We all know that bacteria and viruses loiter everywhere, and that the number one way to avoid getting contaminated is to wash, wash, wash. America's germ-phobic ways have consumers buying all things antibacterial. These antibacterial cleansers act on the same principal as antibiotics -- wiping out all germs in their path. In theory, that seems like a great idea, but just as antibiotics are creating new strains of ultra-resistant bugs, so too are antibacterial washes. Unbeknownst to most of the public, antibacterial products don't even prevent the spread of infectious disease. Yet the market for them is still flourishing. What's more, the Centers for Disease Control claims the proliferation of antibacterial cleansers may even compromise the development of a healthy immune system.

"When people talk about super bugs, they're normally talking about bacteria that have become resistant to a lot of antibiotics, almost to the degree where we're running out of medicines with which to treat them," says Rial Rolfe, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

It's possible that eventually we may get to a state where there are bacteria that cause infections for which we don't have any antibiotics. Rolfe says we've seen antibiotic resistance ever since penicillin was introduced in the 1940s. But there were so many other antimicrobials being developed that when infections became resistant to penicillin, pharmaceutical companies came up with other antibiotics. "That's worked well for 40-plus years, but now we're really running out of chemical structures that can be developed to eliminate these resistant bacteria," he says.