There is nothing so quintessentially American as a state fair. These fairs have a long, proud history and an uncertain future. I have been going to state and county fairs regularly for almost 60 years now and there have been a lot of changes in that span. This year the most noticeable change was that all the animal barns had signs exhorting people to ALWAYS wash after visiting animal areas specifically between fingers, under fingernails, back of hands wrists and lower arm. The signs made a pretty big deal about it although it did not seem like people were paying much attention. But I can not know how many people just did not come in because now the barns look like a hazmat zone. This in spite of evidence that animal contact actually makes for healthier people. In 1900 most people ecxperienced daily contact with a variety of animals. Horses, cattle, game animals, country or city, a person would encounter all these daily. Today it is the exception rather than the rule. One change I have seen in my lifetime is that when I was young, every store had a distinct smell. You could close your eyes and tell if you were in a clothing store, a hardware store or a cobbler. Now everything is encased in plastic and except for Cinnabon and Yankee Candle, they all smell exactly the same: no smell at all. At the same time, I encounter more and more people who react strongly to any pronounced smell either from prissiness or actual alergic reaction. I wonder if some of the increased incidence of alergies can be traced to our increasing isolation. In the immediate post WWII years we developed methods of raising animals in a completely germ-free environment. Early studies claimed that germ-free animals grew faster and were healthier than normal ones. We now produce sterile lab animals as a reglar thing but now we know that the weight increase was due to gut abnormailties and the sad case of David Vetter demonstrated that a sterile environment was no path to enhanced health. Maybe our friends at the fair are trying to tell us something: Our Purell addiction may be doing more harm than good.

The State of the State Fair

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