Originally published at: Restroom hand dryers are excellent at distributing fecal matter | Boing Boing
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Alternate headline: People should wash their hands better in public restrooms
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Or Dyson products aren’t all that.
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But who has agar on their hands when they use hand dryers? A better test would have been to dry hands themselves and then swab from hands onto agar in a clean room.
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Reboing:
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Once again, fecal coliform can be cultured from virtually every surface in the built world. This is not a clinical outcome.
Until someone shows an epidemiological study that people are actually getting sick from hand driers, everything is fine. People need to calm the fuck down about fecal coliform. It’s not “OMG poop everywhere”, it’s just life. This is bacteria’s world. We just live in it.
This doctor probably gives plenty of other good advice, but scaring people yet again about how you can culture fecal coliform from everywhere is not helpful, it is FUD.
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I always suspected those bacon dispensers were too good to be true.
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Loads of germs collect inside and on the outside of hand dryers. Has nowt to do with how thoroughly hands are washed. 
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this specifically is talking about fecal germs, though, ostensibly from blowing off people’s wet hands.
Yes, and they go everywhere, just like pee germs, whenever toilets are flushed.
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Say what now?
As someone who has made a decent living for 30 years cleaning stuff including public restrooms, please don’t shake the water off your hands everywhere.
As someone who uses public restrooms, please don’t shake the water off your hands everywhere.
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Research funded by paper industry lobby groups?
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Germs from urine.
Anything that is in a bathroom gets covered in germs from whatever’s in the toilet bowl whenever it’s flushed, even towels of all kinds, and dryers.
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TIL that urine is not actually sterile
It has also been pointed out that flushing toilets with the lid up aerosolizes fecal matter in the bowl and sends it up in a misty little plume. And public restrooms never have lids. So unless it just been cleaned thoroughly in the last few minutes it’s poop on every surface.
So basically public restrooms are a perfectly fecal environment from the ground up.
[ETA: ack. @MerelyGifted beat me to it.]
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Mythbusters proved this but the control tooth brushes outside the bathroom in another room had the same amount of fecal matter.
My germaphobe cleaning rituals are justified but probably mostly useless.
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Good thing we each have a built-in “immune system,” eh?
