Airport Scare-Ya

Here’s another one of those Airport Scare-ya articles. This time it’s Health Risks of Walking Barefoot Through Airport Security.

But I detect a hint of an ulterior motive . . .

The blog article contains the usual litany of supposed dangers (along with some new, highly exaggerated ones) that you are exposed to when going through airport security: athlete’s foot, warts, herpes(!), MRSA, toenail fungus.

We’ve discussed how, for athlete’s foot you really need the warm, dark, moist interior of a shoe. So for a barefooter, going through an airport isn’t a problem. The problem could arise for those who never take off their shoes except through security, and then stuff their feet back into those incubators. Except that the spores are everywhere, so airport security is not something special.

I’ve written about warts before, in Plantar Warts. The studies are pretty clear that communal showers are the main culprits for plantar warts.

Herpes? That’s really stretching it. Why not just pick any disease you can think of and add it to the list? I took a look on Google Scholar and could not find a single paper concerned about catching herpes from going barefoot. (And by the way, you are much more likely to catch a cold from being close to the people in security than somehow acquiring herpes on your feet.)

MRSA? That’s there just for the scare factor. During the evidentiary hearing when I sued a library, they brought in a MRSA expert. You can read about some of it here, in It’s All About Expectations, but basically the expert conceded that it is already inside people’s shoes.

Q   Okay. You were talking earlier about cracks in the soles of the feet.

A   Right.

Q   And that would certainly be a method of transmission. You’ve also said that MRSA is ubiquitous.

A   Yes.

Q   Is there MRSA inside your shoe?

A   There may be.

Q   There’s a good chance of it?

A   Uh-huh.

Q   Is there pseudomonas aeruginosa, assuming I pronounced it correctly?

A   Yes, pseudomonas. There certainly is.

Q   There certainly is. Okay. So if you have — since there’s MRSA in your shoes and you go and you put on your shoe and you’ve got a crack in your foot, you’re exposing yourself to this MRSA; correct?

A   Yes.

*   *   *

Q   When your foot is inside the shoe, it’s being exposed — with your cracks, it’s being exposed to MRSA all the time; is that not correct? Pretty much?

A   Right. It would be in the environment, right.

Q   It’s right there. So, in other words, all these shod people are actually probably getting more exposure to MRSA in their shoes than a barefoot person walking. Is that a fair assessment?

A   That would be a very interesting study.

They’re just making this stuff up as a danger specific to airport security.

Of course, the blog article is just collecting this from other locations. (Hey, that’s how you write blog entries—I do it all the time. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right here.)

But I found the article where they got their airport scare-ya picture.

Airport Feet Danger?

It’s from KYTX News in Tyler, TX: Foot dangers at the airport. It’s the standard story where some other news outlet does a story, and then it just gets passed around like a foot fungus. They never actually air it out to get rid of the funky smell, but just keep passing along the same unexamined “information”.

But they do always seem to manage to interview some podiatrist who comes up with another ridiculous assertion. In this case, it’s a Dr. Perry Julien.

Walking around shoeless at airport security exposes your feet to other hazards.

“My biggest concern is somebody dropping a bag on somebody’s foot without the protection of footwear.”

It is to laugh. Oh, yes, because if you drop a 20 pound bag on your foot a little cloth upper will provide so much protection.

But I mentioned that this particular blog entry had an ulterior motive.

They’re selling a product!

The Steri-Shoe

It’s the “steri-shoe”. They’re basically ultraviolet shoe sanitizer inserts. You put them into your smelly shoes and turn them on. They emit UV light that (mostly) kills the stuff in there.

That’s actually not a bad idea. It’s not as good as going barefoot and saving on the expense ($130!), but for the shoe-addicted it has a fair bit of justification.

So, they don’t need to put an extra scare into people with the old airport scare-ya ploy. Regular shoes provide all the justification needed. As they say in What Is A UV Shoe Sanitizer?,

The general consensus among podiatrists is that it seems futile to treat a patient’s feet, without simultaneously doing something about his shoes. The dark, moist environment surrounding the feet can serve as potential reservoirs of reinfection.

Well, yeah! It’s not airport security that’s a problem, it’s the shoes.

And if the general populace insists on wearing shoes all the time, it’s probably not a bad product.

Just don’t use it to make it seem as if going barefoot is the problem. It’s not. It’s the going shod.