Ah, summertime and the living is easy, especially for the germs, mold and spores that thrive in the hot, moist climate, traveling through the crowds gathered for festivals, carnivals and parades and hitching a ride on the most overlooked of vehicles.

You expect to find germs in the obvious places — the bathroom, trash cans, the floors. But there's a multitude of objects in everyday life that can harbor millions of microscopic creatures.

While most of these microbes are harmless to people whose immune systems are operating normally, children, who are still building up defenses, and older folks, whose defenses are dwindling, are susceptible.

And anyone can get sick from the really bad bacteria like E. coli and salmonella, which can multiply in minutes.

That's the scary world of Tricia Holderman, who runs Elite Facility Systems of Dallas and Richmond, Va. Elite Facility Systems provides janitorial services to dental, medical and health care clinics.

But she said, it's not just in hospitals that you have to be on guard against infections.

“There are many different germs,” Holderman said. “You could be sitting on a flight next to someone with Ebola.”

“And people have to start taking care of themselves,” she said.

For example, she shudders when she hears someone evoke the “Five-Second Rule” when food drops on the floor.

The so-called rule holds that anything picked up before it sits on the floor for five seconds is OK to eat.

Don't believe it, warns Holderman.

“People track in insecticides and animal feces from outside onto the floor,” she said. Anything in contact with the floor, however brief, is not something you want to put in your mouth, she said.

And a person's hands really are grubby little mitts, picking up germs by brushing, touching and resting on multiple infested surfaces.

“When you brush back your hair or hold a cell phone up to your ear, your hand is near your face, the hand that has opened up door handles touched by hundreds of people,” said Holderman.

“People had gotten so lax about hygiene, at least before Ebola,” she said.

But even the toughest germ and spore can be defeated by the right cleaner, said Herb Snider, co-owner of Mon-D-Aid & Cleanit Co., 143 Mercer St., which sells cleaning products to businesses and the public.

Snider said, “There are multiple ways to go. There are disinfectants based on bleach and there are disinfectants based on petroleum products.”

Snider said both are effective although some people's skin is sensitive to bleach-based products.

“In general, a chlorine-based bleach or petroleum-based disinfectant will kill 99.9 percent of the germs,” he said.

“We sell to the jail and during the Ebola scare they said, 'We need something that will kill Ebola,'” said Snider. “But Ebola is a weak strain of virus. You can kill it with bleach. It's only when it gets in a body that it gets nasty.”

Snider recommends bleach-based disinfectants for dealing with the mold and mildew flourishing in the heat and humidity of July.

“An ounce of bleach to a gallon of water will give you a hospital-grade disinfectant,” he said. “That will kill your mold and mildews and the spores and that way they won't grow back.”

Holderman also recommends a few precautions, the first being washing your hands a lot more often, if not with disinfectant then with plenty of hot water and soap.

“Especially, after being in a high-touch area: in an elevator, touching the hand rails of an escalator,” she said.

When visiting a doctor's office, take your own pen and your own magazines. The ones provided in the waiting room have been handled by an unknown number of people with who knows what kind of germs.

When you take your children to the pediatrician, bring their own toys with you.

“Toys in the waiting room have been handled by so many, and children have a tendency to put things in their mouth,” she said.

“In fact, avoid hospitals when you can, that's where all the sick people are,” Holderman advised.

Sometimes you can't avoid sick people, which is the problem confronting Wendy Moore, director of nursing at Concordia at Cabot, 134 Marwood Road, Jefferson Township.

Moore is responsible for the well-being of the 142 residents in Concordia's skilled and long-term care facilities.

“This time of year, we see more skin conditions. With the hot, humid weather, rashes are common,” Moore said. “We also need to be concerned that the rashes could be shingles which is highly contagious.”

Of course, Moore said, the germs Concordia staff really have to watch out for are VRE and C. diff.

One of the worst offenders, C. diff is short for clostridium difficile.

“When you take antibiotics it kills the good bacteria that assist with digestion in your gut that allows the C. diff to take over,” said Moore.

VRE is vancomycin-resistant enterococci, a bacteria that can cause infections and has developed a resistance to the antibiotic vancomycin.

VRE and C. diff patients are highly contagious, Moore said, and are kept separate during their treatments.

Since C. diff spores can live for months on surfaces, patients' bed linens and trash are handled differently, Moore said.

“And their surroundings need to be deep cleaned with a bleach solution since hand sanitizers don't work on C. diff because of the spores. Everything else can be handled by hand sanitizer but not the C. diff,” she said.

But the most effective weapon on the war against germs remains washing your hands.

But you have to wash your hands the right way, cautioned Cindy Allday, infection prevention and control assistant at Butler Memorial Hospital.

Allday said, “We really concentrate on hand hygiene.”

In fact, said Melisse Maser, hospital director of education, all new hires in every department receive an orientation that includes a hand-washing demonstration.

The hospital recommends wetting the hands and applying enough soap to cover both hands.

Begin with a palm-to-palm rub, then place the left palm over the right interlaced fingers and vice versa.

Then rub left fingers back and forth in the right palm and vice versa.

“Focus on the nails. And the thumbs are a big area that is missed,” said Allday.

Then rinse the hands, dry with a single-use paper towel and use the towel both on the faucet and the door handle to avoid recontaminating your hands.

Maser said a black light demonstration shows the areas of that are missed during a lackadaisical hand washing.

Maser said hospital employees are trained to wash their hands before and after seeing each patient.