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Hot-Air Dryers Suck In Nasty Bathroom Bacteria, Shoot Them At Your Hands (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hot-air dryers suck in bacteria and hardy bacterial spores loitering in the bathroom -- perhaps launched into the air by whooshing toilet flushes -- and fire them directly at your freshly cleaned hands, according to a study published in the April issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that adding HEPA filters to the dryers can reduce germ-spewing four-fold. However, the data hints that places like infectious disease research facilities and healthcare settings may just want to ditch the dryers and turn to trusty towels. Indeed, in the wake of the blustery study -- which took place in research facility bathrooms around UConn -- "paper towel dispensers have recently been added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the UConn School of Medicine surveyed in the current study," the authors note. The researchers speculated that "one reason hand dryers may disperse so many bacteria is the large amount of air that passes through hand dryers, 19,000 linear feet/min at the nozzle. The convection generated by high airflow below the hand dryer nozzles could also draw in room air."
I think that the Dyson dryers are the worst. There is usually a small pool of water in the device, just ideal for bacteria to grow in, then the air blows, potentially taking tiny droplets of this bacteria-infected water into your face.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
and all the hand dryer shot out was skinny vanilla latte!
It's for the environment. You should be happy to sacrifice your health to save the Earth.
For that matter, why aren't you collecting your poop and taking it home and composting it?
Shame!
Everything in existence was designed to kill you. Thanks to your sheltered upringings, you have immunity to absolutely nothing. Please stay in your rooms and never leave for the rest of your days. The rest of us express our eternal gratitude.
This isn't new news. Other studies have been done and reported (here too) years ago.
Back then, in a quandary about what to do about it, I discovered that washing my hands and shaking the water off, they were dry in less than 2 minutes. So as long as the faucet and door allow me to use my elbow to shut off the water and open the door, I'm good.
Since then I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of places that have automatic faucets. I'm thinking of putting them in at home, too.
In a future ideal world, there will be no reason to even think about touching faucets and door handles. Or PIN pads, Veriphone styli, or touchscreens of any flavor. We will all be much healthier then.
I never use hot air dryers. Something about them is just not hygienic.
There are dangerous germs in and on most things. Our germophobic culture is doing more harm than good in the long run.
For Short Speech from President Trump
Measuring flow in Linear Feet Pet Minute? Really?
Various studies have been published on this in the past few years.
The "sanitary" air driers are anything but. The more powerful they are the worse they are.
A little wasteful, but paper is better. If people wouldn't use far more than is necessary to dry their hands it would be less wasteful.
The small waste of paper is far less that one what's used to treat one person's infection.
Pay me now, or pay me later. Paper towels are less wasteful.
What I want to know is why the bacon dispenser is always empty.
So blow dryers spread disease, and disposable towels are an environmental nightmare. I just shake my hands after washing and they're dry in less than a minute. In the rare case that I need them dry immediately I can wipe them on my shirt.
Maybe women's bathrooms are different, but - man, some guys are just pigs.
I work at a university - so with an above-average educated population - and what I see in the men's bathroom sometimes makes me sick. Guys (not just students - faculty too!) come out of stalls all the time without washing their hands afterwards... but that's not the worst. What's even worse is the guys who come out of the stall, do a quick fake pass through the sink (1-2 seconds max), then paw at the paper towel dispenser.
You really think the germs spread by an air dryer are worse than the feces being physically deposited on the towel dispenser?
Plus we used to have the old fashioned kind of paper towel dispensers - the ones with a hand lever. At least with those you could use a forearm or elbow to advance the paper. But now we've got "eco-friendly" dispensers that don't really work 50-75% of the time. When they work, you pull on the protruding paper to get a small section of towel - that's fine. But when they don't work, the only way to get paper is to manually rotate the little disk on the side of the dispenser - something you can't do with anything but your hands.
#DeleteChrome
Yum!
"I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows." -Bart Simpson
Once you know how to use them, they're brilliant and don't blow anything your face.
Take your wet hands, put them down the SIDES of the dryer (not the top!) and bring them into the dryer from the side. Draw them upwards slowly. That's it. The water sheets off the hands downwards and nothing goes upwards. Usually one draw is enough to make them bone dry, if you need to, repeat the in-at-the-side-draw-upwards action a second time.
DO NOT:
Stick your hands in the top, thrusting downwards, because the water will sheet up your arms and into the air.
Water doesn't fly up into your face, and the water going down is drained down.
https://www.facebook.com/MythB...
Confirm common-fucking-sense? This desire for more education is over-rated.
The point of washing your isn't to kill germs. It's to get rid of the places harmful bacteria can live in and multiply in. This applies to not just your hands but hospital floors, walls and hell almost everything. Bacteria are everywhere. If you bleached everything but don't actually remove the stuff the bacteria thrive on, they will be back. If you use anti bacterial hand wash you are really just giving the harmful bacteria an advantage over the good bacteria on your skin. So wash, actually clean and call out your hospital on all the ick and bodily fluids that they just spray with disinfectant.
Seriously, ozonators are not that pricey and ozonated air would probably do more to sanitize your hands than the soap and water you scrubbed up with. Just make sure the restroom has good ventilation.
So spreading bathroom germs is bad, for sure, but we shouldn't give up on air dryers, because paper towels are straight up wasteful on several levels. HEPA filters will reduce the air flow, causing a hand dryer to use _a lot_ more electricity, but a reasonable fix isn't that difficult: bathrooms are already plumbed, so just run another pipe to bring in fresh air--even from a nearby closet would probably be good enough
As an evil racist homophobic trump supporter I believe in letting the ambient air dry my hands. I accept the fact that this is a racist act. I should instead be using the hell out of hand dryers made in China shipped across an ocean, and powered by photovoltaics.
Wipe them on your jeans.
...slime.
As the husband of a germaphobe... I have to say that these stories are getting ridiculous and contributing to a paranoid delusional culture where susceptible gullible people fear innocuous objects.
People worry about the oddest things like blowing air, when they ignore handling the door knob or lever with a bare hand which has who knows what on it along with god & I know is on the bottom of the shoe on your foot that you track into your car, home and workplace.
Nothing wrong with bacteria.
Newsflash: your skin is ALREADY covered in bacteria from your GI tract and all of your household members' GI tracts. Getting several more won't affect anything. It only makes sense in institutional and clinical settings where you might not want to get infected with someone else's bacteria. But that should be easy to fix - just place the laundry room away from lavatories.
They are loud and damage hearing. They should be banned.
If you pay attention to the article (yes, I know, /. , never RTFA), the mostly are interested in what is floating in the air.
As in spores that at some point of time got air born (TFS mentions "flushing" as something that might launch spores in the air)
The whole idea of the article, is that specifically exposing plates to the air flow of the air dryer gives much more bacteria colonies than anything else (sample the nozzle of a turned off air dryer, leaving the plate in an currently unused toilet room, blowing air with a less powerful small fan, etc.)
Their proposed explanation is that this contamination is due to the sheer amount of air that goes out of the dryer (there aren't that many microbes in the air, but when the whole atmosphere of the toilet room is cycled and blown to your plate in a few seconds, you're bound to catch a few microboes).
From that point of view :
- Dysons have always been louded for their extremely powerful air flow and insanely efficient fan motors. That doesn't help the "blowing the whole room's worth of air to your hand" problem.
- Dysons have a pool of water accumulating at the bottom, which will get blown at the exact moment when the dryer is used, helping the "getting microbe airborne" a tiny bit (would be as if someone did flush their toilet exactly in sync with a classical dryer, given TFS. Here the pool is smaller, but closer, but the effect should be tiny).
- Touching the wall isn't a problem (sampling the nozzles of turned off dryer didn't produce much. Again, it's not that dryers are dirty. It's the fact that almost any particule currently in the air will end up being blown on your hands at some point of time in the cycle of these air blowing monsters. Unless dysons have HEPA filters, there's no reason to suspect they are any different from other dryers)
- The direction where sheets of water flow isn't relevant to the perspective of this study.
Funnily though, even if TFS reports that paper towel were added to toilet rooms as a consquence of the study, at point during the study did they test the paper towel surface for microbes...
Tin foil hat ! Conspiracy theory time !! THEY WERE PAID BY THE "BIG SOFT TISSUE" !!!~~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
especially the newer ones (Dyson Airblade and its copies) that blast air at high speed (instead of using hot air at low speed). They're bloody loud, and air dryers never manage to get your hands dry within their set time limit. I always seem to have to use them twice (and yes, I shake out my hands beforehand).
That's not an amount of any sort. Just a rate. I need more to determine the amount. Duct cross section and the time the dryer is running.
Who cares if my hands are wet for 3 minutes until body heat makes it evaporate... Just shake off in the sink and go.
I hate air dryers and prefer using paper towels for many reasons. Much to my irritation paper towels are becoming rarer and rarer. Most restrooms seem to now only have an air dryer rather than paper towels. I cant stand it as the air dryer makes a loud noise. Also, its a good idea to use paper towels to open the door as you go out (many people do not wash hands and you are touching the same handle they did). There should be a law to require paper towels in all restrooms.
Yeah, or what you get owning a dog or cat. Which I do. I laugh at your silly blowing air and its bathroom flora -- do I hold my breath while I'm in the bathroom? Of course not. Do I not pet my dog in spite of the fact that my dog has far more bacteria on it than are being discussed in this article? No, I pet my dog, I snuggle with my dog, my dog licks my very face. Do I grade papers that have been handled by literally hundreds of students while eating a doughnut (and not washing my hands after every paper)? I do. Do I eat the doughnut even if it falls on the floor, according to the five, or even the ten second rule (brushing off any actual dog hair that might adhere)? I have been known to.
Do I get sick all the time? No, I hardly ever get sick -- I've got great, and well maintained, HERD IMMUNITY!
I'm not worried about bacteria, or dirt, from normal sources. The things that will get you are that salmonella-laced cow manure you are handling while you garden. The flu virus you contract just breathing as you walk past somebody that is shedding the virus with every breath. That raw oyster that just happened to harbor vibrio. The plate served to you by a waiter with hepatitis. Some diseases are virulent and readily transmitted, and the air of a bathroom is way, way down the list. In actual fact, I'm at more risk of stuff like norovirus FROM the fact that no, I don't wash my hands after touching every paper a student ever hands me, and I touch my pens, and I loan them pens, and I sit at the front of a classroom filled with all of those disease vectors right after they return from spring break laden with new bacteria I do NOT have herd immunity to -- yet -- and breathe, while they are all coughing and sneezing over themselves and each other. Two weeks later, we all have herd immunity again and things quiet down.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Have air intakes from outside...
It's best to use a gamma ray source in order to sterilize the hand dryer.
I love these things for warming up my post-carpal tunnel hands after driving in the freezing Michigan cold.
Stop in at lunch, hit the restroom, 2 cycles of the dryer and my hands are good as new again.
Then I wash my hands and grab a paper towel from the dispenser.
Anyone who has had carpal tunnel knows your hands feel like they were submerged in snow and dexterity is diminished. After a quick warm up in direct heat, things are back to normal.
Now once again I can't have nice things.....
Never have liked them. Prefer paper towels that actually DRY your hands instead of having to wipe them on your pants after the stupid hand dryers.
This is OLD news. Why would anyone be surprised of this.
Sheldon already told people how bad hot air dryers are. Apparently the authors of the study simply regurgitated what he said and added a few pieces so it doesn't sound exactly the same.
Ya and as soon as i touch the bathroom door handle i get germs as well. walking out the door will stir them up too then OMFG we go outside where gazillions of them float in the air going down our lungs along with fumes from cars,trucks and airplanes,smoke from the chimneys from people who burn fuel oil/wood/coal to heat their homes..guess what, were ALL going to DIE..go cure cancer you will get more funding money that way.
Jack of all trades,master of none
It would be more sanitary to have a plague-infested gibbon sneeze my hands dry
No one has noticed that, invariably, the air blown by one of those blowers is quite hot, surprisingly so. There's a damned hot surface or wire mesh somewhere inside that blower that I suspect is doing a real job on the bacteria flowing through there.
Surely that has something to do with the problem, ne? Has anyone passed an ordinary Petri dish through the airflow of one of these heaters and then waited to see what grew? That would be a LOT better than all these woeful, disgusting tales about people and dirty bathrooms, I would think. Very simple to do, would make a lovely college Biology 101 experiment, maybe even a grad paper!
Except the high speed air flow from a Dyson blasts the germs off ones hands and into the air which them circulates around the room ready for you to breath in. There was a Slashdot story about a study on this a couple of years ago now. High speed air hand dries of *ANY* description are basically perfect germ spreaders. Normal air hand dryers are better by a cpuple of orders of magnitude, and disposable paper towels the best by another order of magnitude. I am keep looking for an advert for the Dyson hand dryers so I can complain tk the ASA here in the UK that they are not the most hygienic dryers but jn fact the most hygienic in existence and force Dyson to remove the false claim.
Don't set the intake to the drying from the bathroom. Pull it from a separate vent outside of the bathroom. Not hard to do. Could pull it from the canteen break room now that people aren't allowed to smoke in there anymore.
the final touch, to remain clean: Use your shirt sleeve to grab the doorknob, if you can't elbow a swing-latch-type door handle.