No problem. I frequently forget to pack my compass, but often find that this results in discoveries I would not have otherwise made had I kept to the path most trodden ;-)
As the holder of a fairly broad-based undergraduate Honours degree in Biology, I feel compelled to comment on the state of herd immunity in modern, domestic populations of Homo sapiens. Medical opinion is currently that, yes, far too many people are far too susceptible to far too many pathogenic micro-organisms. Reasons are many. Mostly it comes down to upbringing and sometimes diet. Asthma, for instance, is increasing at alarming rates. In some areas almost logarithmically! Not, I noted from the statistics, in the more rural areas but mostly in developed areas enjoying greater concentrations of airborne pollutants. That said, we no longer live in the days of pea-souper smogs the like of which still grace the skylines of Los Angeles and Singapore and Beijing. So, what other cause might there be? Well, in more built up areas I would suggest that there is far greater access to cleaning agents, some of which are quite vicious. There might possibly also be less cultural tolerance of "dirt", in the sense of the old saying "you'll eat a peck of dirt afore ye die." Certainly, cultural attitudes to the perception of dirt and hygiene must vary between those of your average born and bred "townie" who plods the concrete streets for most of his life, and those of your born and bred rural villager who plods through two or three cow pats on his way to work each morning. I generalise in the most horrible fashion, but I do so to make a point.
Statistically, children raised in the presence of dogs are less likely to develop respiratory problems in later life. Horrible, dirty, pestilent beasts, but they're good for the soul and, it turns out, the immune system! Statistically, a great many teenagers will experience some form of asthma in their early to mid-teens anyway, even if you raise them in a dog kennels just over the road from a sewege treatment plant. In the vast majority of cases this asthma is transitory and they essentially "grow out of it".
I could waffle on for hours, recalling lecture after lecture and regurgitating my essays and papers, but that's for another forum, I think. Suffice to say that, whilst it is true that we are probably too aseptic a society, in this as in all things there must be a balance. We still need to keep clean, and societal health as a whole has never been better! Witness the fact that cardiac diseases are now the biggest killers in the developed world. Yes, often because we eat crap between two slices of ersatz bread at a local fast food outlet and suck it down with a long fag afterwards, but that's a far cry from parents watching 2 out of every 3 of their children dying before their twelfth birthday from a hundred diseases and conditions which are all now either treatable, or can be vaccinated against.
Dirt is good for you... in measured doses. Would you believe that arsenic is good for you? In measured doses. In large doses everything is a poison. A man with a mental problem once killed himself by drinking too much milk! If you eat 8,000 oranges, the accumulation of pesticides in your system will kill you, but the overdose of calcium from the first few hundred oranges would already have shut down your renal system and killed you quite horribly. That's why, when I wash fruit I've picked out of the fruit bowl, I'm only doing so to remove house dust and freshen the flavour of that first bite. I'm not trying to protect myself from a chemical formulation that is probably present in far higher quantities in the fabric of my 3 piece suite!
Let us all give daily thanks that we are so unbelievably, staggeringly fortunate to live in the first era in human history when the common cold is not a death sentence for you, your friends and your whole family; in which a "touch" of diarrhoea does not mean a grisly end as one of thousands of victims of a cholera epidemic; in which you can have peritoneal surgery for everything from an appendectomy to a caesarian birth without it being almost absolutely certain that if you didn't die from the shock, you would definately die, horribly and painfully, from peritonitis.
End of lecture ;-)
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and i am not saying it did us any good but what doesnt kill you huh 
