Everyone is on high alert concerning protective themselves this flu season. however, one infectious agent Facebook post makes the case that even clean up your hands comes with sickness risks.
On Gregorian calendar month thirty, Nichole Ward sharing a message concerning associate experiment she conducted in an exceedingly public convenience. “Okay guys…ready to have your mind blown?!” she wrote next to a picture of a bacteria-filled Petri dish.
“I stuck the open plate in an internal hand appliance of a public toilet for a complete of three minutes. Yes 3 only,” she continued, explaining that this can be however long it took for the scary-looking blobs within the Petri dish to grow. “DO NOT EVER dry your hands in those things once more.”
And whereas she created guaranteed to say that her post was “simply for awareness, to not instill concern,” that didn’t stop nearly a hundred and fifty,000 Facebook users from reacting and over five hundred,000 from sharing Ward’s message that public-restroom dryers area unit germ vectors spewing potentially harmful microbes on your hands.
Yet some officials expressed doubt about the validity of the results. in an exceedingly statement to ABC Action News, an advocate from hand-dryer company Dyson defended the dryers.
“We’re terribly shocked to envision these results, and unclear on the methodology utilized,” an advocate explicit. “All Dyson Airblade hand dryers have HEPA filters that capture particles as little as bacterium from the privy air before it leaves the machine. Dyson Airblade hand dryers area unit well-tried healthful by university analysis and area unit sure by hospitals, food makers and businesses worldwide.”
The hand dryer-hygiene discussion has been the topic of studies. In 2016, a study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology compared how paper towels, standards dryers, and jet dryers disperse infectious agent particles. The study determined that jet dryers (similar to the kind in Ward’s post) were the “worst culprits,” in step with Fortune. In a test, the jet appliance unfolds up to 100 ninety times agent particles than the other a pair of methods.
While science keeps trying into it, keep laundry your hands to chop down on contagion transmission odds, and confirm they are all dry, since bugs tend to thrive in wetness.
