It’s Christmas Eve - just make sure you don’t kiss any bearded men! (A festive observation from Malvern Cleaners).

Have you, or any of your loved ones, kissed Santa Claus this year? The day he’s due to squeeze down our chimneys, moving around the world with his sleigh speeding at 650 miles per second, it’s worth to take note pf the precautionary principle: don’t kiss him! His beard is a bacterial hazard! So if Santa makes a pass at you this evening - then watch out!

I jest of course - but there is some truth to this, and I’m using this festive day to illustrate the point: a scientific study found that men with beards possess more human-pathogenic bacteria than the dirtiest part of dogs fur (to qualify this, I’m not sure if there is a comparative study for women with beards).

The study, albeit a small one, was carried out by radiologists evaluating whether it was safe for humans to use an MRI scanner after dogs had been through the machine beforehand. They found that humans were far more dirty than dogs, left more bugs behind, and that there was less bacteria in those machines used for animal and human tests than those used exclusively for human tests (a possible explanation for this might be that those machines used for human and animal tests are cleaned more frequently).

As someone who works in the cleaning business in Malvern, I am engaged in a daily campaign against the hordes of microbes that live throughout our environments. Our forces blitz toilets and basins, sometimes using chemical sprays. We wipe out entire microbe ecosystems that thrive around that patch of grease on your hob, or we obliterate the debris of an autumn walk that has been brought in on your boots - invisible fungi on that dead leaf, or bacteria on that piece of dried mud. It is war of invisible annihilation. Each day, billions of lives are lost!

Yet each day they come back, breeding and multiplying so quickly that our job is really no more than that of control. And that, really, is how it should be. Indeed, the vast majority of bacteria are actually harmless to us - with fewer than a hundred that are pathogenic to humans (and to put this in perspective, there are several thousand that live in our gut alone). Increasingly, research is identifying that bacteria are actually good for us as well - influencing the way we think and feel more than we realised before. (For further reading, I would recommend the book by Ed Yong, ‘I contain multitudes.’ It’s a fascinating insight into how bacteria influence their environment, and ourselves, and it will change what you define as ‘life’ forever).

So, whilst the scientific research has been carried out, and I admit to making light of it due to a bearded man’s visit this night, (if I’ve been good!), it should be taken in the same vein as research where swabs have been taken from mobile phones that indicate we are all walking around with a biological hazard in our pockets - and yet we aren’t keeling over each other. Rather, our bodies have adapted to tolerate these populations.

And like all good scientists, whenever I read of some research I am also looking ahead to see what implications the findings might implicate, and to test and refine, so I would recommend we do a follow up study of hairy-faced men who seemingly harbour colonies of life-endangering pathogens in the dimples of their chin or spread out across the upper lip: Are bearded men more likely to be widowers due to their lethal facial arsenals? Do they really harbour the kiss of death or do their spouses and mistresses become immune? If you shave, how long do these colonies persist, and is there an imbalance immediately afterward that might right itself as the now clean skin gives rise to bacteria that better favours that environment?

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing particularly against bearded men - Santa once disappointed a five year old child back in the early 1980s (my list was quite clear: it said a red tractor - so it must have been a colour-blind elf that filled that particular sleigh!). Nonetheless, I am not one to hold grudges.

So if Santa does come down your chimney tonight, then perhaps it’s advisable to leave not a sherry (drink driving implications), or a mince pie (obesity epidemic), but instead a nice razor and shaving foam (not gel - plastic crisis in the oceans!).

So happy Christmas one and all!