From 2017:
This morning my wife and I were discussing how we lived when we were much younger and how the world has changed. My Dad and her Dad had retail stores. My dad had a fish market and just like her dad and everyone with a food market there was piles of saw dust on the floor. The cutting boards were wood, the knife handles were wood and the fish, and meat came in wooden crates as plastic was not available then. I am talking about the fifties.
I used to play in the back yard of our fish market and shoot flies with a rubber band. We also had live carp and eels in old bath tubs.
At the end of the week my Dad would sweep the floor and throw out all the old, fish scale infested sawdust and put down clean sawdust. Every night he would clean, using soap and bleach the knives and cutting boards.
Today, you are not allowed to use saw dust, wooden handled knives or cutting boards probably because of lawyers. I am sure someone, some where got sick and saw dust was blamed just like coffee can't be hot any more.
But it was the saw dust, cutting boards and wooden knife handles as well as numerous other things that enhanced our immune systems.
I was always an out doors kid and cut myself many times. I would rinse it off in a puddle or pond and go about my business never thinking about it.
I had an uncle that worked at the docks in NYC, one of the roughest places on Earth at that time. He got stabbed in the belly twice when 3 guys tried to mug him. (the muggers didn't fare very well) My Uncle wrapped the wounds in the same rag he cleaned eels with and lived to be about 90 never seeing a doctor or dentist in his life.
When my Mom would get a cold as a kid, her Mother would make her sleep in the horse stables thinking the smell of horse poop would cure her. (my Mom was born in lower Manhattan in 1910) My Mother lived to be 99 years old, she died of old age and was never sick and never even took an aspirin. How many people today could say that?
The point of this is that today how many kids do you know with allergies? How many kids are allergic to peanuts? How many kids are home from school with colds?
How many people in their 60s or 70s can you name with allergies?
Probably very few. As a kid no one in my school had any allergies and we all ate peanuts. I always got an attendance award because I was never out sick. I think in the 40 years I worked as a construction worker in Manhattan I was out maybe 3 or 4 times from being sick and never for having a cold, allergy or anything else except maybe a broken bone or disk problem.
That is IMO because I was brought up in a natural environment surrounded by bacteria and never having access to that silly sterilizing hand spray that people today feel they have to take baths in.
I still almost never get a cold, flu or any silly infection.
The little kids in My Grand Daughter's school almost all have some sort of allergy. My Grand Daughter is allergic to everything and half the kids in her school are allergic to something. Peanuts are outlawed in many restaurants and schools.
Kids today, (Like fish) get all sorts of things and in some homes it is an adventure waking up to see if the kids have some sort of infection.
I feel this is a big problem in our fish tanks and the biggest cause of all the posts on disease threads.
This is also why I go to a muddy bay and collect mud to throw in my tank. If I didn't live by the sea, I would throw regular dirt in there as I did when I started my tank.
I also feel we have to start thinking of bacteria as a good thing instead of a bad thing.
Just my thoughts of course and not meant to be taken as fact. Just an observation that is obvious to anyone who is a lot older than most fish people.
