Cleaning!

February 17th, 2018| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Cleaning!

You hate cleaning? Well, now you have a scientific reason to do so.

So says a bunch of researchers in a broad international coalition. They proclaimed this cheerful finding in “Cleaning at Home and at Work in Relation to Lung Function Decline and Airway Obstruction,” published recently in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

It is known that cleaning tasks may imply exposure to chemical agents with potential harmful effects to the respiratory system. Further, increased risk of asthma and respiratory symptoms among professional cleaners and in persons cleaning at home is reasonably well documented. This study suggests that also long-term respiratory health is impaired 10-20 years after cleaning activities. We found accelerated lung function decline in women both following occupational cleaning and cleaning at home. The effect size was comparable to the effect size related to 10-20 pack-years of tobacco smoking [i.e., smoking about 70,000-140,000 cigarettes].”

If you regularly use cleaning sprays, you might as well be smoking.

Over 6,000 subjects were followed over a 20-year span. Women were particularly susceptible to lung function decline after long-term use of cleaners. The damage was comparable to smoking 20 cigarettes a day over 10-20 years—your 70,000-140,000 cigarettes.

In other words: Don’t clean: breath better, live longer, be happier!

Or: Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it is also next to the ICU!

Noted Øistein Svanes , the doctoral student and lead author of the study:

When you think of inhaling small particles from cleaning agents that are meant for cleaning the floor and not your lungs, maybe it is not so surprising after all.”

The scientists didn’t really figure out what kind of cleansers were used, but they did recommend that such products be avoided and replaced with microfiber cloths and good ol’ H¬¬2O.

I wonder if Windex is harmful. If not, that Dad in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (2002), Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine), may have gotten it right. Here’s his movie daughter, Toula (Nia Vardalos):

My dad believed in only two things. That Greeks should educate non-Greeks about being Greek, and that any ailment, from psoriasis to poison ivy, could be cured with Windex.”

Maybe Windex doesn’t fall into the category of cleaners studied by those scientists?

Said Professor Cecile Svanes, of the University of Bergen, the senior author on the study:

We feared that such chemicals, by steadily causing a little damage to the airways day after day, year after year, might accelerate the rate of lung function decline that occurs with age.”

But there is one kind of cleaning that is good for you. Really good. Guaranteed to give you eternal life!

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:9

For those who have placed their trust in Jesus Christ as their only God and Savior from sin—he who bore them all on the cross—that cleansing is free, final, and forever.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
John 3:16

Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing pow’r?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Elisha Hoffman, 1878

Be clean … and live forever!

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