Rutgers Expert Cautions Against ‘Hygiene Theater’ As Flu Season Nears

NEW JERSEY — In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the viral threat was seemingly lurking on every surface: phone screens, mail, doorknobs, even groceries from the supermarket. Except that it wasn’t, a Rutgers University microbiologist says.

And the same holds true for the flu, according to Emanuel Goldman.

Goldman, a professor of microbiology at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, was among the first scientists to claim that hygiene theater – the overzealous disinfection of surfaces – had become “counterproductive” for public health. In April 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agreed.

The CDC now says that the main way that people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is through exposure to respiratory droplets carrying infectious viruses – although there’s a small chance of surface transmission, too.

According to the CDC:

“The virus that causes COVID-19 can land on surfaces. It’s possible for people to become infected if they touch those surfaces and then touch their nose, mouth or eyes. In most situations, the risk of infection from touching a surface is low. The most reliable way to prevent infection from surfaces is to regularly wash hands with soap and water or use alcohol-based hand sanitizer.”

Cleaning and disinfecting surfaces can also reduce the risk of infection, the CDC adds. But according to Goldman – as with all respiratory viruses from the flu to the common cold – you’re much more likely to catch the coronavirus from the air that you breathe instead of the things that you touch.

Goldman says that he is aware he’s swimming upstream against some of his peers in the scientific community, which has held for decades that “fomites” – an object or material that is likely to carry infection – are significant risk factors for spreading respiratory viruses.

Here’s why that “false assessment” is wrong, he argues:

“It was based almost entirely on previous laboratory experiments that assessed the survival of respiratory virus particles on surfaces. The problem with these experiments was that the amount of virus used in nearly every case was significantly more than you would find in real life. Viruses die in the environment, and they die with a predictable half-life – the time it takes for half of the total viral load to dissipate. So, if you start out with a very large amount of virus, you have more half-lives to go through before you reach the point where there are no longer any viable viruses left. The other problem was that some of these experiments didn’t look at infectability per se, but at the presence of genetic material, specifically RNA. The trouble is that RNA survives well on fomites, even though it doesn’t have the ability to infect. It’s more like the corpse of the virus.”

Last year, Goldman authored a paper in the journal “Applied and Environmental Microbiology,” where he claims this train of logic is even more misleading than he originally thought.

“Experiments from my lab show that enveloped viruses, which have an outer layer of membrane protecting its genetic material, resist decay better at higher virus concentrations,” Goldman said. “It’s like circling the wagons – they circle and protect the ones on the inside.”

According to Goldman, SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus. Therefore, experiments measuring surface survival of COVID-19 weren’t only misleading because of the unrealistic amount of virus tested, but also because the presence of more virus was extending half-lives.

“To beat the pandemic, vaccination is of course the weapon of choice,” Goldman recently wrote. “But even with this weapon in our arsenal, we need to focus on what we breathe to protect ourselves, particularly since this virus has the potential to mutate to partially vaccine-resistant forms, already observed to some extent with the Delta variant and apparently even more so with Omicron.”

So what does this mean when it comes to flu season?

The short answer? If you touch something that might have germs on it, wash those dirty mitts of yours, Goldman says:

“What we discovered from the COVID-19 pandemic is that influenza is similarly airborne. During the first year of COVID-19, when everybody was masking, the rate of influenza infection went down to almost zero. If influenza was transmitted by fomites, that wouldn't have happened. Of course, respiratory viruses aren't the only bad things in the world. There are other bacterial and viral diseases you can pick up from surfaces. Our mothers taught us that if you’re going to prepare food, wash your hands. After you go to the bathroom, wash your hands. And if you touch something dirty, wash your hands. We didn’t need COVID-19 to teach us that.”

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