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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.
I spent years cleaning bathrooms - the wrong (or overpopulated) degree will do that to a guy. Let me tell you, people always think for some reason that men are disgusting, nasty pigs. Well. I already had a clue from having had a female flatmate in college, but cleaning toilets was a far more abysmally enlightening experience. Let's leave what happens when drunks and druggies get into a toilet, since that'll be horrible no matter their shape or size...
Men's washroom have droplets from shaking things off too much around the urinal. Once in a while (we're talking per-day here) there'll be a bit of piss on the floor too somewhere.
Both sexes tend to have people who don't flush and/or don't wash their hands. It's unfortunately pretty even. Same with drug paraphernalia.
And then, then there's the women's bathrooms. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy (Obi-wan couldn't have known since he was a man and had never been a toilet-scrubber). First, take all of the problems of a man's bathroom. Yes. All of them. ALL of them. Look at me. Look at me in the eyes. ALL. OF. THEM. Men are not the only ones who piss onto the wall, but at least there was a urinal in the vicinity. Women have no such excuse.
Now add menstrual artwork. Pads and tampons stuck to the fucking ceiling or 'padding' the doors so to speak. Sometimes things clog and you discover someone in the fancy office has been dumping theirs in the actual "fancy normal house toilet" reservoir and at that point you might need the plumber to come by.
Add in maybe one stillborn or miscarriage every... probably once a year back where I worked. It was an office, but would be a lot worse for whoever cleans things up over at a walmart or a mall.
Makeup. On the mirrors, on the dryers, on the toilets, on the floor, it's like a thick incense sometimes and it'll deposit on everything. You don't have dust in women's bathrooms, it's just foundation settling on anything.
Fake eyebrows (eyebrows?!?), the one time I found a fresh placenta hidden behind one of the toilets, half eaten pizza, condoms, so many condoms (maybe twice as much as the men's), sometimes with the zucchini still inside... trails of blood, dropped "mooncups", vomit, so much more vomit than the men...
This was in a relatively professional setting mind you. The guys who work at stadiums and other massive public venues I've talked to had that same distant look that you'd expect from someone with severe PTSD from spending years in a war zone.
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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