A word to gardeners

Those popular bags of potting mix and various compost mixes can carry a very nasty air borne bug floating around in the mixture. Inhale one and you will be in considerable strife.

For around five days you will have a 24/7 splitting headache which defies the likes of Panadol, your thoughts will be addled and you won’t be able to read or eat, your blood pressure and sense of balance will be affected and you will experience wild fluctuations in temperature, feel continuously nauseous and just generally awful – and you will lose heaps of weight.

The treatment is ten days of very strong antibiotics. Mercifully these will more or less zonk you out. After five days you will slowly come right, the headaches will be the last to leave. By day nine or ten you will be able to carefully walk around, you will be very weak it will take up to three weeks to be back to more or less normal.

“But yes” I hear you think “it’s your own silly fault you should have read the warning on the pack.” But here’s the thing: yes, there is a warning on the pack, but the designers of the by far the most popular brand’s pack seem to have gone to extraordinary lengths to dissuade it being read.

To start with it is printed in black ink on a block of grey background –the very worst set up for reading. The there’s the small and curious heading: ‘Warning keep out of reach of children and pets’. Yes, it’s laudable to warn to keep little Johnny, Fido and Fluffypuss safe. But there is nothing in the heading to indicate the very real health dangers.

Underneath the heading I would expect a few succinct lines of warning on the danger of the fumes. Rather in tiny letters, around half the size of what you are reading here, and near enough impossible to read, there are eighteen lines of dense gobbldeygook. It’s a pretty sure bet that absolutely nobody goes to the considerable trouble to read this.

Given that this bug makes one very, very sick I feel a much better warning should be in place. I would suggest: ‘SEE HEALTH WARNING ON REAR’ in large red letters along the top front of the pack.
The area of the warning on the back is in the right place and does not need to be any bigger. I would suggest very large red lettering on a yellow back ground simply saying something along the lines.

WARNING contents may contain harmful airborne bacteria
DO ONT OPEN IN CONFINED SPACE
DO NOT BREATH UP FUMES.
People will take note of something like this where as I’m pretty sure nobody bothers to plough through the present great slab of text.
The offending bacteria flourishes in over 27 degrees heat which is reached in the composting process, usually once bagged the temperature drops. However with the longer hotter dry summers we now experience the bacteria continues to live in the bags, and an increase in the number of people being affected has been noticed.
I am also reliably told that those white paper based face masks are less than useless, they will not stop air borne bacteria but do give a false sense of security. Best advice; wear a proper mask or at least only use potting /compost mixes outside and keep you head well away.