stuff,” said Williams, pushing a shopping cart out of a Rite Aid in Denver.
Under normal circumstances — like when the headlines aren’t screaming pandemic and schools aren’t shutting down because of one sick kid — Williams might seem a little obsessive.
Doctors and psychologists say it’s understandable to worry about germs more now than usual, but they fear the hype over H1N1 flu is pushing some over the edge.
“You can’t live in an alcohol factory,” said Dr. Harley Rotbart, a University of Colorado Denver microbiology professor and author of “Germ Proof Your Kids.”
He recommends using alcohol-laced hand sanitizer if someone in the family is sick, then sticking it back in the cabinet.
Rotbart called it “prudent” to disinfect the keyboard at work if you share it with a sick person, but “paranoid” to wipe it with bleach every time you sit down when no one ill has touched it.
These days, though, even he is bringing hand sanitizer to the dugout for his son’s baseball games.
“It’s the talk of everyone. Everybody is worried,” said Rotbart, who is hit with swine-flu questions every day from his patients, his friends and even his mom. “We have somehow managed as a civilization to survive with germs . . . without living in a bubble.”
It’s hard to tell how much concern is too much as world and local health authorities are urging people to wash their hands and cover their sneezes.
For some, health epidemics can cause subclinical anxieties — including obsessive-compulsive disorder — to percolate to the surface, said Dr. LeAnna DeAngelo, a Monument psychologist who studies germs.
“It puts them over the edge, so to speak,” she said. “If people are washing their hands to the point that it interferes with their lives, then that’s too much.”
Rushing to the emergency room with a runny nose, fearing it’s swine flu, is over the top, she said.
“Prevention is good, but you want it to be reality-based,” DeAngelo said.
And here’s something that could worry the anxiety-prone even more: Succumbing to fear causes stress, which makes people more susceptible to illness.
“Hypervigilance causes stress,” said Dr. Kathleen Hall, chief executive of The Stress Institute in Atlanta. “All these people that have all this worry are actually more susceptible to everything — cancer, heart disease, accelerated aging.”
Images of the flu pandemic — masked travelers at the airport, sick wards at the hospital — spread fear and anxiety, Hall said. She counsels people not to “succumb to this ridiculous pandemic of fear.”
In her opinion, people whose hands are parched and dry are going overboard with sanitizer. People who wipe off door handles and light switches in their own homes or keep their hands in the pockets so they don’t have to shake hands are on the verge of hysteria.
“We’ve got to get a grip on confidence,” she said, questioning how much people would panic if there were a bioterrorist act or a more deadly virus than H1N1 sweeping the world.
Colorado chief medical officer Ned Calonge has been in the newspapers and on television nearly every day the past two weeks telling people not to spread germs. He said he doesn’t mean to freak people out to the point they douse their hands and kids in sanitizer numerous times a day, but he recommends squirting the stuff after touching handrails or shopping carts or using the bathroom.
“It’s not right for people to obsess over this,” he said. “Until this event, I wasn’t a hand-sanitizer carrier.”
Calonge is hoping this spring’s flu event will improve Coloradans’ personal hygiene permanently.
For Denver mom Tanya Reyes, new habits are likely to stick, at least for a while. In the past two weeks, she has toted sanitizer around and reminded her 3-year-old and 6-year-old to keep their hands away from their faces.
Reyes sat nearby as her kids climbed around at the Cherry Creek Mall play area this week. She was ready with the sanitizer when they finished.
“We can’t be too overprotective,” she said. “We just use a lot of Germ-X.”
Williams, who said she wipes down shopping carts before touching them and recently pumped herself full of zinc and vitamin C tablets for a flight to New Orleans, is also trying not to stress.
“You need to get some germs in your life,” she said, “but with traveling and everything, I don’t want to risk it.”
Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com
How much does swine flu scare Americans?
46 percent are concerned that they or someone in their immediate family will get H1N1 flu within the next year
25 percent are avoiding places where lots of people gather, including sporting events, malls or public transportation
20 percent are avoiding people who recently traveled to Mexico
17 percent are avoiding Mexican restaurants or stores
8 percent wore face masks
4 percent kept their children home from school or day care
Source: Survey by the Harvard ap Research Program at the Harvard School of Public Health
Prudent or paranoid?
PRUDENT
• Using hand sanitizer after holding onto the handrails on the airport’s moving sidewalk
• Wiping down the shopping cart at the grocery store
• Disinfecting your computer keyboard or telephone after someone who is sick touched it
• Washing your hands before you eat, after school or day care, and after using the bathroom
PARANOID
• Forcing your kids to use hand sanitizer several times a day at home, even when no one in the house is sick
• Disinfecting your keyboard every time someone else touches it
• Worrying about the germs on your refrigerator door handle or light switches
• Worrying about shaking someone else’s hand or sticking your hands in your pockets to avoid it
• Panicking because your toddler sucked on the shopping cart
Sources: Dr. Harley Rotbart, author of “Germ Proof Your Kids – The Complete Guide to Protecting (without Overprotecting) Your Family from Infections,” and Dr. Kathleen Hall, chief executive of The Stress Institute
