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."
It's amazing, how the sciences of epidemiology and microbiology have produced such irrational paranoia in some people. Yes, there are bacteria upon your shower curtain. It's (often) warm and moist. (gasp)
Naturally the rational solution to this is to start throwing away your shower curtain after each use. (!!) But wait, there are bacteria on the trash can... better start throwing the trash out after each use. And that icky dumpster! AAAIEEEEE!
Give it a rest. Unless you have a compromised immune system or are caring for someone who does, this is NOTHING to worry about.
I sure that 80% of the bacteria in your intestines are from the same families of bacteria that infect wounds. But if you kill all of them off you are asking for some serious health problems.
While this may be a factual study, I find myself more interested in the alarmist reactions people have to news like this.
Life is not about walking from one hermetically sealed clean room to another, there's all sorts of things out there that we interact with on a daily basis. Every time you breath, you inhale pollen, dust mites, various chemical vapors, and all sorts of organic detritus.
Every time you drink water, there's a certain quantity of dead organic material, traces of various excrements, and so on, even if your water is bottled.
We do not live life as individual colonies of humanity, sailing through deserts of sterility, instead we walk through a cloud of sloughed off bacteria, viruses, and other debris, and it's O-K.
Humankind has lived for millenia with these things, and for the most part, we've been O-K.
People lived before pasteurization, people lived before water filtration, people even lived before MOUTHWASH! And they were all... O-K.
The world we live in is much cleaner in terms of organic residue then ever before, and the legions of bacteria on your shower curtain have not spontaneously appeared out of the ether, so calm down, take a deep breath, and stop panicing.
It's just a matter of time before someone figures out that there's a correlation between good health and some non-obvious combination of bacteria and organic waste. In the meantime, let Howard Hughes-style cleanliness craziness pass you by and just live your lives peacefully.
Y'all are O-K.
This kind of silliness has lead companies to create all manner of anti-bacterial wipes and soaps, and while they may ward off the occasional infection, more likely it is just watering down our immune systems so that when an infection does strike, our bodies are unprepared. To me, this is just another blip on the mass-media Paranoia-meter.
I guess I'm pessimistic, but IMHO we are hell bent as a species on painting ourselves into a biological and ecological corner.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Humans are designed to survive much dirtier conditions then we live in now, that's what we have an immune system for.
Infact one of the reasons why there's a lot more people suffering allergies these days could be that because we live in such clean conditions our immune system's got nothing better to do then go nuts over minor environmental contaminates.
Let's see..
Slashdot posts a link about how America is losing its dominance in Science, and the same day posts this shitty hack of an article and calls it science.
First off I'll state that I'm a microbiologist. Saying that two bacterium come from the same "genetic family" is totally meaningless. Take E. coli K12 and E. coli 0157:H7 for example. They're the same SPECIES. K12 is harmless while 0157 will give you bloody diarrhea and could potentially kill you. I hate reading crap like this. It helps ignorant people justify their decision to disinfect EVERYTHING, thus inhibiting childrens' development of robust immune systems.
According to a news story I heard on the radio, your average keyboard has more bacteria than your toilet seat, which makes sense if you think about it. I clean my toilet seat every week but when was the last time you used Lysol on your kb?
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
(1) it took NIH money to culture four dirty shower curtains.
(2) it took two (2) PhDs to figure this out.
(3) these are apparently rather filthy PhDs (RTA - the four shower curtains were all theirs).
You could have found this out for free at the next state science fair. Along with the usual assortment of cultured doorknobs, soap dishes, dishes from the sink, toothbrushes and hairbrushes, TV remotes and telephones.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Who pays for "studies" like this?
"Their research was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, the medical research arm of the federal government."
But when a "study" like this comes out, stating the obvious in "OMFG the sky is falling!" terms, you should follow the money.
Kelly and Pace emphasized that the bacteria they found on their shower curtains normally don't cause problems for humans. "We don't want to freak people out, because we're really only talking about immune-compromised people," Kelley said.
***
Hardly the "OMFG the sky is falling!" terms that you describe.
Don't blame the researchers, the article might not be well written but it's not that the researchers were trying to release some life-changing study.
Instead of wood or linoleum floors whose dirt can be attached through relatively primitive means (water and cloth), we largely live on carpet. I can run the steam cleaner over my living room carpet apparently indefinitely without it ever failing to yield up more filth.
Instead of baths in porcelain tubs that get scrubbed at least weekly (to remove rings and, as a good side effect, germs), we're taking showers standing next filthy curtains, and neatly aerosoling germs straight to the lungs via the shower steam (if your house is an a high radon area and you take a lot of showers, might as well take up smoking too!).
Just general house cleaning has become both less common and less easy. Rember the phrase "spring cleaning"? Ever participated in one? Before anti-biotics made scratches and other small wounds of no account, keeping your local environment clean was a survival instinct as much as a social nicety.
At least in the case of shower curtains, however, there is a simple solution. Get a washable shower curtain (google for shower curtain washable cotton duck) and wash it in hot water once a week. One germ collector eliminated, and it's nicer brushing up against wet cotton than wet chemically treated plastic. You still need to Comet that tub once a week, though :-).
So now I'm supposed to suddenly be afraid of doing something I've been doing my life without any ill effects so far? Sounds like a marketing ploy.
100% of people come from the same genetic family as shit-throwing chimps.
paintball
I just love it when these guys roll out and say stuff like this.
"There are more germs in your kitchen then there are on your toilet seat", seeming to imply that a toilet seat has fewer and less dangerous microbes than a kitchen sponge.
And now we have "There are lots of infectious, er, well at least they belong to infectious families, of bacteria on your shower curtain"
I'm sorry, but I can say that I've never gotten a wound infected while washing dishes or taking a shower. I can not say the same about cleaning a toilet. A word to the wise - if you have an open cut on your hand/arm, do not clean the toilet, even if you are wearing rubber gloves.
Anyway, do these guys really have nothing better to do than count bacteria on shower curtains and issue a press release about it? I'm sure whoever provided the grant money for this research is ecstatic.
-R
Reminds me of the polio outbreak in the US. It actually occured when they fixed the sewer system. In the early 20th century kids would often play in the streets with open sewage, and although polio existed, it never got out of hand. However when they cleaned up the streets and installed a modern sewage system, the infection rate shot up? Why? Because the kids playing in the streets with the open sewage developed an immunity to the disease early, but after the sewers were cleaned up, the kids did not get exposed to weaker forms and thus the contraction rate shot up.
This is why I think young people in America are going to be a lot more susceptible to disease as they grow older. As the germ phobes buy all these "anti-bacterial" products, it tends to make the developing immune systems in the children weaker because they do not have an opportunity to fight diseases at a young age. Sensationalist media like this doesn't help.
Latin Americans *hate* standing water, they think it's very unclean.
This isn't that far off base. Standing water is a great breeding ground for mosquitos, and as we all know mosquitos tend to carry such wonderful things as malaria with them. So, it may be a cultural thing that simply developed as a self-defense mechanism.
Standing Water attracts mosquitos. Mosquitos carry malaria. Malaria kills people, or makes the very sick. Ergo, don't create pools of standing water.
On the other hand it could just be one of those cultural flukes that have no valid base in reality, kinda like Americans and tits on TV.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
as the saying goes, "what does not kill us only makes us stronger". Attributed to Nietsche (sp?) I believe.
:)
Our bacterial friends are just insuring that the weak members of our species are being culled out. If you can't handle a little bathroom scum then, hey, better to not reproduce. Right?
(For the humor impaired, I'm joking...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"(perhaps daily instead of once a week)"
Once a week? Hell, I'm happy to clean it every other month!
Karnal
You should try giving your cat water once in a while. Dehydration also causes urinary tract infections.
The author's right. What he didn't say however, was that the white bacteria (Staphylococcus) that are nasty infectors are probably not the Staph that is on the shower curtain. I'd expect most Staph there to be Staph epididymus, which occurs superabundantly on human skin. The yellow bacteria (called Sarcina lutea when I went to school) are, after Staph epididymus the most common bugs in inhabited houses. So yes - scratch your head or elsewhere, and you'll leave your bacteria on your shower curtain. But it's not worth having nightmares about at night. BTW, when a bleach compound (Tilex, etc., or a 5% solution of plain old household bleach) is used on a surface, the effect is good for about 3-4 days. I make my living doing indoor air quality studies. Convincing people that they should be clean, etc. is a good first step.
I quit using antibacterial soap years ago, and I've never been too big on Lysol or any other cleaning product whose primary purpose is to kill germs. See, I think there's a twofold danger here. Firstly, your immune system needs to know what to defend itself against. If you kill all the germs in your environment and don't get exposed to them regularly, then your immune system is weakened and you become more susceptible to bacterial infection. Secondly, if your cleaning product kills 99% of bacteria, then it's probable that some of the the 1% that survived have some genetic trait that can make them resistant to your germ killer. As that fraction of the bacteria reproduces, you've helped, using Darwinian survival of the fittest, to grow a stronger germ.
Don't get me wrong. I don't leave chicken sitting out on the counter overnight and then eat it raw. There's a fairly obvious line between "not overcautious" and "stupid". By cleaning up the messes that culture bacteria, I avoid a potential point of exposure to dangerous levels of them. But, by not making an effort to utterly sterilize my living environment, I allow myself to be exposed to normal levels of all sorts of buggies, keeping my immune system on its toes.
I recently had my wisdom teeth out and took my antibiotics like the doctor ordered. Guess what? I didn't get a nasty bacterial infection, even when I switched back to solid foods too soon and got some particles of food down in the empty (and not quite fully healed) tooth sockets and didn't notice for a few hours.
We're already starting to learn that to try and eradicate bacteria and other pathogens in our environment is a tactic that backfires badly.
For millions of years our immune system has evolved to protect us from most of these microbes and until recently a satisfactory balance has developed that allow us to co-exist without too many problems.
Unfortunately (and probably driven by idiotic chemical companies) a new mindset developed in the mid 20th century which suggested we should "kill all germs" using whatever disinfectant or antibiotic was most profitable to sell.
There are a growing number of health professionals who now claim that our immune system is actually becoming weaker -- since it's seeing fewer threats. This would be fine and dandy except that bacteria and new pathogens (prions etc) are on the comeback path -- their ability to adapt/evolve extremely rapdily meaning that many of our chemicals and antibiotics are now largely ineffective.
In effect, they're doing a Borg act and already adapted to become immune to our weapons.
The ultimate example of this are the growing number of antibiotic resistant bacteria that now pose a real threat and can't be killed by even our last line of defence -- vancomycin. If you are infected by one of these, you and your immune system pretty much on your own and death is quite likely.
There is now also evidence to suggest that the dramatic rise in asthma is a result of our "cleaner living" and the reduction in bacterial and mould levels in our homes.
It's about time that we woke up to the fact that, with only a few exceptions, bacteria are our friends and pose little or no threat to us.
Even the deadly staph normally lives quite happily in our sinuses and other parts of the body. It only becomes a threat under unusual circumstances which allow it to grow at a rate beyond our immune system's ability to cope.
So, be friends with your shower curtain and learn to appreciate that by being exposed to its bacteria on a daily basis, you're actually doing yourself a favour by exercising your immune system to make it stronger and more capable for when it's really needed.
Bleach is a disinfectant, not an antibiotic, so germs don't really develop resistance to it. It would be like you or I developing resistance to being boiled in acid. Possible? I guess. But orders of magnitude more difficult than evolving resistance to an antibiotic.
>>About 80 percent of the organisms they found in the flaky scum were in the same genetic families as those known to infect wounds or cause problems for people with AIDS, cancer or other immune system disorders.
Let's not forget that potatoes and tomatoes are in the same genetic family (Solanaceae) as [gasp] Deadly Nightshade. And carrots are in the same genetic family (Umbeliferae) as [horrors] Poison Hemlock. And little Fluffy the Cockapoo over there is in the same genetic family (Canidae) as the dreadful Dire Wolf. Little sucker might turn on you at any minute.>Who pays for "studies" like this? I predict if you follow the money, you'll find that this fine product is from the makers of Lysol and other fine household products.
Actually, this one was funded by the National Institutes of Health. That makes it just stupid, rather than nefarious, I guess.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Your 'joke' holds a grain of truth - it's a simple fact that a sterile environment leads to weak humans; lack of exposure impairs immunity. Diseases such as asthma and hay fever owe their rise in prominence to the dramatic increases in hygene during the last century or so. Still a good trade for the black plague, though.
Even if the bacteria were infectious, that would be no reason to change your curtain. Quite to the contrary, I'd rather be infected with a wide range of infectious bacteria when I'm in good health, so that when I need to go in for surgery or get a severe injury, I will already have antibodies built up. If you were to modify your life so that you lived in a sterile bubble, the first disease you came across would be life threatening.
..haven't missed the part where the three Chinese guys give perfume to the star baby. It's like the diaries of a madman!
Only 10% of you is you. The rest is not your cells!
For starters, when you go to the toilet to do the #2, well, 50% of shit by mass is bacteria! The rest, is the stuff you ate.
People should realize that without bacteria, you are DEAD. A horrid death at that.
Most of the stuff that kills bacteria is a bunch of bull, you just pushes them around, and you end up with feces bacteria on your dinner table (really!) after you clean your house.
Anyway, when humans will actually be able to affect the microbial life balance, well, then we will be trully fucked. They are the engine of life on this planet, whether you like it or not.
PS. This goes not only to parent, but to all ignorants to whom the TV commercials speak to. Those "antibaterial" products don't really work or are killing you more than the bacteria (bateria will be back in a matter of hours after you kill them) - use water for same results! :)
The best way to clean your shower curtain is to throw it away and buy another one :P We have a vinyl inner and a fabric outer, and the fabric one stays, while the vinyl one gets replaced occasionally.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The post-op anitbiotic is worse than the operation, but it only lasts seven days. There was no pain from the surgery unless I bumped my nose, and the relief in my breathing was immediate from the moment I left the hospital. I had a deviated septum that's had the right side of my head plugged up most of my life - I'd do the entire operation again in a heartbeat and, in fact, if my ear doesn't empty of fluid on its own in another month or so I'll get a tube put in there to drain it.
I've had sinus problems my entire life. I don't think people who don't have chronic sinus problems can understand what a miserable experience it can be, getting infection after infection every time you get a stupid cold. Repeated infections cause polyps (not to mention resistant strains from all the antibiotics) which just plugs it all up worse - that's how they know about the staph. Kinda silly to be second guessing now, as I already made clear I've HAD the surgery.
People who HAVE had chronic sinus problems their entire lives also cannot know what a relief it is to be rid of it. Modern technology is a wonderful thing and, in the long run, the operation was less than all the rest of the money I've spent over the years on doctor visits and lost work.
I see two problems with your criticism: First, you don't know the difference between science and magazine articles; and second, you only look at the study from your own limited experience - and because you, personally, have had no problem with surface bacteria you conclude that there is no problem.
What's sorely missing from this article is any sense of journalism.
This was a scientific study, NOT journalism. The study, albeit reported in a popular article, reports the facts. YOU are the one who sees a "the sky falling" article. The problem is that you are not imaginative enough to see that the world does not revolve around you. You erroneously conclude that since you don't have a problem then there just must not be one. True, bacteria on a shower curtain will not be a problem for most people, but there are subgroups, perhaps those in hospitals, who could find it a serious problem. It is the same as a day of poor air quality - most healthy people are unaffected but there are some (the very young, the very old or the very sick) that suffer or die.
Knowledge of this possible route of transmission of infection can be important for people with wounds or for people with compromised immune systems. Just because you do not have an open wound on your leg that could become gangrenous does not mean that awareness of high bacteria levels on shower curtains is unimportant to those who do have such wounds. Just because you do not have a compromised immune system from chemotherapy does not mean that the possibility of aerosolized bacteria is unimportant to those who have. Just because you do not have HIV or AIDS does not mean that this potential source of fatal infections is not important to those that do. Burn patients, for example, would be particularly susceptable to this type of contact exposure.
No, this study was not BS at all. Your comment, however, is a different matter.