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."
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.
What an absolute load of crap. That's like saying "about 80 percent of Germans come from the same country as Adolph Hitler."
What's sorely missing from this article is any sense of journalism. I know that's a passe' concept. But when a "study" like this comes out, stating the obvious in "OMFG the sky is falling!" terms, you should follow the money.
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.
These would be the same people that supply "educational, informative" news bits to small-market stations that get run alongside the real news. I remember one in the mid-90s that described the horrors facing your family during the Thanksgiving holiday, and how you'd save their lives by using an antibiotic cleanser. Our old friend Lysol was prominently featured -- over and over -- but the company's likely sponsorship of the ad-in-news'-clothing was conveniently left out.
Or maybe I'm just another paranoid Green.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I always wondered why there was no shower curtain in my apartment in Korea. The bathroom was tiled all over, had a sink, toilet, shower head and a drain in the center. Simple enough - my only complaint was that the shower head was directly over the toilet...
Gasp! Scientists have found that plastics that live in warm, wet environments contain Bacteria! Oh...my...god!
Seriously, this is about as non-newsy as you can get. Next we're going to find out that there's bacteria of the wound-infecting type just hanging around on people's skin. And telephones! Don't get me started on telephones. We might have to create an army of Telephone Sanitizers to save us from being wiped out by some manner of virulent disease contracted through the receiver of a telephone.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
I dislike shower curtains...too difficult to clean. My shower has a germ infected glass door. As for the germs, the article fails to make a case that exposure to germs on shower curtains cause disease. Personally, I think limited exposure to germs helps keep the immune system in tune. I think I will continue to take showers despite the grave hazard that the exposure to germs entails.
If our shower curtains gather all this scum, wouldn't the body wash puffs that many people use also? Wouldn't this be worse as there is no need to aerosolize the bacteria in case- it gets ground right in? Following that, what is the best way to disinfect a body wash puff? Is there a way? Or should they be treated as disposible items?
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
So what if 80% are from families of infectious organisms? We have beneficial E. coli bacteria living in our stomachs (we are born this way!), but other strains of E. coli (same family) are known to cause severe and sometimes lethal food poisoning. Big deal.
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
has it occurred to you that the body kills bacteria, but chemical bioaccumlation is forever?
S. paucimobilis, which can cause problems for immune-compromised patients or lead to blood stream or urinary tract infections, pneumonia and abscesses in the gut.
I've noticed that my cat often enters the shower (after i'm done) and licks the water droplets. Recently he came down with a pretty sevire urinary tract infection (UTI) which ended up costing me a couple hundered dollars for an emergency vet clinic stay. Now i'm wondering if the shower curtan was to blame.
"In wine there is wisdom. In beer there is strength. In water there is bacteria." --Old German Proverb
Using glass shower doors instead of curtains is probably a good idea, though, and certainly a better idea than disposable curtains. (?!?) At a minimum, they're easier to keep esthetically clean than vinyl curtains.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Bleach breaks down pretty quickly. It dramatically alters the local PH, but doesn't tend to persist.
I'm sick as a dog right now because I'm on day four of a seven day course of some disgusting antibiotic that leaves me nauseous and physically in pain, but it's all that's available to me now because, thanks to abuse of these medicines by our own medical system, this infection in my sinus (that had to be surgically removed) is immune to everything else.
Yeah, "humankind" may adapt, but in the process legions will become sick and die. FYI the infection in my sinus is a staph, and staph can live a very long time on things like shower curtains. So dismiss it if you care, just hope it's not your leg that has to be cut off when you contract a treatment resistant staph from simply brushing against your shower curtain after having scratched that mosquito bite you got last night...
Does somebody have a definitive link on who Goodwin really is? From what I've found online, Goodwin's Law is just an Urban Legend with no scientific backing.
Further, Goodwin's Law suggests that the conversation would be over at the point Hitler is mentioned, yet, conversation continues.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
From How to post about Nazis and get away with it:
It's a real thing.
Honestly disposable stuff is shit. You should look into getting a quality shower curtain that may cost a couple times more than a disposable one, but will outlast 20 disposables. I hate to ring the bell of sanity here but we are at the same time seeing more and more waste, high gas prices, and disposable non-biodegradeable items. We are tied to the middle-east oil and we need clean sources of energy- at the same time people are buying more and more throw away convenience garbage. "Swiffer" sweepers, pre-wet dusting wipes, paper-towels, and recently I've seen people using disposable cutting boards? I mean honestly, wtf?
When I was in college I decided that I needed to make my money go further. I got a couple small towels to use as a napkin and paper towel for kitchen stuff. And a few dishes which I washed after I used them by hand (the house didn't have a dish washer). I found that living like this was incredibly cost-effective not only in not requiring me to buy more stuff every couple weeks, but it greatly reduced my trash output- and in doing, my trash collection bills. You can use bleach, ammonia, or soap to clean almost anything, and they're a lot cheaper. Who needs windex which is just blue color added to ammonia and alcohol?
I think people these days are driven by maketing of large companies and have forgotten how to do things the 'normal' way, the way of the past, the way that has always worked. Don't let your TV tell you what you need to clean with, what you need to wipe with, what you need to cover your left-overs with, what you need to buy.
You can get along with much less money, and have much better quality. Disposable stuff is generally shit compared to the non-disposable counterpart. Next time you eat a meal use a regular towel/fabric napkin to wipe your face and clean up. It beats paper anyday. Fabric curtains can be cleaned easily (and plastic, really) instead of throwing it away.
I think we as a people of America or the world are losing our oral tradition, we are losing the knowledge of our elders to knowledge of corporate interests. I am not a hippy, I run my own business and I like the enterpreneurial spirit. I have a problem with people who do not think for themselves and follow the status quo. Think about it.
10 years ago after a fairly simple surgery to relieve pressure from a un-removable spinal cord tumor, I had an unpleasant (read: near fatal) encounter with just such a bug. MRSA (aka Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. This SOB munches on most antibiotics, burps and asks for more) I woke up two months later with literally 16 different IV bags, 24 hour dialysis, respirator, 60 pounds lighter, suffering initial stages of kidney and liver failure, having swollen sufficiently for my outer skin to break and peel off in paperback sized sheets, blind in one eye and mentally deranged and disoriented from brain damage (insufficient Oxygen to the brain) and two months of bizarro-world type halucinations while I was out.
Ever had to have therapy just to learn to swallow again?
Now I'm very particular... perhaps neurotically so... but I use alcohol based hand cleaners constantly, change sheets/shower curtains/air filters etc religiously, and tend to even the most minor of cuts and scrapes with great detail (not to mention my emergency stash of Cipro and Amoxicillin for when I'm out in the wilderness hiking..) I'm sure I'm a statistical abberation, but it was a year long hell of recovery for me. I'm still struck by wierd memory problems and am constantly tested because of long term effects of kidney/liver damage. What suck is that I still need periodic (18-24 months) surgery to remove pressure on my spine. -(
Sorry to leave you here, but I also have to go and buy another shower curtain, preferably a disposable one. Why is it that disposal seems to be the new cure-all in our society? What ever happened to cleaning and re-using? We'll end up causing a lot more problems than we solve..
Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off. We are instructed to spray dissinfectants everywhere, into the air of our bedrooms and kitchens and with special energy into bathrooms, since it is our very own germs that seem the worst kind. We explode clouds of aerosol, mixed for good luck with deoderants, into our noses, mouths, underarms, priviledged crannies -- even into the intimate insides of our telephones. We apply potent antibiotics to minor scratches and seal them with plastic. Plastic is the new protector; we wrap the already plastic tumblers of hotel rooms in more plastic, and seal the toilet seats like state secrets, after irradiating them with ultraviolet light. We live in a world where the microbes are always trying to get at us, to tear us cell from cell, and we only stay alive through diligence and fear.
We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume they must somehow relish what they do. They come after us for profit, and there are so many of them that disease seems inevitable, a natural part of the human condition; if we succeed in eliminating one kind of disease there will always be a new one at hand, waiting to take its place.
These are paranoid delusions on a societal scale, explainable in part by our need for enemies, and in part by what things used to be like.
--Lewis Thomas
Orginally printed in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Reprinted in the Book of the Month Club's "A Long Line of Cells". (Highly recommended)
KFG
Bravo!
While we're at it, I've always wanted to see a field guide to identifying common household microorganisms. For instance, what (sets of) critters are responsible for the "pink ones", "yellow ones", or "white ones"?
Granted, there's no practical health value to knowing that, I've always been curious as to who's living with me. My curiosity was piqued by moving from one apartment to another, and noticing that where my "old" dish rack and shower used to tell me I was overdue for a full-blown bleaching by accumulating visible yellow stuff in the corner, my "new" dish rack tells me by displaying colonies of whatever the pink bugs were. "Hi! We've got a thick enough protective biofilm here that rinsing with water won't work! Nyaah nyaa-OMFG, IT'S THE SODIUM HYPOCHLAAAaauggh...."
Another bug story - the single-pane windows in my first apartment used to (probably still do) harbor colonies of some green-black mold that would slowly drop spores onto the windows' venetian blinds during winter. Ugh. I hated cleaning those blinds (bleach, paper towels, up-close-and-personal) myself, but there was no way to convince the landlord to do proper remediation of the cracks in the paint around the windowsill, because the landlord didn't want a "mold" claim on the building's record. If it'd been a house, I'd have fixed it out of my own pocket and never breathed a word to the insurance company, but the work required was too extensive for me to DIY and the landlord didn't want to hear of it. Fucker.
Anyways, whatever that mold was, it was badass. I first discovered it because some had dropped off the blinds and set up shop on the metal windowsill behind a pile of boxes that blocked my view of the windowsill for a whole winter. When I found it a few months later, the mold had etched marks into stainless steel. Not only was it badass mold, but weird mold. It ate metal (and presumably dust/skin flakes and other spores) all winter long, but it left the huge pile of yummy cellulose cardboard (the boxes) untouched.
According to some scientists, there is a correlation:
However, this isn't a perfect hypothesis. I grew up on a farm, and still have allergies, although some other studies seem to show that any such benefits are frequently counteracted by being around cigarette smoke in the early years, which I also was.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out, though. So, maybe all those people that need anti-bacterial everything (I've seen toys that have triclosan embedded) will pay heed and back off a little bit. On the other hand, prepare to welcome our new bacterial overlords.
Bacteria in my shower.... big whoop. Here's a real eye opener:
In 2001 a comet exploded over Kerala, India. For days after the event, it rained red. While this made the news around the world, what didn't make it were the subsequent analyses of the content of the rain. These two papers describe a microbe which was discovered to cause the red tint to the rain. It has no DNA, metabolizes a wide variety of organic and inorganic materials, and actively breeds at 300 degrees C. Is this proof of alien life?
Who cares about bacteria in my shower? This stuff probably came from the stars.
(This story submission was rejected by the editors, insert crack smoking comment here)
It's a good hypothesis, here's another possibility: In the early 20th century, mechanical refrigeration made the widespread consumption of large quantities of ice cream possible. The increased consumption of sugar resulted in weakened immune systems and poorer general health.
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