The difference might be that shoes aren't as good of a substrate for bacteria as a warm moist foot.
The athletic administration at my college required that I put my shoes back on when practicing soccer on the intramural fields. Their reasoning was that I could get a cut and develop an e coli infection.
Oh, good point. I hadn't considered that.
> The athletic administration at my college required that I put my shoes back on when practicing soccer on the intramural fields. Their reasoning was that I could get a cut and develop an e coli infection.
This is also a good point, but not the issue that was being raised, which was specifically about others' health, not my own.
The claim was that I was tracking in all the dirt from outside on my feet, and spreading it around where it would dirty up others. Since I'd be doing exactly the same (plus all the other dirt from years of wear) if I were wearing shoes, I agree with you that it makes no sense.
As someone who walked barefoot in Chicago for much of a summer: why is this everyone's nightmare legal scenario? Sure, I could be barefoot and step on a tack, but why is that so much more of a nightmare than if I'm not looking and put my hand down on a tack on a desk? (Well, maybe because I put my hand down with less weight than my foot, but that's not the point.) There are plenty of ways to be injured in the workplace, and we are allowed to manage most of these risks ourselves; why is shoelessness so particularly terrifying?
(Incidentally, one of my favourite objections to my shoelessness was someone who claimed that it was unclean (for others, not for me). I wash my feet every day, but almost never my shoes, so which one of those results in more uncleanliness for the places that I walk through?)