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...
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...
From How to post about Nazis and get away with it:
It's a real thing.
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.
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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