Let's talk dirty.

One of my colleagues told me a story about the latest form of social dysfunction from the people who brought us the air kiss: pre-handshake prophylaxis.

Scenario: A guy about to greet someone whips out a small bottle of hand sanitizer and slathers up, then extends the bottle to the other person in an offer of reciprocal sterilization. In case he hasn't brought his own bottle. Because God forbid you should touch another human being, particularly a filthy stranger, without scrubbing up.

This may be yet another loopy West Coast thing at the moment, but it's not going to stay there. It'll spread to New York, where it will catch on like wildfire because the City That Never Sleeps is lying awake obsessing about rats and bedbugs and alligators in the sewers and hypodermic attacks already. And then the rest of the country will cave to the pressure until anyone not visibly carrying a bottle of alcohol gel will be made to feel like Typhoid Mary.

It's bottled water all over again.

Remember when bottled water didn't take up half the beverage aisle of every supermarket? People drank tap water. Only effete poseurs would insist on ordering Perrier or mineral water in restaurants. But somehow, over the years, people began saying "tap water" in the same tone as "landfill runoff," dewy health nuts started obsessing about hydration and now nobody goes to the mailbox without toting a water bottle full of some enhanced high-performance elixir that may or may not even be, technically, H2O.

It's almost as if somebody realized that there was money to be made.

Washing your hands is next to godliness, as everyone knows, and we can avoid catching colds and flu, lead more fulfilling lives and learn to speak a foreign language without tedious memorization if we just pop into the restroom every 20 minutes or so for a nice surgical scrub.

But suddenly, that's not good enough anymore. Hand washing doesn't cut it: Only hand sanitizing will do. Dispensers are sprouting from walls everywhere -- if you can bring yourself to touch them.

That's actually the slogan for the most popular hand sanitizer, Purell: "Imagine a touchable world." Imagine a touchable world? How have you been interacting with it so far, Bubble Boy?

Um, fearfully. According to a press release from Procter & Gamble, which makes its own hand sanitizer, "eighteen percent [of Americans surveyed] avoid shaking hands altogether, and four in 10 (36 percent) believe public restrooms are the place where most people are careless about spreading germs. In fact, 30 percent admit to using tissues and/or paper towels to open doors, while 16 percent awkwardly use their elbows."

And that's not even the weird part: "In what could be the most telling sign of Americans' fear of catching a cold or flu, 22 percent will refuse to kiss their significant other." Considering the number of people I've seen kiss their dogs, with tongue, that's pretty sobering.

We're cautious, but not very logical. That same survey, of over 1,000 adults, found that one in three think they're more likely to catch an illness from a stranger than from someone they know. (Because people you know give nicer gifts.) And 92 percent think others will make them sick with their germs, but only 9 percent think they'll make anyone else sick. Right. And nobody but you knows how to drive, either.

As always, it's the children who suffer. They will thoughtlessly touch anything, and then taste it. Unfortunately, this also applies to ... hand sanitizer. Which has (or should have, in order to be effective) an alcohol content of at least 60 percent. A couple of kids have gone to the ER after slurping down a 120-proof Jell-O shot.

You wouldn't think even a kid would want to eat something that stinks like a hospital bathroom, but some sanitizers are scented now; snopes.com describes the taste of Purell as "akin to a slightly flowery version of vodka," which sounds pretty good to me.

Sanitizer is wonderful, if you're Howard Hughes, but it really doesn't do much more than soap and water, for which it is not a substitute. And exposure to bacteria -- which are everywhere, like Starbuckses -- strengthens the immune system. Children, especially, need to eat a few cookies off the floor or they will end up in the hospital the first time somebody sneezes on them.

Imagine a touchable world? Imagine the next marketing juggernaut. Buy stock in rubber gloves.