MANY people's faith in God is somewhat stronger than their in medicine. Which is why in hospitals around the country, bottles of holy water find their way onto wards after being secreted in visitors' handbags and patients' bedside lockers. The medical treatment may (be cutting edge and cost many thousands of pounds but that little bottle of holy water is always there just in case all else fails.
But the problem is that holy water is often contaminated by dangerous bacteria. Blessing simply doesn't kill germs. And the sprinkling of holy water that is meant to cure, may actually cause life threatening infection in certain circumstances.
In fact, when you are lying flat on your back unconscious in intensive care after major surgery, the greatest risk to your survival could be the well meaning relative or friend who douses your dressings with a little liquid from Lourdes. The murky liquid, holy though it may be, may have been kept in a dirty bottle for years.
In one famous case, told in the British Medical Journal in 1992, a man who was hospitalised with multiple injuries seemed utterly resistant to all medical treatment. Every time the doctor was ready to release him, he got sick again. No one could figure it out.
Until, that is, someone noticed that his mother was discreetly dampening him with holy water from a bottle in her handbag. When tested, the water turned out to be noxious.
Mr John Blake, an eye surgeon at the Royal Victoria Eye & Ear Hospital and St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin, was aware of the case when he himself was faced with a particularly difficult situation.
The case was baffling at first. A 72 year old woman scheduled for cataract surgery had to have her operation deferred twice because on each occasion she developed purulent conjunctivitis in her left eye prior to surgery. Understandably, she was as disappointed as Mr Black was perplexed. Searching for an explanation for this unprecedented double deferment, Mr Blake asked her if she had put holy water on her face. Sure enough, she admitted that she had brought a bottle of Lourdes water with her to hospital and had applied some to her forehead on the morning of the surgery on each admission to hospital. She had also wet her face with the water on the morning before each admission.
Examining the bottle, Mr Black saw that it was half filled with murky fluid which his patient had regularly replenished from a reservoir in a holy statuette of Our Lady which had been brought from Lourdes one year before. Swabs taken from the bottle grew staphylococcous viridans and those taken from the hollow statuette grew Xanthomonas (pseudomonas) maltophilia.
Still, Mr Blake wondered why her eyes had become infected only on the mornings before her surgery, when in fact she had used the water every morning of the previous year. Had she usually washed her face immediately after application of the water? No, she rarely washed her face. Had she put on cream or make up? Yes, she had put Nivea cream all over her face directly after placing the holy water on her forehead. On the two mornings of surgery however, she had omitted the cream.
Mr Blake realised that most mornings, the cream had blocked the contaminated holy water from trickling into the woman's eyes. Paradoxically, by omitting the cream on the two mornings of surgery, the woman had deprived herself of this protection.
The woman had been extremely lucky. The infection caused by the potentially devastating bacteria had shown up before the surgery was to take place. If the eye had been surgically opened with these bacteria present, she could easily have been blinded by the resulting infection.
The discovery led Mr Blake to wonder if some of the many cases of low grade inflammation among eye surgery patients were, indeed, caused by holy water. In research which has consequently been published in the Irish Medical Journal, he questioned 55 hospital patients and learned that nine had brought receptacles of holy water unknown to medical and nursing staff on the eye wards. Suspecting that these bottles represented a significant course of infection, he recommend that "patients' stagnant stores be taken from them on admission to hospital and be replaced with fresh sterile holy water". Mr Blake says that he doesn't want to scare patients off using holy water, but he does want them to "use it intelligently".
Mr Blake has convinced both the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear and St Vincent's Hospitals to provide patients on the eye wards with sterile, blessed holy water on request. He, believes that all hospital patients should ask for blessed, sterile water instead of using their own. Too often, their own holy water has been maturing sometimes for months in dirty bottles may be responsible for a significant source of infection after eye and other surgery.
Whether or not you are in hospital you should use holy water safely. You must first get sterile water in a sterile bottle from the hospital or chemist and ask for a priest to bless it. It's important to realise that even a sterile bottle has only to be opened once for bacteria to enter. Within 24 hours of opening, it becomes a breeding ground for dangerous germs and must be thrown away.
Once you have obtained the sterile holy water, you must use it carefully if you want to avoid inflicting harm on yourself or on others. Never, Mr Blake warns, sprinkle holy water on an open wound anywhere on the body, whether the wound has been caused by surgery or an injury. Never sprinkle holy water on the surface of the eye or on the body generally where there has been even the slightest abrasion of the skin. Never let holy water touch the skin on an area of severe abrasion or ulceration.
Mr Blake stresses that in general, even contaminated holy water will not harm a healthy person. But it is those who are sick or undergoing surgery who are most likely to have holy water sprinkled over their bodies and it is not uncommon for holy water to find its way onto surgical wounds in the belief that it will help them heal faster. Unfortunately, the opposite is more likely to be the case.