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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!
There are dangerous germs in and on most things. Our germophobic culture is doing more harm than good in the long run.
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.
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
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.
Composting public toilets would make more sense, given the economies of scale. Unless they become like music festival toilets... Eww.
The point of washing your hands is to dislodge a reasonable amount of germs, and perhaps to wash off fecal matter.
Urine is sterile in most people (but not everyone).
We encounter a large amount of germs constantly. But we get sick if we are weakened or we don't recognize the signature of the illness so our immune system is slow to react.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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" !!!~~
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