Random musing: A dangerous place

During my travels here I just can't stop thinking about all the small odd things one encounters in a different country - apparently this is now shaping up into a series of Jo's rants about the US ;-)). This is one I typed up a while ago...

The word is in general a terribly dangerous place to be. This seems particularly true for America. But I don’t want to talk about the huge terrifying dangers of hurricanes and blizzards, nor the commonly accepted and not much thought about dangers of everyday life such as car accidents and not even the stereotypical dangers of life in a country where every idiot can (and unfortunately does) buy a gun. It is the dangers that lurk on a microscopic level to ambush and presumably kill you at any given point in time that people here seem to worry about.

The amount of TV advertisement for all sorts of medicines and in particular sanitizers or ‘germ killers’ is simply staggering. Here are photos of my all-time favourites.

It seems to be a neat idea to wipe the handle of your shopping trolley with a sanitising wipe – that is, if you don’t consider all the nasty chemicals that are presumably in there. But is that really necessary? Are there any known cases of some sort of pandemic that was spread through the shared use of shopping trolleys? Or, would it also be enough to do your shopping, go home and wash your hands before you start preparing the food?

But in order for everyone to be safe and sanitised at any time the American chemical industry has developed the following amazing product.

A water-less, use anywhere gel-type hand sanitiser. Isn’t that great? I feel so much better already. Thank you to whoever manufactured this. I am sure the economic benefit from marketing products like this with annoying persistence, telling you that unless you use this you are almost certainly going to die did not enter the thinking of those people.

Again I am writing this on the train and now it is time to eat my breakfast. I have to go now since I don’t seem to be able to find my sanitizing wet wipes……