Hygiene

You may associate hygiene mainly with being clean.

They are both, in fact, mainly associated with courtesy.

How well do you clean up after yourself?

How well do you make amends for the mess you cause?

How well do you protect people and other species from infections?

What informs your approach to personal hygiene, including mental hygiene?

Whether you are or are not currently in lockdown, what is your attitude to your experiences of the past few days and the next few days?

What do you know about public policy in relation to preventative health care and long-term well-being?

How do you assess public health messages and mental health messages?

How do you usually warn people are possibly hazardous conditions?

How do you identify hazards, particularly biological ones?

What is your acquaintance with toxins?

What do you know about pathogens?

How has the germ theory of disease informed your approach towards hygiene and civility?

You probably know about the reasons for quarantine, whether of people, plants or animals.

Some people may try to convince you, through advertising or otherwise, that hygiene requires the liberal use of poisons.

Yet many micro-organisms are beneficial to human health.

And many claims about health and happiness are not beneficial to human health.  They are not based on real evidence.  They are merely an image.

How carefully do you critique information, and how do you know?

How reasonably and responsibly do you maintain cleanliness of your person and the environments you inhabit and visit?

What happens to the waste you produce, and why?

How have you contributed to pollution over your lifetime, and why? 

What do you know about cleaning products and personal hygiene products and the waste and pollution associated with them?

Civility is intimately associated with hygiene.

What do you know about foodborne illnesses?

What do you know about waterborne diseases?

What do you know about infectious diseases and asymptomatic carriers?

What have you been learning about the airborne transmission of diseases over the past year and a half?

Much of Australia is currently in Covid lockdown, including South Australia.

How often do Australians say "No worries" or "She'll be right" or "How are you today?"?

The latter, in particular, assumes the person has no worries, or is willing to express toxic positivity or tell lies.

There are quite a few examples of toxic positivity online, some of which mention a person better left unmentioned.

Toxic positivity prevents honest communication.  It is a form of brainwashing, in much the same way as toxic negativity.

How do you respond to toxic positivity, and toxic negativity?

How do you wash them out of your mind, out of your body, and out of your relationships, and out of your life?

Civility Today is a daily news services inviting you to think carefully about how you think and interact about various themes.

Today's theme is, as you may have noticed, hygiene.

Good hygiene has a positive effect on health.

Yet hygiene on its own does little to support health if it is not matched by a safe and healthy environment in other ways, including interpersonally.

Good nutrition is a form of hygiene.

Good sleep is a form of hygiene.

Toxic positivity is mental noise.

What value do you place on professional, personal and academic insights into reasons and emotions?