Hand Dryers Spout Fecal Bacteria: Study
Bathrooms make me go full OCDtard. And especially the hand dryers- they just freak me out- happened even before Sheldon Cooper’s rant. Although it was funny, it did have some logic behind it; there is truth and science behind his claim.
Scientists have now discovered that the machines designed to blow hot air on you are actually sucking up feces particles and spraying them onto your hands.
A new, independently-funded study of 36 men’s and women’s bathrooms at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine found that bathroom hand dryers blow tons of bacterial spores around. Researchers holding up test plates to hand dryer air found as many as 60 different bacterial colonies could be blown onto them during a 30-second air dry. Turns out, even though the air coming out of hand dryers is almost perfectly clean, it ends up pushing more nasty bathroom air around than a paper towel.
The scientists wrote it was not immediately clear what “organisms” are “dispersed by hand dryers” and if “hand dryers provide a reservoir of bacteria or simply blow large amounts of bacterially contaminated air, and whether bacterial spores are deposited on surfaces by hand dryers.”
The
study said it was possible hand dryers are “responsible for spreading pathogenic bacteria, including bacterial spores” through an entire building as well. Researchers also noted Bacillus subtilis PS533 was discovered in every bathroom they tested.In theory, adding high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters should stop bacteria particles from spraying over your newly cleaned hands. However, when the team retrofitted some of their dryers with HEPA filters, they only blocked about 75 percent of bacteria. Although that’s a lot, it certainly isn’t perfect.
“Perhaps the filters weren’t working properly, or the large air column below the hand dryers was sucking in bacteria from unfiltered air adjacent to the forced air column,” Peter Setlow, who is a professor at the University of Connecticut, explained. Convection created by a hand dryer’s air streams, for example, might pull in unfiltered bathroom air.
“Bacteria in bathrooms will come from feces, which can be aerosolized a bit when toilets, especially lidless toilets, are flushed,” Setlow told Newsweek. He added that microbes shed from the skin of the many people who travel in and out of public restrooms add to the contaminant mess in the air.
Peter Setlow says the bacteria will not potentially affect human health but it shows how easy the bacteria spread. He said the bathrooms they tested now offer paper towels.
The research adds to a growing body of evidence showing that hot-air hand dryers have a role in the spread of bacteria—safe and potentially dangerous.
