People with compromised immune systems are, in my opinion, in a separate category.
But if, as you say, only bleach kills it, how can one possibly make oneself safe? Aren’t all the other non-bleach protocols in vain?
The people I know who seem to get sick from contagious diseases very regularly are all school teachers.
I don’t think you can achieve 100% safety.
ETA. Yes schools are nasty with biological weapons on the hoof.
Cleanliness makes its biggest difference with the work of food handling, frankly. The old adage, don’t poop where you eat is key, but also washing hands thoroughly after using the toilet, touching one’s groin, etc. are the best ways to avoid infectious disease.
Next best is avoiding other oral-fecal exposures.
I don’t think I ever treated a patient for a disease caught from a toilet. Or a dirty towel.
here’s a nice summary of the Hygiene Hypothesis. It debunks a few myths about it and points out where it may be valid.
To my inexpert knowledge there are the products approved by the EPA that have ingredients that are effective against many viruses. They may be only suitable for surfaces and not skin.
Hand sanitizers are usually alcohol based which cannot penetrate a/any? virus. These are regulated by the FDA.
I don’t know what “penetrate” means in this context. Virus particles have a capsid, which is a protein layer that encloses the molecular payload. Some viruses have a further lipid-molecule envelope.
But ethanol (particularly in high concentrations) is still pretty effective at tearing apart the virion, encapsulation and payload.
That study predates COVID-19 but includes SARS-COVID and MERS-COVID, which are related and structurally similar virions.
Only if:
- norovirus is present, and
- it’s the only thing you’re trying to kill.
If other disease organisms are present, then non-bleach interventions may still be helpful.
Alcohol-based hand sanitizers are effective against SARS-CoV2, though not as effective as thoroughly washing your hands.
Alcohol-based hand sanitizers are not effective against norovirus.
There are a non-trivial number of diseases/parasites that can be shared between species, so non-human poop can also be a problem. You don’t need to be patient zero for a new one to get sick.
However you can get just about anything another human can get so that is a bigger problem than animals.
I keep thinking of the milkmaids who didn’t get small pox.
The military has studied this at length, they don’t run everyone through buzzcut haircuts and the rest of it simply for effect. People in close contact living conditions, especially poor ventilation, are prone to spreading respiratory illnesses, contaminated drinking water spreads a host of communicable diseases . Toilet seats can harbor lice or “crabs”.
Before the advent of antibiotics it was fairly easy to die from even relatively minor cuts and abrasions, before careful wound treatment was perfected. Calvin Coolidge Jr, the president’s son, raised a blister on his heel playing tennis on the White House lawn. It became infected, septic, and despite access to some of the best medical care then available in the world, he died about a week later.
Indeed, there are very few pathogens that are infectious through intact and healthy skin. In almost all cases they need to get in by ingestion, inhalation, an existing wound, or contact with a mucus membrane. Getting sick from a dirty bathroom is probably going to be hand-to-mouth, not by being absorbed through a butt cheek.
“Wash your hands, you filthy animals.”
This is pretty rare, because they don’t survive very long away from a human host, and don’t cling well to smooth surfaces. I wonder if it’s possible to transfer bed bugs from around a toilet.
I’ll have to take your word for this, as those are the types of articles I never read, along with what foods are good/bad for you and how much/little alcohol is good for you.
Well, that scared me.
Goodwill, you know in the back where bins and bins of blankets, sheets, throw pillows are? Nope. Not walking within 10ft of that area. I’m freaked out enough that I only go in infrequently now.
My hoarding tendencies and germaphobic nature are in competition.
I recall health advice from many years before Covid, which mentioned that one of the more effective things nurses did to avoid getting transmitted diseases was to learn not to rub their eyes. When you stop and think about it, most people rub their eyes regularly. The whole “wash hands, wipe surfaces” thing is because those hands go onto your eyes. Whatever is on your hands gets transferred to the eyelids, and through rubbing, gets into the moist eyeball area and likely makes it into the body from there.
There are a few vectors into the human body. Eyes, nose, mouth, cuts and sores, and for some pathogens, genitals or anus. For Covid, as I understood, the risk was inhaling (wear a mask!) or rubbing it into your eyes. Other diseases are trained to attack via the digestive system, need to be ingested. Etc. Since your hands are wandering everywhere, and touching a lot of things, they easily transfer pathogens to assorted openings into the body, despite the best efforts of skin to protect the wet juicy breeding grounds from those pathogens.
Also, to the OP’s query - our body tends to learn to fight the pathogens it encounters. The cartoon is pretty accurate. So it’s not how often you encounter germs, but how often you encounter new viruses or bacteria. The familiar ones, you already know how to fight or you already have a chronic infection (or you are already dead). If you stay in the same general area, you are less likely to encounter stranger things. However, not completely safe. Migratory birds, for example, make regular special deliveries across the continent.
Indeed it was suggested that the reason the flu tends to originate in Southeast Asia (supposedly) is that they still raise some pigs the traditional way, in small enclosures, where they wallow in mud that collects those special deliveries from migratory birds, bats, etc. The pig’s biology is very close to human, so we are more susceptible to diseases that latch onto pigs than, say, goats or cows or dogs. Hence, the greater risk of diseases from those sources making it into humans who raise those pigs.
My wife worked at a fast food restaurant and is very picky about food safety. I have to tell her - “the likelihood of infection is very very low with modern food handling. But if the chances are 1 in a million of an infection from carelessly handling raw meat, that corner restaurant will not poison anyone in a hundred years. McD’s or Burger King on the same scale would poison a dozen people a day across North America. Hence, they strongly emphasize food safety.”
Yes, as I understand, the buzz cut becamse popular because of all the soldiers returning from WWI. In the mudholes of the trenches, with no sanitation, it became a necessity to avoid lice infestations.
Not coincidentally, beards and moustaches started going out of style around the same time.
I don’t imagine anything is going to happen to me as far as illness goes if I sit on a wet toilet seat or don’t bathe or wash my hair for months on end. The chances of catching something from a wet toilet seat are tiny - I’m pretty sure that not only would the source of wetness had to have exited right before I entered but it would also require either an open cut/sore touching the seat or a body part touching the seat that never does. If I don’t bathe , I’ll probably get itchy and smelly but I wont get sick.
Most of the articles I read don’t imply that you would actually get a contagious disease if you don’t wash your sheets often enough. They mostly say that allergies might act up as your sheets will be full of dust mites or that your scalp will get itchy if you don’t wash your hair.
Most of the articles I read imply only that the list of protocols they advise are just “what should be done, because experts” and hardly ever describe the ailment you are putting yourself at risk for if you fail to follow their guidelines.
Germophobia is one of the phobias that is very well supported and generally agreed to, in this society. My guess is this has a good bit to do with capitalism and little to do with data. Since I am opposed to capitalism, and also believe that germophobia is destructive – like most phobias – I just wanted to push back a little on it.
I have a friend who throws out her toothbrush if it falls on the floor. But at least she knows it is an irrational compulsion.
Well, to borrow an apt idiom, “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
Hygiene is important for reasons of public health as well as social conformance. You don’t have to sell your soul to Big Soap, but oppositional refusal is its own enslavement.
I think the OP is mostly right: germophobia is exagerated. Still you can get some serious diseases from lack of hygiene, specially parasite related illnesses: see Echinococcus multilocularis from not washing your fruits and vegetables (depends very much on where you live, it is not endemic everywhere), cholera or snail transmitted diseases from dirty water, all diseases related to fecal contamination, things that lice or mosquitoes transmit (from other humans, or from rodents). Hygiene, simply washing yourself and specially your hands, can help against some of those. The question is whether the cost-benefit relation of excessive washing is a positive one. The advantages are probably greatly exagerated, but there in some cases.