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'll stick to bathing in the rainbarrel in front of my trailer.
I always wondered if that funky, non-natural, slimy, stuff-that-didn't-come-from-me, slippery, smelly, discolored stuff on my shower curtain wasn't good for me. Now I know!
I spray my shower curtain with bleach every week or so. That should kill our good bacteria friends...
My other car is first.
these things worry not me, the traditional non-showering geek
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Exactly the reason I don't shower.
They have the Internet on computers now?
I don't take showers you insensitive clod!
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
I have an enclosed shower stall. Without a shower curtain, there's no way that I can be exposed to such bacteria!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
How on earth is this news for nerds, stuff that matters.
I've been to the coding department.... and trust me, none of them are in danger of going near a shower.
but seriously, this didnt effect me before, its not going to effect me know. I might hit the curtain with some cleaner next time I scrub the walls, but thats about it.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
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...
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.
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
Wow, jumping right into the Godwin's Law on that reply, ain'tcha?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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
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.
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've grown quite a tolerance by licking my curtain.
hehe ick.
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.
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
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'
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.
has it occurred to you that the body kills bacteria, but chemical bioaccumlation is forever?
While showering one morning, our hero thinks, "This guy got published for looking at dirty workstations? Huh, I wonder if what's on this shower curtain in my hot steamy shower will get press, too?"
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
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
This is the San Diego Union Tribune, so chances are good that the "staff writer" is nothing but a glorified reformatter of press releases. Their reporting is so bad even my parakeet won't crap on it.
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.
welcome our new infectious shower-curtain overlords.
That is to say, I'll remember not to dress any wounds with strips of my shower curtain.
What a dumb story.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
if this study/research was sponsored by a large, evil corporation planning to ride the panic buying wave for their all new, shower-curtain cleaner+disinfectant - that they know will be induced after this story is read by the masses?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
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."
Bleach breaks down pretty quickly. It dramatically alters the local PH, but doesn't tend to persist.
(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."
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...
OMG, that does NOT go with my bathroom's color scheme at ALL.
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 :-).
"I don't understand why some people wash their bath towels. When I get out of the shower I'm the cleanest object in my house. In theory, those towels should be getting cleaner every time they touch me."
"Maybe I could hug you every day so I don't need showers."
"Are towels supposed to bend?"
--Wally and Alice, this Dilbert cartoon
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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..
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.
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.
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
I see this article covers pink, white and yellow bacteria. Does anyone know where I can find out if the brown gunk on my shower curtain is dangerous or not?
paintball
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully you kept a sample of that around.. we might need it when the machines try to take over.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
sheesh...didn't you read the article! These bacteria can cause infections! It's not like our bodies have a defense system against infections, or a way to get rid of them.
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'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.
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.
Godwin himself stated that the law accredited to him is a tongue-in-cheek analysis of statistics, not a method of enforcement, and that it was never intended to be used to stop a thread or declare a "winner". So maybe you should stop doing it, perhaps. You Nazi.
Virg
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.
But when a "study" like this comes out, stating the obvious in "OMFG the sky is falling!" terms, you should follow the money.
Indeed. Just two more researchers in the pockets of the powerful Shower Curtain Industry Association of America (SCIAA).
Exit, pursued by a bear.