> These results demonstrate that closing the toilet lid prior to flushing does not mitigate the risk of contaminating bathroom surfaces and that disinfection of all restroom surfaces (ie, toilet rim, floors) may be necessary after flushing or after toilet brush used for the reduction of virus cross-contamination.
I fear the collision of safety culture and robot technology that will make it cheap and easy to actually keep bathroom surfaces sterile. We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome.
The same kind of objections apply to things like clothes, shelter and agriculture. I'm not advocating that we do away with these, or the idea of cleanliness. But our dependence on them comes with a cost that isn't always worth paying. Particularly where the cost is a compromised immune system.
This has real world implications to prevent the spread of disease today. For example, the norovirus is a very contagious and nasty bug that quickly spreads to patients and staff. It is not something you want to encounter. This study implies that that PPE on staff in those environments is critical and could help inform their standard disinfecting procedures.
I presume you're referring to the "Hygiene hypothesis" which links early childhood exposure to microorganisms with fewer allergies and autoimmune disorders.
It's important to note that this has not been demonstrated conclusively, and when medical professionals talk about it they stress that it's not worth exposing yourself to fecal matter intentionally to "build resistance." Personal cleanliness is still one of the more important things you can do for health.
A reasonable compromise seems to be: let your kids play in the dirt, but also teach them to wash their hands after using the bathroom.
We've absolutely seen that people not exposed to certain types of bacteria don't develop resistances to it. There's a reason tourists have to drink bottled or sterilized water, after all.
That said, your compromise seems right, but it missed the point of the parent post. Living in a hyper-sterilized world is going to have consequences.
Yeah, folks gotta understand the hygiene hypothesis kinda relies on assumptions about baseline environments, it falls flat on its face if you consider environments with industrialized biological contaminants such as hospitals, factory farms, or open sewage.
FYI I have psoriasis and I was consciously avoiding any dirt as a kid, I was just always repulsed by dirt and mud and whatnot (was not a huge fan of sand either)... Years later I find out that non-exposure to certain environmental bacteria (that usually exist in dirt) within a certain developmental window results in a much higher chance of getting stuck with lifelong psoriasis... F___ me
In case anyone is curious about research related to this area, you can read the short history from Karelia study to biodiversity and public health interventions (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10043497/#:~:te....) research paper that looks at the health condition disparities between the Russian and Finnish border kids.
I had the same reaction to that paragraph. There is simply no convincing me to that such paranoia is rational. Bathrooms are a bit gross when it comes to germs and that’s fine. Focus on the important stuff, and let bygones be bygones.
Yes, paranoia. You have about as many nonhuman cells in you as human cells. It’s hard to count. The would around you is full of microscopic life. You are absolutely covered in it.
Your immune system did not evolve to function in a sterile bubble. Some people were traumatized as children to be so afraid of microorganisms that they make ridiculous decisions.
The biggest culprit of foodbourne illness is sick cooks with poor hygiene. Not the failure to bleach every surface in your bathroom every time someone flushes the toilet. Oversterilization is a strong suspect in many sources of disease.
I believe that my bathroom and everything in it is full of germs; I also believe that my body has been perfectly able to deal with those germs for the last 40 years, as I don't really get sick besides the yearly-or-so cold or flu.
Taking my toothbrush out of the bathroom for the fist time at this point in my life because of "the germs" would be paranoid behaviour, in my opinion. It's not that there aren't germs, it's that they've always been there and I'm still here and healthy.
I don't really understand what you are getting at. Why is it relevant that you don't feel concerned about spaces contaminated by the germs you personally brought? Of course you don't.
I also don't understand what your toothbrush has to do with this. Please try considering this from the perspective of establishing practice for a bathroom shared by more than one individual: its probably important to know if closing the lid is an effective hygiene technique or not.
I'm not sure about it honestly, its not like a crazy theory or anything but it could also be an example of the perennial 'The thing that makes this generation evil is...'. I havent actually read anything serious on it though so I have more like a careful absence of feeling on the topic.
Why would you assume that I deny germ theory? What in my comment would lead you to this opinion, other than assuming the worst possible interpretation of my position?
Did you expect my answer to be 'yes'? Genuinely curious about what you're trying to get at.
Because you stated that this line of thinking was paranoia? Which is at odds with germ theory? Because it isn't paranoia to note that a sick person using the bathroom could spread disease even if they close the lid of the toilette.
I didn't deny that a sick person can spread disease in that situation, or any others. I'm making a point about the safety trafeoffs and risk tolerance. We can't be 100% safe all the time, and this includes our relationship with germs and the microbial world.
No, you're not, because tradeoffs and risk tolerances isnt meet for the paper. The paper is about the practice of closing the lid, that it is ineffective, and suggests surface sanitation as the alternative. It seems that people get triggered by the topic though and read in both a command and moral judgement to get offended at.
> cheap and easy to actually keep bathroom surfaces sterile
I think that flatteringly overstates modern human abilities: Almost every surface on Earth either has life on it or is about to be get recolonized in short order. (Often after we did some temporarily-effective thing involving brute force radiation or unusual heat or volatile chemicals.)
At best we'll end up with almost-sterile bathrooms that we're OK with because life that is both process-resistant and dangerous hasn't popped up yet.
> We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome.
There are two flavors to this that I think really need to be distinguished, because they lead to very different experiments and recommendations:
1. "Hygeine Hypothesis" - "Our immune systems need to be toughed up by winning battles against actual pathogens."
2. "Old Friends" - "Our immune systems need additional calibration by harmlessly interacting with the suite of benign things we co-evolved with."
The former suggests that a certain level of (literal) inner turmoil and danger is required, whereas the latter suggests that it's a much more general issue of micro-ecological diversity and no pathogens are needed.
My Grandpa used to say if a child didn't eat a pound of dirt a year it just wasn't healthy. This was usually in response to my Aunt's frenetic diatribe about a cousin getting dirty while on the farm.
He was right. We got dirty on the farm. We ate dirt in the form of working and playing in the dust and mud. We would get "cleaned up" on the hot summer days by swimming in the river. Not only did we survive, we thrived. It was some of the greatest years of my life, eating a pound of dirt a year...
I worked on developing compartmental modelling software for consultants to use, so they could estimate how radionucleides moved around the environment. One of the parameters the consultants had to work out for their model was - how much dirt does a child eat in a year. I don't know what figure they ended up with.
I love research articles that include TL;DR bulletpoints/ Highlights
•
Viral aerosols from toilet flushing pose a possible route of pathogen transmission.
•
Toilet lid closure prior to flushing is believed to mitigate cross-contamination.
•
We show toilet lid closure prior to flushing does not mitigate cross-contamination.
•
Brushing toilet bowl without disinfectant results in contamination of surfaces.
•
The use of a disinfectant during bowl cleaning reduces cross-contamination of surfaces.
Love it. I used to really suck at some school subjects that had heavy text, until I started "converting" the prose of textbooks to bullet points, tables and whatnot. Then it would magically become interesting to me. Some people would also photocopy my stuff.
Funny enough my sister was the opposite, she could read a book and write a thesis in a weekend. I guess different people have different preferences.
Wow, those people who keep their toothbrushes capped and out of the bathroom win another one. Never me, though. I'm a Hygiene Hypothesis Hoplite. Might well be a Semmelweis Simpleton though. Who can tell? Only time.
I assume that all of them put a plug up their ass so they definitely never fart in their bed at night putting those exact same fecal bacteria where they sleep.
Like, I get it - it's gross. But humans can be exposed to a certain level of gross and not die, it's fine.
It's more than fine, in many cases. We need the right bacteria in our guts to digest our food properly and they have to get in there somehow. Also our immune systems need exposure to a diversity of natural bacteria and other organisms in order to develop and function properly. Lack of exposure to natural biota is strongly suspected to be a major cause of the rapidly growing epidemic of allergies in modern life. (This is the Hygiene Hypothesis referenced upthread.)
Not saying you should stick your toothbrush in the toilet, but unusually strict hygiene measures are unlikely to be net beneficial for you. My reading of the research is that greater exposure to bacteria is very healthy and desirable as much as possible without actually getting sick.
> But humans can be exposed to a certain level of gross and not die, it's fine.
I'm reminded of this every time someone posts a link to FDA regulations of what is acceptable as "food", what level of contaminants are allowed in "food", and other things that really make you not want to eat "food".
The thing is, within normal, stable households, most of good hygiene practices - including hand-washing after using the restroom - are unnecessary. You already share all the microflora, and if one person brings in something contagious, you're gonna get exposed no matter what, and it's up to your immune system to save the day.
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.
Worms. Maybe bacteria and viruses can get everywhere regardless, but larger things like worm eggs are not going to travel so easily. Washing your hands can definitely help with the reduction in transmission of worm eggs.
This is definitely interesting. However, their diagram at the bottom makes me wish they had done another test site to model a sink near a toilet. While the lid-closed position still allows plenty of aerosolized water to emerge from the sides of the closed lid, it's not clear whether the aerosolized particles are then light enough to head upward towards a sink, or if they fall semi-ballistically like their diagram implies.
Isn't an aerosol pretty much by definition able to be carried all around by air currents rather than being just a briefly suspended droplet? I do agree though that the bathroom sink area seems like an important thing to test. I'd have thought it's of much more interest than the floor beside the toilet.
There definitely will be a distribution of droplet sizes (plausibly not unimodal) depending on the mechanics of what's producing and dispersing the droplets. Broadly speaking, the smaller the droplet, the longer it stays in the air. I'm not sure precisely where the line is, but in the context of virology, 'droplet' and 'aerosol' are distinct. Droplets are large enough that they still fall mostly ballistically, albeit potentially a bit slowly for very small droplets. But once it's small enough that it doesn't really fall anymore, it's an aerosol. And they can remain suspended in the air for hours.
back in college I was living an a room that I rent from a nice old lady trying to make some extra money. Due to it being a small space and other factors like noise and sun light, my bed end up next to the door to the bathroom. I got pink eye at least three times that year, before I was able to get a better place.
Ever since myth busters my toothbrush almost always have a cap on it and I always close the lid before flushing the toilet.
I remember that mythbusters episode and I thought the conclusion was that the toothbrush bacteria cultures were no different than the control, which was a toothbrush right out of the package?
I knew I had this info from some place, and it was the MythBusters episode! Thanks for the reminder. I always put the lid down because of that episode but was unable to remember it. It just became natural
How many cases have there been of people getting sick from things on their bathroom counter though? Like sure, you're measuring the physical phenomena and then concluding it leads to sickness but how significantly does it lead to sickness?
It’s very hard to measure and attribute. But that doesn’t mean it’s not common.
Similar to how many (?) cases of patients getting sick from a doctor’s neck tie or a nurse having used a touchscreen. It’s almost certainly not zero. Is it a lot though?
I think it's not really relevant for your home toilet, but once you start thinking about public toilets in high traffic areas and/or high points of contact between different population groups like airports, doctor's offices, hospitals, malls, etc., I don't know why it wouldn't be worth investigating this and the potential risks.
It's definitely relevant in family homes where parents/siblings/guests share bathroom use.
When one child gets sick in our house, we take some efforts to keep them somewhat isolated, and these measures have been usually successful.
The bathroom is the weak link in their routine as they continue to share it with siblings. This report reinforces us asking them to spray disinfectant.
Before we enacted some of these policies in our home, one kid getting a bug from school meant the entire family would get it. Now that's much less common.
Or even if it does, is that a short term pain but a longer term strengthening of the immune system? We keep sanitizing our environment - which is an outlier's outlier relative to the history of the species - and we keep getting more ill, more autoimmune diseases, more allergies, etc.
TBH when my friend's dog links my face, I sometimes lick my lips. The odds of that making me stronger are 1000x the odds of it killing me. Mind you, I'm not going to lick a toilet bowl. But perhaps some minor exposure to such things isn't so bad in the broader sense?
Things that use your body to reproduce are difficult to “limit” such that you guarantee “minor exposure”. Instead, you’re gambling that your immune system can mount a response quickly enough to “limit” the illness. Perhaps the benefit of making your immune system mount a response is that it’s now “trained”. (This is of course the basic concept behind a vaccine: “train” the immune system and “limit” the risk of serious illness.)
I literally said "early death from disease". Do you need me to enumerate specifically which diseases penicillin was able to treat?
Your comments reek of survivorship bias. Just because we're alive today doesn't mean things weren't terrible before. Imagine how different the 14th century could have been if we had antibiotics to treat the bubonic plague.
Nonetheless, mentioning penicillin is entertaining, but that's not within the scope of questioning the over-sterilization of our daily living environment.
You've gone hyperbolic to make a point - typical ofmn HN - that simply doesn't apply. It doesn't address the question. That question is - again - is too clean a good thing? (Hint: probably not).
Thanks for taking the time. But please, let's stay on topic. Thanks.
This resonates given my love of dogs and the huge chain of complex events that likely connects the sewage plant effluent that fertilized the lawn where I lived as a child and my emergent disease states that followed.
Ignoring the fact that exposure may be a problem from E. coli to sewage, I read Robynne Chutkan's microbiome book at the suggestion of my doctor several years ago and nothing has come closer to the truth on our lack of exposure also being part of the problem.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Try finding the median there and there's a Nobel waiting for you.
My "come to Jesus moment" on the importance of microbiome was a feature article in the NY Times' Sunday Magazine five or so years ago.
We always hear "People with pets live longer" and "couples live longer", right? While I can imagine the emotional value of those relationship and how it enables better health, my theory is that the constant presence of other microbiomes - human and/or pet - is also a major contributor to better health. Live alone? Without a pet? You aren't exposed as much.
p.s. Thanks for the book suggestion. I'll add them to my Wish List on ThriftBooks.com
Chutkan deserves the success she's had since that book shipped. The book is not an easy read. It requires a strong stomach, to say the least.
I was lucky to have a doctor who was thoughtful enough to connect my obsessions with diet and exercise to continuous improvement by leveraging my hyperlexia against the root cause that I have a stomach in each leg. ;)
I like your theory. It would be interesting to see a group of biology students debate the merits of such a theory and how they might prove or disprove such a theory.
I'm sure there are some game theory problems lurking there.
> We keep sanitizing our environment - which is an outlier's outlier relative to the history of the species - and we keep getting more ill, more autoimmune diseases, more allergies, etc
There are many sickness that basically don't exist anymore or are very rare, but used to be normal in the past.
The true power of lid closure is that it makes you feel gross and REALLY want to wash your hands, and by washing your hands, you get rid of 99% of the risks.
Mine has proven equally reliable to a mechanical toilet, while providing considerably more comfort. This actually makes sense when you consider all the mechanical complexity in a typical toilet is getting replaced with a series of solenoids. Flush is now just energizing an electromagnet, rather than the gravity-powered dance of floats and valves you're used to.
There's also fun to be had trolling toddlers. Sometimes when my 2yo closes the toilet I'll sneakily open it with the remote and she'll yell at it "NO!" and slam it shut again.
They said remote, not app. My toilet has a remote with all it's features that's mounted on the wall next to the toilet. The on toilet controls are limited to the essentials.
As to why they have the remote outside of the bathroom apparently.... I took have questions.
I heard about somebody at Google (where they have lots of Washlets) who swapped the remotes for two neighboring Washlets either on purpose or by accident. Much hilarity ensued.
In three years, it's been one pair of AA batteries so far and the cap on 'lots of maintenance' would be a 15-minute task to remove and replace with a new one.
Reality: to most audiences the toilet (and sanitation technology in general) is just a punchline, and the show's producers know that. That's why. We're getting what we pay for, and we vote with our eyeballs.
The proposed sealed toilet seat[0] is honestly a good idea, and it's a sensible implementation of the concept. I wish them luck. The TV segment felt oddly like a modern-day version of when John Snow said that maybe we shouldn't drink cholera water, everybody. :-\
Maybe this whole "emitting body waste into a liquid" thing isn't a good idea. Maybe vacuum containers should be held to one's body during emissions and the silver/copper/stainless steel interfaces cleaned with lasers and UV afterward. The toilet was a great innovation in its day, but it seems ripe for disruption.
And think of how much more productive we could be if we could save trips to a dedicated room for it! Every desk could be fitted with a waste vacuum, right next to the soylent dispenser. Just don't mix them up...
That is a bit overkill and lacking in energy efficiency and sustainability, though. A more environmentally conscious solution would be for western nations to bring back some French innovations from the centuries ago such as the bidet followed by the trebuchet.
This post looks grey from downvote, but I agree, I am profoundly disatisfied with how stagnant flushing technology has been. I don't just want nice bidet and warm seats, I want a continuous flow removing poop while I'm on the seat.
From what I remember, they put a toilet in a clean white empty room, and flushed some ink. Then they looked how far the ink spots splattered. But don't quote me on this.
It's literally the second paragraph of the article:
>A surrogate for human enteric viruses (bacteriophage MS2) was added to household and public toilet bowls and flushed. The resulting viral contamination of the toilet and other restroom surfaces was then determined.
Not sure why they used viruses? Most of the interesting fecal pathogens are bacteria — particularly E. coli, Clostridium dificile, Vibrio spp., Shigella spp.. The major exception is polio, which has thankfully become rare. Bacteria are a bit larger and probably less diffusive than viruses, raising questions about the generalizability.
If my very rudimentary biology knowledge serves me well, viruses are a lot smaller than bacteria because they're just little bits of RNA and bacteria have a whole bunch of stuff around that to actually live. Wouldn't the smallest realistically dangerous particle be the thing to test with? Larger things might not be carried by the droplets, but shouldn't the other way around be fine? I'm just guessing/reasoning it out here and would be happy to learn more if you know this isn't correct!
My suggestion is that the more diffusive, small particles are less likely to be trapped by a lid. That could mean that larger, heavier bacteria follow more ballistic and less Brownian trajectories and their distribution would be affected more by putting the lid down.
> Aerosolization of viruses via toilet flushing may be more impactful, compared with aerosolization of bacteria, given differences in response to humidity and in droplet size. Various studies have indicated that viruses retain viability at both low or high relative humidities and, therefore can remain infectious in droplet nuclei and other aerosols, which may stay suspended in the air for hours to days. Also, viruses are likely to aerosolize more easily than bacteria and 94% of virus has been shown to partition into liquid phase rather than solid phase.
The next step will be fan intake in the floor of the bathroom instead of the ceiling.
Now, everytime I switch the toilet fan on I think about the researches on airplanes during covid that showed that there was little contamination thanks to cabin air intake being at the floor level and fresh air coming from the top.
That research is pretty much bunk because those systems are not always active when the place is occupied. They’re almost always off during boarding and taxiing. Like it’s great to filter the air in this way, but if you let everyone bathe in each others breath for an hour before turning them on, the practical impact on transmission is drastically diminished.
Yes, sure. But it gives helpful guidance. It means that if you wear a mask through the airport, and before takeoff and after landing. Taking it off for meals and the like is a much lower risk then not wearing a mask at all.
Sure, this is true. I just remember being somewhat peeved during the pandemic when this was being touted by airlines without this caveat, with the express intention of misleading people about actual risks.
Modern industrial toilets (that is, ones installed in work facilities) use high pressure to, uh, mash up the flushable materials, which seems to greatly increase the aerosolization. I had some friends in grad school who put bacteria-sensitive substance on the walls of the toilet stall and you could easily see hot spots of deposited matter.
> Up to 145,000 droplets were produced per flush, with the high-energy flushometer producing over three times as many as the lower energy PAT and over 12 times as many as the lowest energy HET despite similar flush volumes. The mean numbers of fluorescent droplet nuclei particles aerosolized and remaining airborne also increased with flush energy. Fluorescent droplet nuclei per flush decreased with increasing particle size. These findings suggest two concurrent aerosolization mechanisms—splashing for large droplets and bubble bursting for the fine droplets that form droplet nuclei.
Typically, when I see that it's an indication that the distribution is non-normal. And for anything resembling "count" data (e.g., number of dollars, parts per million, whatever), it's pretty much guaranteed that it will be positively skewed -- because you have a hard lower limit (0) but no upper limit.
That said, I have no expertise with the field of, uhh, toiletology, to know whether they handled this data appropriately or not.
Edit: Sorry, just to add that typically with non-normal data like that, my inclination would be to report the median (which will be less affected by skew than the mean), and perhaps the interquartile distance (difference between the 25th and 75th percentile) rather than SD. But most statistical models are still designed around means and SDs, so you may still be inclined to report means and SDs since that's what you statistically tested for differences.
I think one of the fancier hotels I was staying in, in China during my last trip had a fancy toilet with heated seat, bidet, and bowl air extraction fan. (Fancy hotels in China are geared to the tastes of party officials, which is why they often outdo the fanciest hotels in the US. Often for about 1/10th the price!)
Can't wait for them to evaluate the ultra-aerosolizing Dyson Hand Dryer which is unfortunately in so many airport bathrooms. Pro-tip >> when traveling at least wear a mask when using a public bathroom.
But if you close to flush when standing next to it, it would definitely stop aerosols from flying into you.
This study is not saying anything new because everyone knows the toilet seat is dirty regardless what you do, while everyone’s concern is aerosols flying on their faces.
Is there a functional reason for why toilet lids do not close in an air-tight fashion? If there were no openings for the particles to escape through, it seems like it would make closing the lid more effective.
Wouldn't the air above the water tend to hold the water in the bowl, since emptying the bowl would create a partial vacuum? And would that effect, if it exists, be enough to prevent effective flushing?
In winter I bring my tropical plants indoors and that means lots of lights in the bathroom where I overwinter them. 20,000 lumens is enough to see the droplet spray. Gross. It definitely changed how I urinate and lid closure during flushing.
> Two types of toilets of United States design were used. [...] The public toilet was tankless, using water line pressure for flushing, as is typical of United States public toilets. [...] The home toilet was a typical siphonic toilet with a tank
So neither was a tanked washdown toilet, as is universal in Europe. I wonder if those behave any differently.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI fear the collision of safety culture and robot technology that will make it cheap and easy to actually keep bathroom surfaces sterile. We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome.
The same kind of objections apply to things like clothes, shelter and agriculture. I'm not advocating that we do away with these, or the idea of cleanliness. But our dependence on them comes with a cost that isn't always worth paying. Particularly where the cost is a compromised immune system.
It's important to note that this has not been demonstrated conclusively, and when medical professionals talk about it they stress that it's not worth exposing yourself to fecal matter intentionally to "build resistance." Personal cleanliness is still one of the more important things you can do for health.
A reasonable compromise seems to be: let your kids play in the dirt, but also teach them to wash their hands after using the bathroom.
That said, your compromise seems right, but it missed the point of the parent post. Living in a hyper-sterilized world is going to have consequences.
Your immune system did not evolve to function in a sterile bubble. Some people were traumatized as children to be so afraid of microorganisms that they make ridiculous decisions.
The biggest culprit of foodbourne illness is sick cooks with poor hygiene. Not the failure to bleach every surface in your bathroom every time someone flushes the toilet. Oversterilization is a strong suspect in many sources of disease.
This study suggests ways to prevent those cooks from becoming sick
Taking my toothbrush out of the bathroom for the fist time at this point in my life because of "the germs" would be paranoid behaviour, in my opinion. It's not that there aren't germs, it's that they've always been there and I'm still here and healthy.
I also don't understand what your toothbrush has to do with this. Please try considering this from the perspective of establishing practice for a bathroom shared by more than one individual: its probably important to know if closing the lid is an effective hygiene technique or not.
Did you expect my answer to be 'yes'? Genuinely curious about what you're trying to get at.
I think that flatteringly overstates modern human abilities: Almost every surface on Earth either has life on it or is about to be get recolonized in short order. (Often after we did some temporarily-effective thing involving brute force radiation or unusual heat or volatile chemicals.)
At best we'll end up with almost-sterile bathrooms that we're OK with because life that is both process-resistant and dangerous hasn't popped up yet.
> We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome.
There are two flavors to this that I think really need to be distinguished, because they lead to very different experiments and recommendations:
1. "Hygeine Hypothesis" - "Our immune systems need to be toughed up by winning battles against actual pathogens."
2. "Old Friends" - "Our immune systems need additional calibration by harmlessly interacting with the suite of benign things we co-evolved with."
The former suggests that a certain level of (literal) inner turmoil and danger is required, whereas the latter suggests that it's a much more general issue of micro-ecological diversity and no pathogens are needed.
It might be like the difference between being in an airport for 5 minutes with a Covid stranger vs. sharing a bed with a Covid family member.
He was right. We got dirty on the farm. We ate dirt in the form of working and playing in the dust and mud. We would get "cleaned up" on the hot summer days by swimming in the river. Not only did we survive, we thrived. It was some of the greatest years of my life, eating a pound of dirt a year...
This is a huge oversimplification on how the immune system works, same as saying "what does not kill you makes you stronger". No.
Funny enough my sister was the opposite, she could read a book and write a thesis in a weekend. I guess different people have different preferences.
Like, I get it - it's gross. But humans can be exposed to a certain level of gross and not die, it's fine.
Not saying you should stick your toothbrush in the toilet, but unusually strict hygiene measures are unlikely to be net beneficial for you. My reading of the research is that greater exposure to bacteria is very healthy and desirable as much as possible without actually getting sick.
I'm reminded of this every time someone posts a link to FDA regulations of what is acceptable as "food", what level of contaminants are allowed in "food", and other things that really make you not want to eat "food".
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.
This makes me want to see some physics simulations of cow shaped particles.
Ever since myth busters my toothbrush almost always have a cap on it and I always close the lid before flushing the toilet.
For something so low effort, this one new study isn't going to change my habit of closing it "just in case."
Similar to how many (?) cases of patients getting sick from a doctor’s neck tie or a nurse having used a touchscreen. It’s almost certainly not zero. Is it a lot though?
When one child gets sick in our house, we take some efforts to keep them somewhat isolated, and these measures have been usually successful.
The bathroom is the weak link in their routine as they continue to share it with siblings. This report reinforces us asking them to spray disinfectant.
Before we enacted some of these policies in our home, one kid getting a bug from school meant the entire family would get it. Now that's much less common.
No such conclusion is made, though.
I've read elsewhere today that anything under 95% vaccination will result in outbreaks; the r-naught is 12-18 if google is correct.
Masking.
TBH when my friend's dog links my face, I sometimes lick my lips. The odds of that making me stronger are 1000x the odds of it killing me. Mind you, I'm not going to lick a toilet bowl. But perhaps some minor exposure to such things isn't so bad in the broader sense?
Again, the species developed in a less than sterile environment, and suddenly we're going to clean that up and there are no unintended consequences?
People are chugging soda and eating over-processed food are...worried about flushing the toilet? Let's weigh the risks here.
Yes, and early death from disease was incredibly common.
The discovery of penicillin is estimated to have saved over 200 million lives.
fwiw, if we keep doling out antibiotics as we are, we'll be happy with only losing 200 million.
So again, are we making gains or grabbing a balloon?
I literally said "early death from disease". Do you need me to enumerate specifically which diseases penicillin was able to treat?
Your comments reek of survivorship bias. Just because we're alive today doesn't mean things weren't terrible before. Imagine how different the 14th century could have been if we had antibiotics to treat the bubonic plague.
You've gone hyperbolic to make a point - typical ofmn HN - that simply doesn't apply. It doesn't address the question. That question is - again - is too clean a good thing? (Hint: probably not).
Thanks for taking the time. But please, let's stay on topic. Thanks.
So is living in houses
Ignoring the fact that exposure may be a problem from E. coli to sewage, I read Robynne Chutkan's microbiome book at the suggestion of my doctor several years ago and nothing has come closer to the truth on our lack of exposure also being part of the problem.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Try finding the median there and there's a Nobel waiting for you.
https://robynnechutkan.com/
We always hear "People with pets live longer" and "couples live longer", right? While I can imagine the emotional value of those relationship and how it enables better health, my theory is that the constant presence of other microbiomes - human and/or pet - is also a major contributor to better health. Live alone? Without a pet? You aren't exposed as much.
p.s. Thanks for the book suggestion. I'll add them to my Wish List on ThriftBooks.com
Chutkan deserves the success she's had since that book shipped. The book is not an easy read. It requires a strong stomach, to say the least.
I was lucky to have a doctor who was thoughtful enough to connect my obsessions with diet and exercise to continuous improvement by leveraging my hyperlexia against the root cause that I have a stomach in each leg. ;)
I like your theory. It would be interesting to see a group of biology students debate the merits of such a theory and how they might prove or disprove such a theory.
I'm sure there are some game theory problems lurking there.
There are many sickness that basically don't exist anymore or are very rare, but used to be normal in the past.
There's also fun to be had trolling toddlers. Sometimes when my 2yo closes the toilet I'll sneakily open it with the remote and she'll yell at it "NO!" and slam it shut again.
As to why they have the remote outside of the bathroom apparently.... I took have questions.
Posting from one right now lol.
Reality: to most audiences the toilet (and sanitation technology in general) is just a punchline, and the show's producers know that. That's why. We're getting what we pay for, and we vote with our eyeballs.
The proposed sealed toilet seat[0] is honestly a good idea, and it's a sensible implementation of the concept. I wish them luck. The TV segment felt oddly like a modern-day version of when John Snow said that maybe we shouldn't drink cholera water, everybody. :-\
[0] https://whatsonyourtoothbrush.com/
Clothing will be redesigned around it. [0]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/12/04/...
https://www.introba.com/news/5-reasons-vacuum-toilets-are-fu...
I kept thinking the toilet in a gas station, but I'm sure they did it in an isolated, purpose-built toilet in a research facility.
But shit is shit, and how did they "deploy" the object for repeatable experiments?
>A surrogate for human enteric viruses (bacteriophage MS2) was added to household and public toilet bowls and flushed. The resulting viral contamination of the toilet and other restroom surfaces was then determined.
Why is the title of the paper about lid closure when it says that does not help? It should be about disinfecting as that does help.
Now, everytime I switch the toilet fan on I think about the researches on airplanes during covid that showed that there was little contamination thanks to cabin air intake being at the floor level and fresh air coming from the top.
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/36734 has additional supporting material
> Up to 145,000 droplets were produced per flush, with the high-energy flushometer producing over three times as many as the lower energy PAT and over 12 times as many as the lowest energy HET despite similar flush volumes. The mean numbers of fluorescent droplet nuclei particles aerosolized and remaining airborne also increased with flush energy. Fluorescent droplet nuclei per flush decreased with increasing particle size. These findings suggest two concurrent aerosolization mechanisms—splashing for large droplets and bubble bursting for the fine droplets that form droplet nuclei.
Lid up (1014 PFU MS2) 11.02 ± 10.77 3.64 ± 3.19 6.23 ± 6.47
Lid down (1014 PFU MS2) 4.25 ± 4.48 1.77 ± 1.97 2.31 ± 2.54
That said, I have no expertise with the field of, uhh, toiletology, to know whether they handled this data appropriately or not.
Edit: Sorry, just to add that typically with non-normal data like that, my inclination would be to report the median (which will be less affected by skew than the mean), and perhaps the interquartile distance (difference between the 25th and 75th percentile) rather than SD. But most statistical models are still designed around means and SDs, so you may still be inclined to report means and SDs since that's what you statistically tested for differences.
This study is not saying anything new because everyone knows the toilet seat is dirty regardless what you do, while everyone’s concern is aerosols flying on their faces.
The lid could be transparent to make sure no surprises are left behind.
So neither was a tanked washdown toilet, as is universal in Europe. I wonder if those behave any differently.