I strongly believe you are right, sneeble (cute name by the way).

My mother had a germ phobia, and she used to wipe everything with a disinfectant we have here in Oz, called Solyptol. There was a bottle of it on the basin which she wiped her hands with regularly. The whole house smelt of Solyptol. In fact I only have to smell the stuff and it reminds me of my mother's house.

She always seemed to be coming down with gastric infections and anything else that happened to be around, even though she was living alone - whereas my kids and I were a normal healthy bunch. And no, she didn't have any underlying medical condition to cause it, and we didn't visit if any of us were sick (which didn't happen often anyway), so we weren't passing on any obvious infectious diseases.

I always thought that because she lived such a germ-free existence most of the time, she had no natural resistance to any of the normal germs that occasionally showed up, and I'm sure this is true.