Another warm water environment that provides perfect conditions for some of the bugs at Microbes Inc. are what are known as personal service settings: nail salons, hairdressers, barbershops, spas, acupuncturists, and body piercing and tattoo parlours. Traditionally these services have not been of great concern to public health officials. However, recent inspections of nail salons and spas, triggered by the outbreak in California in 2000, have revealed that pedicures are far from the only infectious risk posed by these settings. With reuse of unsterilized equipment to cut nails or shave calluses, unclean hand and footbaths, and contaminated wax, the plucking, trimming, and painting that goes on in salons has created an ideal environment for many bugs to thrive.
In San Jose, California, 140 men and women became infected with Mycobacterium chelonae (a microbial cousin to M. fortuitum) after receiving pedicures in thirty-four different salons in 2004, and similar outbreaks have been recorded in Illinois, Colorado, Washington State, and Oregon. In 2007 a woman in California, who was undergoing cancer treatment, developed an infection caused by an antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus after being given a pedicure, and she died as a result. In Toronto, more than thirty women developed terrible abscesses on their legs, arms, and bodies after receiving acupuncture from needles contaminated with another nasty bug, Mycobacterium abscessus. Licensing bodies in many U.S. states and provinces of Canada have now developed standards for cleanliness and disinfection at nail salons, spas, and other personal service settings to reduce the risk of infections. But in a high-volume business these regulations may not be followed as strictly as they should be.
Tattoo and body piercing parlours have also been linked with infections, though for many years these practices were well out of the mainstream, so little attention was paid to these services. In the 1960s tattooing moved beyond the realm of sailors and convicts, and body piercing became trendy in the 1970s after a piercer in California published a magazine called Body Art. While facial piercings have long been traditional to many cultures, other body piercings, particularly of the nipples and genitals, are largely a new, Western phenomenon that became popular through the myths propagated by Body Art. One of the magazine’s most infamous stories suggested that Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband and great love, wore a penis ring to avoid unsightly bulges; this story gave birth to a piercing called the “Prince Albert,” which enjoyed incredible popularity. Despite its persistence in urban mythology this is undoubtedly an invented story.
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