I dunno… You’re all sounding a bit neurotic to me. My guess is that all this obsessing in and around the bathroom is producing a false sense of sanitation. After all, germs are everywhere. As mentioned earlier money is loaded with germs, even the coins. So if you reach in your pocket for your keys and fumble around with the loose change in there, you’re contaminated. Doorknobs, desktops, the hand you just shook, your clothes… germs everywhere and unavoidable.
Is there any hard evidence that people who employ all these sanitary techniques are any healthier than those who just take ordinary precautions?
Small nit but alcohol doesn’t kill many germs. It just tends to make them dormant for a time. That will slow down their growth rate so it’s still something useful. Just understand it doesn’t make you “clean.”
I wash my hands in a what I belive is an average and ordinary fashion after using the restroom. I touch the fixtures and door handles with my bare hands, run hot water, use soap, rinse, dry my hands with paper towels and leave.
I have alcohol based hand sanitizer at my desk that I use whenever my hands feel icky, before I eat, if I sneeze, etc.
I rarely get sick. I have had the flu only twice in my 30 years (I also never get a flu shot but that is another story).
As I am not operating on anyone, preparing food, or hanging out in the intensive care unit I don’t think I need to take the precautions mentioned above.
Now, I may die of some terrible communicable disease in the future and regret this, but for now I’m ok with my less than rigourous hand washing procedure.
As mentioned by SanibelMan triclosan is in antibacterial everything in the home, and after a tiny bit of research, I found a site here that is questioning whether our trend towards antibacterial everything is going to breed triclosan-resistant bacteria soon (the answer is “yes”; bacteria adapt extremely well to the challenges that humans give them). It is my belief that sanitizing everything around is is not going to make us healthier; I think our bodies need to be challenged regularly to maintain our antibody systems at healthy levels. By challenged, I don’t mean by pathogens, but by the normal bacteria and viruses that make up the world we live in. So while I’m not saying antibacterial is bad, I would use it sparingly and where it is definitely needed (for example, I keep a dispenser in the kitchen for after I work with raw meat).
Actually, there is recent evidence correlating rates of auto-immune disorders of the gut (e.g., Crohn’s Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, etc.) to the general sanitation level of the population. But the correlation was opposite of what the researchers expected.
They found that the more sanitary the environment, the higher the rate of Crohn’s and other disorders. And in the populations with excruciatingly clean habits, the instances of Crohn’s was significantly higher than that of the standard population. Populations with poor sanitation had less GI autoimmune disorders, but they suffered from cholera, dysentary and food-borne ilnesses much more often.
To explain the correlation, the researchers hypothesized that if you don’t give the body something to fight off, it will turn against itself.
In other words, it doesn’t pay off to be TOO clean. Your immune system needs something to do to stay out of trouble.
And then there’s the “anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” angle.
My stepfather - egads. He’s not unsanitary, but he has the stomach of a goat. He can eat anything, regardless of how long it’s been sitting in the fridge. Things that would make me ill, he relishes with comments like “it just gets better with age!” It just has to be an acquired talent…
I would like to know if they have any effect on VIRUSES?
Because bacteria are living things. Viruses are these nifty designed RNA coated little bits & I don’t see how antiBACTERIAL gels would have any effect on them. Could some Biochemist clear this up for me?
The main purpose of hand-washing isn’t to kill pathogens, it’s to remove them, which is why it’s so important to use soap and relatively hot water. Water all by itself tends to float on top of contaminants, which then are left when it is dried off.
Soap, on the other hand, has funny shaped molecules. One end of a soap molecule bonds easily with water, while the other end bonds easily with dirt and oils. When you rinse the soap away, it carries the dirt/oil/other contaminant with it. Heat tends to speed physical reactions, such as soap dissolving in water, so hot water makes the soap much more effecient at removing contaminats, both visible and invisible.
So the short answer is yes, washing hands with hot water and soap does help protect you from viruses, but by removing them, not by killing them.
missdavis102, no matter how much you wash, you can never get all the bacteria off. Just like a mouthwash commercial that says it gets rid of millions & Millions of germs; but then the mouth has billions of germs.
I wash my hands normally, with soap and hot water. I use my hands without gloves, tongs, psychokinesis, my foot, or huffing and puffing to operate fixtures and open doors. I do not carry antibacterial wipes, spray, lotion, or high-intensity radiation emitters.
I have had one cold in the last six years, and was once sick for a couple days with some sort of bug that knocked some cow orkers over for two weeks straight. Perhaps these facts are purely coincidental, but I suspect that just as its healthier to stay a little bit hungry for much of the day instead of continually stuffing one’s stomach it is also healthier to be a little bit dirty than operating room levels of antisepsis.
When flesh-eating bacteria that are resistant to everything up to and including hydrogen bombs wipe out half the race, I’ll say I told you so, aside from the part of having no jaw left.
I was Just thinking about this last nite after I read this thread…
After going through all that effort to avoid those germs at the faucet by using paper towels etc…
How do you guys LEAVE the toilet? Do you TOUCH the SAME HANDLE of the door the other people used who DIDN’T wash their hands??? when i say door…I mean the one where u enter and leave the toilet not the cubicle door.
cerebrum, there are a few options on the door thing:
use your foot (only for two way doors) to open door.
use some paper to open it
wait until someones open the door
use only restrooms with no doors.
Push the door at the top where people dont usually push it.
Some are useful when using the toilet potty because those have doors on them & no man can wash his hands until he gets out of there to a sink. Thus, you can bet those handles have tons of bacteria on them.
I can just imagine you WAITING for someone else to open that door and then Shuffle quickly through it before it closes again… ala Mcguyver
Most doors here Swing inward into the bathroom, so no I cant Use my foot on it.
But that paper sugestion seems workable. Only thing is what to do with the paper After you open the door?;D walking around with a bunch of toilet paper in your hand in a mall or office till u get to the nearest bin is NOT cool.
Sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star while you wash your hands to make sure you do it long enough. Plus, singing a little song helps pass the time. : )
Don’t forget the backs of your thumbs, all the way up to the wrist. This is another frequently-missed area.
I’m not an obsessive hand-washer, and I confess that I touch the knobs afterwards, and I have no faith at all in various antibacterial products. But neither could I walk out of the bathroom without washing my hands. Yuck! I always want to follow people who go straight from the stall out the door and yell at them.
the anti-bacterial gel would’ve been excellent when I was working the grocery store, and got chewed out for agreeing with a customer that the meat wasn’t properly wrapped-because that juice would get EVERYWHERE and it was highly unsanitary.
I sometimes hate the way soap smells. I always smell the soap before washing and if it smells terrible I wash it right off. I can’t stand my hands being infested by “cheap soap smell.” Seriously, I’m not asking for lavendar and rosemary petals to come shooting out of the spigots, but why must soap smell bad? How hard is it to give the soap no smell at all?
I’ve heard, though I have no real proof, that Jews were much healthier back in the olden days because they actually put in their religion that you must wash your hands before every meal. Most people didn’t even do that and got all sorts of diseases.
Shhhh Handy, don’t give away the secret. You’re liable to put these guys right out of business. Oh, and them as well. My goodness, there sure are a lot of Indians selling toilet products.
Maybe after they’re done designing those websites with shit stained hands, they use the teapots for a lovely cup of Earl Grey.