Slashdot Mirror
Who's Behind the Shower Curtain?
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, it's not Norman Bates. Instead, hundreds of millions of yellow, pink and white bacteria are hiding on your shower curtain. According to a study by San Diego and Colorado researchers, it should be enough to push you to turn the water off and to make you grab a towel. After analyzing the vinyl shower curtains from their own bathrooms, the scientists found '...about 80 percent of the organisms they found in the flaky scum were in the same genetic families as those known to infect wounds'. Sorry to leave you here, but I also have to go and buy another shower curtain, preferably a disposable one."
I spray my shower curtain with bleach every week or so. That should kill our good bacteria friends...
My other car is first.
We have a cloth shower curtain, and it goes in the laundry every week or so. They cost more, and washing is a hassle, but there's a lot less grunge to tolerate.
Cleaning Instructions: How to clean a shower curtain to shine like new
As glass is slower to acquire the scum; I wonder if squeegeeing the glass doors also helps slow down this effect.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Did you read the next paragraph?
So while Lysol may have helped out some, at least some of the money came from a respectable source. Although, I hope this study didn't cost all that much to do.
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Godwin is a real human, and was recently Interviewed on /.. The other thing about his law is that if someone attempts to invoke Godwin's law, the thread will continue eternally. See Jargon File Mirror.
The previous sig has been removed due to
this goes with the old saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" An interesting article about this at 'http://healthandenergy.com/asthma_&_germs.htm '
The next time you take antibiotics, think about this: Lactobacillus and Streptococcus are two species of bacteria that outcompete many more harmful varieties of microbes. They each have characteristics which help to make the surface of your skin quite inhospitable for other invading microbes.
When you take antibiotics, your susceptibility to get a yeast infection (if your female) increases dramatically, since the acidic environment created by Lactobacillus' metabolic wastes makes life difficult at best for the yeast trying to establish itself.
Yeah, yeah...the shower curtain thing is pretty damn gross, but lighten up. As I am continually trying to convince my wife: living with a little bacteria will only serve to HELP our health rather than diminish it. (I can't believe I'm going to word it this way, but...) The more we work to build commensurate/mutualistic symbiotic relationships with bacteria the more we have to gain.
You left out the most important part: the results. They found fecal coliform growing on ALL the brushes, including the two brushes kept covered in another room. It's also important to note what the bacteriologist said after he told them it was on ALL the brushes: fecal coliform is everywhere, so don't worry about it. If you're healthy, you can handle it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Mozart was Austrian. The famous joke usually invokes Beethoven who was German but composed in Vienna.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
No, no, no. Mozart and Hiter were both Austrian.
It was to make Beethoven (German) an Austrian and Hitler (Austrian) a German.
Mozart was born in Salzburg and was buried in Vienna.
To the average person, it probably doesn't mean much - our immune systems are generally strong enough to fight off the majority of bacteria we're exposed to. To an immunocompromised person, it could quite literally save their life.
If it weren't for the somewhat mysterious nature of OIs, I'd agree with you - but anything that might help to pinpoint specific sources of OIs can save a lot of lives.
Although not stated explicitly in the article, people being treated by Chemotherapy have their immune system killed or very depleted. Knowing that a shower curtain may contain harmful bacteria growths could be life-saving. Most likely, nothing life-threatening is growing there, but the article does provide more information about one area where people feel safe but might not be.
By the way, we have found that the best disenfectant is bleach, sodium hypochlorite. Better than alcohol or Lysol. Don't apply to cloth shower curtains though. 'Also found that anti-bacterial hand soap is basically worthless.
Here are things that will affect you more than the shower curtain:
1) Those water filtering pitchers that live in your fridge (e.g., Brita filters). My family seemed to keep getting sick (colds, or sore throat) until we started taking real good care to clean the pitcher out regularly (dishwasher).
2) The pink stuff that can grow on your toothbrush (down at the bottom of the bristles). Yuck! I now *dry* my toothbrush off with a clean towel after use.
3) Razor blades! I used to get "shaving bubbles" under my chin and a rather irritated face until I dipped the double-edged razor in rubbing alcohol after every use.
I'm sure the shower scum isn't too healthy either, but heck, the easiest access microbes have to your body is through the mouth.
Reading aloud only works if you pronounce "duty" like an illiterate imbecile.
It's like in a hospital where you are probably more likely to get some raging new sort of bacterial infection BECAUSE they try so hard to keep everything free from the "evil" bacteria.
The reletively harmless bacteria gets killed off pretty easy by the bleach and chemicals used to clean the hospital (which is one reason why they're the reletively harmless ones) but the really tough bacteria doesn't die off completely and now has all this new empty space with no competition.
This is why some scientists were upset with the idea of all these anti-bacterial household products. Not because we would be breeding super-resistant bacteria, but because there is a large population of harmless bacteria that keeps the little pockets of bad bugs in check... and as others have stated here, we could just as easily say that IF there was some sort of unhealthy conditions being generated, it's more to do with the wonders of cheap plastic shower curtains than anything else.
Actually, the story itself is pretty level-headed, it's the summary posted on Slashdot that is sensationalistic (I believe that's what you meant when you said "sensationalized" but I just want to make it very clear). The article says:
But the submitter cut the sentence when quoting, removing the qualification and making it look like the organisms found affect everybody and not just a specific group of people.
Another quote to show the article is quite reasonable:
The good thing is, now when someone is diagnosed with a deficiency in their immune system, they can be advised to use glass shower doors.
we use the 'cloth' shower curtians -- they're washable.
And yes, they do an excellent job of keeping the water in the shower. You can get 'em at Wally World (among other places) relatively inexpensively.
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
A lot of people seem to think that Godwin's law means that the thread must end when Hitler is mentioned, but that's not really true. The only way to violate Godwin's law is to have an infinitely long thread without mentioning Hitler or the Nazis even once, which is impossible (you can't have an infinitely long thread, it has to end at some point).
The law simply states that the longer a thread goes on for, the more likely it is that somebody will mention Hitler. It's all probabilities -- in this case, Hitler was mentioned straight off the bat.
I'm sure there's dozens of nerd household tips already and all, but I periodically toss my vinyl internal shower curtain in the washing machine and run it on hot cycle two or three times, taking it out and uncoiling it in between washes as the curtain tends to get all wound up in the machine. I don't know how much energy really goes into making the curtain (and how that compares to the amount of water and electricity being used), so I don't know if it's actually efficient to prolong the life of $4.99 curtains like this... but a few cents in water and detergent works for my budget.
Yes, but according to the article, "...I'd advise to run your shower curtains through the clothes washer every few weeks...Better yet, get a glass door. Glass accumulates this biofilm slower.". I don't know about you, but I don't know many glass doors that fit in a clothes washer. :) I'll stick with vinyl.
But do make sure the washing machine is on a cool wash. Our neighbor used a high heat setting, and the vinyl turned into sticky gooey mass that has to be peeled from the washing machine.
The fact that you're missing is how the bacteria get transmitted. Following your example, you basically couldn't go into any kitchen. Could never enter any public bathroom. Could never use any public doorknob. There's tons of bacteria everywhere.
I just make sure that if I've got an open cut on my hand, I don't start wiping it on everything. Oh, and I don't spend time licking shower curtains.
Oh, and the reason that most antibacterial soap doesn't work is that it uses an antibiotic to kill the bacteria. Bacteria will evolve beyond just about every regularly applied antibiotic out there in a fairly short time. You're just helping their evolution along by providing them with regular pressure, with nice breaks to allow for reproduction. This is also what's causing problems in hospitals, since for the longest time, doctors prescribed antibiotics for everything. Bacteria have moved on, but antibiotics haven't.
Be glad life is unfair, otherwise we'd deserve all this.