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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.