by Redisca

Created on: August 27, 2008

Let's assume that irradiation in and of itself is completely harmless. Let's assume that the procedure would not alter the nutritional qualities or the taste of food. Let's assume that it would not create a disincentive for vendors to clean and sort their produce, so that next time you buy a bag of lettuce it will come with perfectly irradiated bugs and worms in it. Let's admit that salmonella poisoning is terrible and potentially deadly. Let's ask ourselves: putting all these issues aside, should produce be irradiated? The answer is still a resounding "no", for reasons that follow.

Completely sanitizing our environment and our bodies sounds at first blush like a good idea, but it comes at a terrible price - namely, weakening our immune systems and thus, ironically, rendering us more susceptible to infection. Humans actually do need exposure to microorganisms in order to build up healthy immune responses. Reduced exposure means a weaker immune system and consequently, a greater susceptibility to infection.

When I was a first-grader in the early 1980's, I could count on one hand the number of classmates who had allergies, none of which were medicated. The condition itself seemed merely like getting a bit of a flush after eating chocolate, or spending the month of May occasionally sneezing. "Asthma" was one of those things that old people had. Today, some forty percent of children between the ages of 6 and 18 take regular prescription medication, most of it for allergies (in other words, their allergies are debilitating enough that they have to be medicated); and among American adults, people who aren't violently allergic to at least something seem to be a vanishing breed. Meanwhile, the rates of asthma are skyrocketing among young children.

These problems and a whole host of others - including the proliferation of drug-resistant "superbugs" - are traced right back to our relentless abuse of antibiotics, disinfecting household cleaning products, and, I am sad to say, irresponsible vaccination practices. There is now good reason to suspect, also, that the growing rate of neurological and developmental problems in young children is attributable to auto-immune responses triggered by overzealous immunization; which, if true (and it likely is, at least in part) means that we trade some easily treatable and rarely fatal childhood infections for life-long disabilities that are both stigmatizing and extremely expensive to "manage".

Additionally, not all bacteria are bad

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