Hygiene maniac

The other day I wrote about Japanese custom of washing hands on coming home which a British guy referred to as "hygiene maniac."
There may be no point in trying to hide from your virus or bacteria, for they are on and around you, in numbers you can never conceive of. If you are in good shape and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of approximately one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy surfaces, which is about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to live off the ten billion or so flakes of skin that you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils that seep out from every pores in your skin.
And those are bacteria that inhabit only on your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and breathing passages, clinging to your hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes... Your digestive system alone is host to well more than a hundred trillion microbes.
Since humans are big and smart enough to develop and use antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the edge of their existence. Do not believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the earth is destroyed by the supposedly smart people. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be. Bacteria got along for billions of years without us. We could not survive a day without them.
People say "Too much is like too short(過ぎたるは及ばざるがごとし, my translation)". I must agree. Hygiene may be important, but never go overboard. Sometimes we may have to thank them.