Okay, don’t get me wrong, I understand the principle of poop/pee/wash. But then, I’m also pretty confident in my ability to do my business cleanly.
What I’m asking is, is it just important to wash hands generally? Or is the trip to the bathroom a particularly risky time, germ-wise? My intuition is that I’m more likely to get disease from doorknobs, dollar bills, and handshakes than from my business in the restroom.
Unca Cecil wrote a column on this, but I can’t link to it at the moment.
Bottom line is: The pubes are full of sebacious glands, a specialized sweat gland that produces sebum in addition to sweat. It provides a wonderful environment for colonic pathogens to colonize. So every time you touch your pubic region, you are getting coliform bacteria on your hands. It’s no real risk to you, but shake hands with someone, who then rubs his mouth or nose, and your coliform bacteria, which you are adapted to, are now in his system, where they may well cause him illness, if he is not compatible with that particular bacterial strain.
I think the washing after using the bathroom is more to keep you from transmitting genitourinary/fecal germs to anyone else. This includes stuff like Hepatitis A, E. coli, Norovirus, and other nasties.
Plus, being in a room with a sink, you’re at a convenient location to wash off anything you might have picked up from a doorknob, dollar bill, etc., hopefully before you’ve absentmindedly touched your eyes, nose or mouth. So if you have it drilled into you to wash every time, you have a number of opportunities during the course of a day to get rid of germs you picked up before even entering the bathroom.
Edit: Dammit, QtM beat me to the punch.
Here it is.
LilShieste
You may be right about most of it. There is no reason to think that your penis is more dirty that any other part of your body if that is all you touch after urination. That is your own set of germs and the sink knobs and the door handle are contaminated by those of many people. It is hard to avoid the exit handle no matter what.
Poop obviously has e. coli which is easy to contaminate your hands and clothing with but we have to ask what we are trying to prevent. People get exposed to e.coli every day and most people have personal hygiene equipment including their toothbrush within reach of the toilet. All this stuff gets a “fecal shower” every time someone poops and flushes the toilet. E. coli is all around us in every bathroom. All ground meat has it as well just because they can’t keep the grinding equipment perfectly clean.
It is an interesting question. Who actually gets sick from not washing after whatever bodily function we do? Virtually everyone is immune to certain levels of e. coli and I don’t know of a public bathroom specific disease. I am not sure what a healthy person gains form hand washing after going to the bathroom.
As I noted above, you do get to wash off other germs you picked up before entering the bathroom. Also, you’re only assuming you’re healthy at any given time; many diseases are infectious before symptoms appear.
The Norwalk virus doesn’t cause obvious symptoms for 12-60 hours after infection, but you can still be shedding the virus 2 weeks after recovery. We aren’t entirely sure yet when you are and aren’t infectious, but most cases (except when seafood comes contaminated) are spread via food service workers who don’t wash properly.
So … what about girlies? We don’t actually have to touch our pubic areas when we go to the bathroom. I touch my pants, the toilet paper, and the flush handle. Is there something inherently oogy in those, or should girls get more of a pass on this than guys?
When at a public restroom that has a sink with running water but no soap. . .
Does rinsing with just water do anything helpful at all?
Well, it makes other people feel better. 
I don’t have a cite for this but my guess is: “it’s better than nothing.”
Since you’re essentially just washing the bacteria off of your hands (i.e. not trying to kill them, per se) the water helps in that respect. The soap basically helps by just getting rid of some of the oils on your fingers, onto which tha bacteria can really cling. (Most of this is mentioned in Cecil’s column, above.)
I think that drying your hands with paper towels helps with this, too. (Wipe away some of the more persistent buggers.) I don’t want to think about how many bacteria probably reside on the paper towels, though…
LilShieste
I remember hearing somewhere that drying your hands is actually a lot more important than most people think. Something about damp hands being more hospitable to nasty bacteria than dry hands. Does this sound plausible, or am I misremembering?
Yeah, that sounds very plausible. Generally speaking, bacteria flourish in warm and damp conditions, so I guess just after a shower is when you are most vulnerable!
(Tongue firmly in cheek re the shower bit)
OK, well that makes sense, but I have to ask – in that case why have I never been struck down by a nasty illness after, ahem, much more direct contact between my mouth and nose and another person’s pubic region?
I’m not sure this is true, given what QtM said in post #2, and also taking into account that the pubic environment is generally warm and often kinda humid. I’d bet there are plenty of places on your body that don’t have anything like the population and diversity of pathogens.
You have just been lucky - mouthwash and antibacterial soap are a good idea.
Presumably with a regular partner you build up some kind of resistance to their particualr blend of bacteria?
Demonstrably I did not
Yet no one can provide one case where anyone has ever actually gotten ill from not washing…
Cecil’s article addresses this also, and is worth linking to again in this thread - it’s a good one!
Why are men supposed to wash their hands after urination? Plus: urine therapy!
Yes you can. There are plenty of established cases of transmission of Hepatitis A (by the orofecal route) where the vector for infection was clearly a pre-infected restaurant employee. It’s true that nobody is sitting there watching the individual virus go from the employee’s pubic region to his hands to the food to the customer, but when you have a single preinfected Patient Zero and a group of recently infected people whose only common connection is having eaten at the same restaurant where Patient Zero works, you have an essentially undeniable correlation with no alternative causitive mechanism.
Even if you don’t touch your pubic region yourself, you touch your underclothes which do have pathogens on them when removing them to do your business. Why people are so pathologically resistant being rational, and in particular in regard to something as inconsequential as washing their hands, is a mystery more perplexing than what happens inside a black hole.
Stranger