I wish hospitals, airports, and other shared spaces would use brass hardware or other alternatives rather than steel, particularly on door knobs and other highly trafficked surfaces. I always wondered if there'd be a market for selling such biocidal and viricidal hardware, either passive hardware using special alloys or surfaces (e.g. untreated wood performs well by locking pathogens in pores so they don't transfer readily); or active hardware that, e.g., ran a small current across the surface.
> Of the surfaces tested, plastic security screening trays appeared to pose the highest potential risk, and handling these is almost inevitable for all embarking passengers.
I hope it works similar to bacteria, where "tile, wood, and laminate surfaces transfer much more bacteria than carpeted surfaces." (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140315-five...) Most of the security areas I've seen are carpeted, albeit low pile carpeting.
But maybe it doesn't work the same; or maybe it's just so contaminated it doesn't matter. The best solution[1], though, is probably to sell your soul to the devil and enroll in TSA Precheck.
[1] Presuming there's a real problem. Aren't the fungi that cause atheletes foot (tinea pedis) and onychomycosis (infection of the nail bed) pretty much everywhere already? I think it's more a matter of keeping your [low-temperature] extremities dry. Onychomycosis is almost inevitable past a certain age because of immune and circulatory deficiencies.
From what I remember, wood's main difference is that is absorbs water. On the one hand, this wicks water away from the surface making it dryer immediately (bad for pathogens), but on the other hand it retains moisture for longer (good for pathogens). These trade-offs are overall beneficial for the use case of a cutting board, but that may be a very narrow set of conditions.
This is aside from the fact that hospitals are a more adversarial environment than kitchens--every sneeze might contain ebola, and every patient might be immunocomprimised. I would imagine airports fall somewhere in the middle.
Plastic and steel are common because they're easy to clean reliably. The problem is that the properties that make them easy to clean--smooth, inert--are the same properties that allow pathogens to linger.
Microsurfaces on, e.g., hardwood have properties that sequester and kill pathogens. (https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/09/cutting-boards-food-safety/) However, that can also make them more difficult to clean, particularly in a commercial or industrial setting where the process needs to be low-cost, minimally labor intensive, scaleable, and reliable. Similarly, the surface properties may be difficult to maintain or restore. For example, perhaps oil build up on wood surfaces regularly touched by passers-by reduces or eliminates the antimicrobial qualities, or even make it worse than the alternatives.
That's the rub--how to design (and market) cheap hardware that is easy to maintain while maximizing antiseptic properties during use. We've optimized for the former (cheap, easy, reliable sanitation) but neglected to appreciate that actual cleanliness sucks because typical materials in high-traffic areas go from pristine to cesspools almost immediately and, crucially, stay that way until the next round of cleaning briefly sanitizes the surface.
What kills wood is a changing environment. Keep it dry and it lasts forever. Keep is wet and it lasts forever. Let is cycle between wet and dry every hour, it last a week.
Unfortunately this feels like situation where the free market will fail to incentivize the best solution. The airport itself does not feel the economic pain from its travelers getting sick from touching its steel surfaces. The passengers likely aren't even aware this choice might have caused their sickness. So airports will always choose steel over copper/silver/brass so long as steel is cheaper.
This seems like a reasonable place for regulators to step in.
Airports are a controlled environment where your free will is a lot less meaningful than usual.
I'm quite fond of hand-washing, and I hate airports because they make it so difficult. You have to touch everything, and everything touches you, and sinks are few and far between, and only located in jam-packed restrooms.
You also can't bring decent quantities of hand sanitizer through checkpoints. This ban on liquids and gels applies to alcohol gel, BZK foam, povidone solution, and towelettes premoistened with any of the above. I checked.
Once aboard the plane, there's no effective handwashing. The bathrooms are so small you brush the walls with your shoulders while turning around, the trash-flap has to be shoved on to deposit your paper towel, and the door latch has to be touched to be operated.
After you've arrived at your destination, luggage at the baggage claim has been handled by folks outside your control, who themselves probably don't wash their hands very often, and once you've grabbed it, even if you wipe it down with some towelettes you've squirreled away, there's no restroom nearby to wash the remaining mostly-dead germs off your hands.
So please, tell me which airports you've been flying where handwashing is easy, and I'll try to schedule a connection through one to check it out.
You can wash your hands at any airport in the world. Also, neither you nor anybody else has been on a flight that required more than 100ml of hand sanitiser to keep yourself clean. If you're using more than that, then you have a problem and it's not related to bacteria.
People routinely get sick when traveling to the point it's basically a trope. Keeping your hands clean is an excellent problem way to reduce your likelihood of getting sick in general.
You, personally, may not get sick traveling, but your experience is not a solution for a systemic problem, nor is your proposal of doing nothing.
It's possible that people who routinely get sick when traveling are the ones that live their lives in self-made sterile cocoons... a tiny sliver of the air-travelling public.
> People routinely get sick when traveling to the point it's basically a trope.
The only version of the trope I've heard of before is eating in foreign 3rd world destinations (eg: Delhi belly). I live in a major tourist destination and if tourists were routinely getting sick out here I'd know about it.
I mean of course one should be washing their hands after using the bathrooom, but all that other stuff you mentioned.. that's anal to the point of obsessive.
I don't have data to support my conclusions, but I subscribe to the Hygiene Hypothesis... humans have lived in filth for millennia, and our bodies haven't evolved to live in sterile conditions.
It seems easier and cheaper than forcing everybody to have good hygiene. Maybe the Nazis could make it happen, but I think we'd lose much more than we'd gain.
There is no free market, airports are owned and operated by the government. Regulations are not necessary. If the government wants copper fittings, they simply need to order them.
Although the vast majority of major airports are state owned, some aren't. Notably, most major airports in the UK (including Heathrow and Gatwick) are privately owned and operated.
There's a huge number of companies already in this space - the biggest problem is actually showing that they work, rather than just being somewhat nifty materials that work in a lab.
I wonder if there were UV hand "washers" all over the place if that would help.
If they had the UV hand driers in the restrooms as well as UV baths around the entrances to the xray scanners, such that everyones plastic tub that entered the xray machine was also UV'd as it went through... (Although I dont know how long it would have to be under UV to impact....)
You should be able to cut the UV time down to a second or two, before you get problems with the stuff starting to melt from the radiative heat, even if you use a strong fan to cool the surface. This is worst-case, and I do think you can get away without a fan, but there might be edge cases.
One interesting thing I've read, is that frequent disinfection (like in hospitals) actually increases the prevalence of highly resistant strains.
One reason is obvious - those better adapted survive and pass on resistence genes.
But the second reason is more interesting - the disinfection will kill the lesser resistant bacterias, so the resistent ones have less competition to worry about, thus they can concentrate their evolution efforts towards resisting the disinfection. Each extra gene a bacteria carries has big costs on it's fitness, so removing the competition increases the available budget for resistance genes.
I know the article is about viruses, I don't know if viruses compete between themselves in the environment.
Cleaning removes things pretty uniformly, but also doesn't result in a sterile (or even really quasi-sterile) surface. Disinfection is a pretty important next step after cleaning.
There are ways to clean that are so effective that even endospores will be removed, though strong oxidative disinfectants seem to generally be more effective.
Something like strong UV-C irradiation or a wash with ethylene oxide should result in the destruction of all life remaining on a washed surface.
UV-C irradiation generally falls under "disinfection" because if you haven't cleaned the surface of gross contaminants first, it doesn't work very well.
This is also just the inevitable consequence of removing one species from a niche without the others - even if it doesn't encourage evolution towards resisting the disinfectant.
Which is important because you see this even when using extremely effective disinfectants.
I've kinda suspected this for a while so I generally make a point of going to the nearest bathroom and washing my hands after getting through security, especially if I'm eating something before boarding.
Yup, and I've developed some pretty effective habits of unwrapping other food in the style of a banana, so my hands touch only the wrapper, and advance/expose the food so it's touched only with my mouth.
I might have missed it, but I do not know if they tested for significant quantities instead of just presence. A presence of all sorts of pathogens is pretty common everywhere (you can find all sorts of stuff under kids nails), it is the concentration above certain thresholds that significantly increases disease risk.
I would be interested in how concentrations of different pathogens compare between, say an airport, supermarket and hospital ER reception. My 2c.
Those plastic bins at security were apparently the worst. I go through airports quite a bit, but never really thought about that particular vector. It's especially bad because the very first thing a lot of people do after security is find some food. Instead, it would be a good idea to find a restroom and wash your hands, then find food.
I'm going to start using that phrase to describe some of the software I work with. Maybe it'll catch on.
Having recently been through a real live measles-containment exercise (don't ask) I've gained a much greater appreciation of what epidemiologists and other public-health professionals do. People just don't realize how they're being protected every day. I hope some of your colleagues are talking to TSA and airport management about these findings.
49 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI wish hospitals, airports, and other shared spaces would use brass hardware or other alternatives rather than steel, particularly on door knobs and other highly trafficked surfaces. I always wondered if there'd be a market for selling such biocidal and viricidal hardware, either passive hardware using special alloys or surfaces (e.g. untreated wood performs well by locking pathogens in pores so they don't transfer readily); or active hardware that, e.g., ran a small current across the surface.
> Of the surfaces tested, plastic security screening trays appeared to pose the highest potential risk, and handling these is almost inevitable for all embarking passengers.
But maybe it doesn't work the same; or maybe it's just so contaminated it doesn't matter. The best solution[1], though, is probably to sell your soul to the devil and enroll in TSA Precheck.
[1] Presuming there's a real problem. Aren't the fungi that cause atheletes foot (tinea pedis) and onychomycosis (infection of the nail bed) pretty much everywhere already? I think it's more a matter of keeping your [low-temperature] extremities dry. Onychomycosis is almost inevitable past a certain age because of immune and circulatory deficiencies.
This is aside from the fact that hospitals are a more adversarial environment than kitchens--every sneeze might contain ebola, and every patient might be immunocomprimised. I would imagine airports fall somewhere in the middle.
Microsurfaces on, e.g., hardwood have properties that sequester and kill pathogens. (https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/09/cutting-boards-food-safety/) However, that can also make them more difficult to clean, particularly in a commercial or industrial setting where the process needs to be low-cost, minimally labor intensive, scaleable, and reliable. Similarly, the surface properties may be difficult to maintain or restore. For example, perhaps oil build up on wood surfaces regularly touched by passers-by reduces or eliminates the antimicrobial qualities, or even make it worse than the alternatives.
That's the rub--how to design (and market) cheap hardware that is easy to maintain while maximizing antiseptic properties during use. We've optimized for the former (cheap, easy, reliable sanitation) but neglected to appreciate that actual cleanliness sucks because typical materials in high-traffic areas go from pristine to cesspools almost immediately and, crucially, stay that way until the next round of cleaning briefly sanitizes the surface.
This seems like a reasonable place for regulators to step in.
Airports are a controlled environment where your free will is a lot less meaningful than usual.
I'm quite fond of hand-washing, and I hate airports because they make it so difficult. You have to touch everything, and everything touches you, and sinks are few and far between, and only located in jam-packed restrooms.
You also can't bring decent quantities of hand sanitizer through checkpoints. This ban on liquids and gels applies to alcohol gel, BZK foam, povidone solution, and towelettes premoistened with any of the above. I checked.
Once aboard the plane, there's no effective handwashing. The bathrooms are so small you brush the walls with your shoulders while turning around, the trash-flap has to be shoved on to deposit your paper towel, and the door latch has to be touched to be operated.
After you've arrived at your destination, luggage at the baggage claim has been handled by folks outside your control, who themselves probably don't wash their hands very often, and once you've grabbed it, even if you wipe it down with some towelettes you've squirreled away, there's no restroom nearby to wash the remaining mostly-dead germs off your hands.
So please, tell me which airports you've been flying where handwashing is easy, and I'll try to schedule a connection through one to check it out.
You can do none of these things and be just fine.
You, personally, may not get sick traveling, but your experience is not a solution for a systemic problem, nor is your proposal of doing nothing.
> People routinely get sick when traveling to the point it's basically a trope.
The only version of the trope I've heard of before is eating in foreign 3rd world destinations (eg: Delhi belly). I live in a major tourist destination and if tourists were routinely getting sick out here I'd know about it.
I mean of course one should be washing their hands after using the bathrooom, but all that other stuff you mentioned.. that's anal to the point of obsessive.
Isn't a large value of washing after using the restroom that it means you'll wash your hands multiple times a day when you wouldn't otherwise?
> but all that other stuff you mentioned.. that's anal to the point of obsessive.
Arguments similar to this were used against washing your hands at all when we first developed a theory of germs and contamination.
Really though, this discussion won't progress until one of us has supporting data.
I don't have data to support my conclusions, but I subscribe to the Hygiene Hypothesis... humans have lived in filth for millennia, and our bodies haven't evolved to live in sterile conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
For example, a recent RCT showed that antibacterial-impregnanted scrubs were relatively ineffective in hospitals: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/infection-control-an...
If they had the UV hand driers in the restrooms as well as UV baths around the entrances to the xray scanners, such that everyones plastic tub that entered the xray machine was also UV'd as it went through... (Although I dont know how long it would have to be under UV to impact....)
And then there's the whole cancer downside...
One reason is obvious - those better adapted survive and pass on resistence genes.
But the second reason is more interesting - the disinfection will kill the lesser resistant bacterias, so the resistent ones have less competition to worry about, thus they can concentrate their evolution efforts towards resisting the disinfection. Each extra gene a bacteria carries has big costs on it's fitness, so removing the competition increases the available budget for resistance genes.
I know the article is about viruses, I don't know if viruses compete between themselves in the environment.
I know viruses are not bacteria, so I'm a bit off topic, but still interested.
And with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofilm there are ways to beat straight soap. So we're selecting for aggressively starting biofilms.
Which is important because you see this even when using extremely effective disinfectants.
Treat everything like a push-pop, basically.
I would be interested in how concentrations of different pathogens compare between, say an airport, supermarket and hospital ER reception. My 2c.
Having recently been through a real live measles-containment exercise (don't ask) I've gained a much greater appreciation of what epidemiologists and other public-health professionals do. People just don't realize how they're being protected every day. I hope some of your colleagues are talking to TSA and airport management about these findings.