While many doctors and researchers are saying that we should cut back on our use of antibiotics as they are making us less resistant to common harmless infections and maladies while also making the diseases themselves mutate, evolve, and become more resistant to the drugs we have and possibly many new drugs. Currently broad spectrum antibiotics are used in surgery to fight off potential infection until the stitches are all healed, if bacteria become resistant to this type of clinical practice there could, theoretically be a retrograde step where surgery carried out today will no longer be possible.

When Jenner noticed that milkmaid who had caught cow pox, a relatively harmless skin condition which was passed on by contact with cows, didn’t get the far more harmful small pox he developed the idea of vaccination. Today, with our near obsession with cleanliness, we are avoiding harmless illnesses but at the risk of making ourselves weaker when it comes to common, harmless germs.

Since viruses are unaffected by antibiotics they do represent pathogens which should be avoided. As these too mutate and evolve regular vaccinations are necessary for the old and vulnerable, it’s their propensity to evolving that makes them incurable, however, inoculation and hygiene do make them avoidable. That’s where air filters come in.

Not only do air filters make summer bearable for hay fever sufferers they can reduce the environmental viral and bacterial load meaning that you are still exposed to ‘friendly’ bacteria as well as the bad, however, in much smaller numbers than you might otherwise be.

When diseases become airborne they can travel great distances and then survive on surfaces for quite some time. They become aerosolised by sneezing, coughing, even laughing and breathing. Combine a susceptibility to infection, more resistant bacteria, air pollution, pollen and tobacco smoke for example and it’s easy to see why doctors, hospitals and even the government are taking the threats of pandemics more seriously than they have since the 1918-20 Spanish flu which killed between 50 and 100 millions.

Removing these potential risk factors from your environment will have the effect that you will be healthier, have a stronger immune system and therefore be better able to fight off any infection on your own without any clinical intervention, should you catch any disease.