Am I setting myself up for an early death here?
In my office there’s no easy access to hot water. I have a coffee cup that I use regularly and when I’m done I rinse the heck out of it with cold water. Any problems?
Variation on the above (and probably my motivation for posting this question): A couple of weeks ago I made a cup of tea (in my cup) for a cohort who was coughing up a storm. Used the same cleaning method. Any problems?
Actually, you’re not really supposed to wash tea-ware (cups and the pot itself) with anything but water, since the soap could remain.
At work I usually just rinse out my cup with water and wipe it dry with a tissue.
Unless there is something left in the cup for mold or bacteria to feed upon, they won’t breed much in there.
Take your cup to the mens room at the end of the day, and use the hot water there. Or, use paper cups.
I usually just rinse my cup out but I do normally use hot water, although I will rinse it in cold water if that is all that is available. Like Aeschines said, if you wipe it out good after rinsing it nothing should grow in it.
I do store mine upside down so any wandering vermin won’t crawl into it.
Micro-organisms don’t do well on dry surfaces (no matter what the Lysol people tell you) As long as there’s no sugar, or milk residue left in the cut it should be fine.
Instead of setting your self up for an early death, you are probably bolstering your immune system, which will help keep you alive. Unless, of course, you’re eaten by a Yeti, or fall off the edge.
That would be cup :smack:
(where’s my sign)
I attribute my long life and daily health to the fact that I NEVER was my coffee cup.
In my Navy days, it was often obligatory to fetch coffee or soda for staff instructors in the engineroom in the neverending quest for a signoff on some qualification or other.
One day I was sent on a mission to fetch coffee for one of the instructors – he told me where his cup was back in the shop.
His cup had fur growing in the bottom of it :eek:.
I spent several minutes scraping and scrubbing the quarter inch of slime and fur from the bottom of the cup. When I showed up proudly bearing his cup, I razzed him a little about how utterly filthy it had been.
He proceeded to give me a serious ass-chewing, telling me that he had been cultivating that scum for six months, and that that was what gave the coffee the flavor.
In retrospect, I can imagine that he might have been kidding, but the day he said that to me, I believed him. Besides, the coffee cup truly did have fur inside, intentional or not.
Oh yes… the OP. I guess if Petty Officer Richards lived through that, you will get by quite fine with your cold-water rinses.
When I worked in an office, I did exactly the same thing for years with no ill effects. I did have several cups that I cycled through, so they were thoroughly dry when I used them.
People are way too hung up about the “dangers” of germs these days. IMHO.
Ah, but were you ever, say, a plate?
Did anyone else think this was going someplace else?
Plan b, you’re asking if this practice is sanitary. No, it’s not. But it doesn’t matter, either.
Assuming that it is you, and only you, that is using this cup, then any infectious agent on the cup is almost certainly going to to come from you. From an infection standpoint, it’s safer than licking your fingers. So you’re fine, as far as infections are concerned. Any virus or bacteria is going to come from you, and your immune system is going to be well aquainted with it.
Now, you still don’t want the cup to provide a good harbor for potentially infectious agents, of course. But I want to tell you something - the temp of the water doesn’t matter all that much. Hot water cleans better because solubility increases with heat. But surfactants (i.e. soap) increase solubility far more than temperature. If you ever have the misfortune of taking a physical chem class, then you will know temp can be ignored in some solubility (and hence cleaning) equations.
To cut to the chase, cold water works almost as well as hot - as long as you got soap. A good surfactant will help water dissolve fats (the lipid bilayer of bacteria and prokaryotes), proteins (viral coats), and chitin (fungal cell walls). Don’t worry about the temp - just use soap.
