Yes, I know. It’s anal. Even slightly creepy. But it makes sense.
I freely admit that I am one of those people who hangs around in public toilets waiting for someone else to come in or go out so I don’t have to touch the door handle. Or performing acrobats so I can use my shirt to cover my hand in order to avoid physical contact.
The number of people who don’t wash their hands after using the toilet is unbelievable — or perfectly believable, depending on how cynical you are — and I’m only talking about the women in an office setting. No wonder we need Global Handwashing Day! It’s the simplest and most basic way to prevent the spread of colds, flu and other forms of ickiness, and so many people just don’t get it.
I’m especially concerned about door handles because I’ve always read that they are covered with more germs than the average toilet seat. Somewhat disappointingly, an American professor of environmental microbiology says that door handles are home to less bacteria than any other surface in a public toilet, though other studies claim otherwise.
(As is shopping. If you’re interested, the handles of shopping trolleys are especially pestilential (thank you Pick n Pay for providing antibacterial wipes to your shoppers). Fridge door handles and TV remotes are pretty horrific too. And germs can survive in hotel rooms for a day after some sneezing troglodyte leaves his effluvia everywhere for the next guest.)
Finally, those of you who insist on flushing with the lid up - you know who you are — do you realise that some of those miniscule droplets are going to end up on your toothbrush?? It always amazes me how even germ-obsessed types forget the basic fact that bits of what is in the bowl are capable of travelling up to six feet upon being expelled forcefully into the surrounding atmosphere.
So if you leave the lid up, remember, next time, that minty fresh breath of yours isn’t all it seems.
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42 Responses to “Do you know what you’re touching?!”
Sarah, nail.head.hit.you.
Escalator hand-rail thingies really disturb me, as do trolleys and you cant even avoid touching the trolley-handle..aaaargh!! The common computer/laptop mouse is another seemingly innocent but deadly germ hogging everyday-use object.
Since moving to the UK, I’ve had to up my germ-dodging antics and manoeuvres cos don’t believe what they say about Africa, its a jungle out HERE!
Tram, train, tube orange handle-thingies, the ’stop’ button on buses, the button to open the train door, the petrol pump handle cos we have to pour in the juice ourselves, the buttons on the pay-and-display parking ticket machines..I need back-up. Over.
I’m a paper wrapper myself - I keep the paper towel that dried my hands to open the door and only then throw it away.
I curse toilets with only dry blowers - in that case I use my left pinky to open the door.
i spoke about this in the times blogs i do so again!i don`t eat food that has not been prepaired in my presency or where i have not been given assurance that at that place the health and hygiene of the public is aken into consideration.
in th past restaurants were visited constantly by council inspectors and were compelled to have frequent training sessions with their staff to educate them about germs and bacteria however nowadays managers don`t care a hoot about our health and will not hesitate to tell you to go somewhere if you`re not happy about the service .
now,as a health conscious person i go through painful exercises to keep myself healh.
After washing my hands i grab a new paper towel and close the tap so that i don`t catch the germs on the tap`s handle.i dispose of it then grab another one to wipe my hands and use it to open th door then dispose of it.once i do that then i know i left germs behind an i can now go work with food.that the explanation want to hear from manager`s before i can eat their food.
Oh Lord! Few things disgust me quite as much as people who don’t wash their hands after using the toilet. I was surprised to see that affluent women (at the Waterfront and at Cavendish square) did not wash their hands. A few weeks back I saw a very popular model (who lives here in CT)coming out of the toilet (at the Waterfront) and storming out-without bothering to wash her hands. Yuck!
I always carry antibacterial wipes and feel a little squimish shaking men’s hands because I know that, even though a disturbing number of women don’t wash their hands, men generally have more germs and reportetly faecal bacteria in their hands because even when they wash them, they don’t do it properly (i.e. not long enough and they use very little soap). Double Yuck!
The awesome thing about humans is that we were born with immune systems. Gross as it is to think about all the bacteria living on your desk you are generally safe in the knowledge that it isn’t going to jump up and strangle you / give you cancer / eat your brain out.
What freaks me out more is people who come to work inches from death coughing and spluttering their germs into the ducted aircon to be transported all over the office. Stay at home vile people.
I still never touch a lift button or escalator handle and I’m pedantic about putting the lid down. I tend to avoid public toilets at all costs.
You poor soul “I freely admit that I am one of those people who hangs around in public toilets waiting for someone … . Sorry I must have touched a journalist sometime. The more we isolate ourselves the less we can withstand infection and any doctor will tell you that urine is in fact sterile and that it can, at a pinch, be used to clean wounds! Have you recovered fron that brief faint? They, the doctors, will also tell you that a quick splash with cold water and whichever scented gunk is supplied is worse than useless. Stop being so prissy - you won’t die from touching the lift button, although the mental picture of you using your shirt to cover your hand whilst pressing the button for the 50th floor has somewhat brightened up my day - thanks for that!
Agreed Sarah…my office is a hive of disgusting toilet etiquette…not sure what the ladies are like…but in the gents… men leave their mark as if it were their last claim for territory in the loo…and the noises that abound in the process is akin to the maternity ward at a nearby hospital…The grunts and groans leave me wondering whether to run for help or shelve out some change in pity.
And I seldom see a man wash his hands after a lavvy session and I don’t quite look at them in the same way thereafter…so guess who walks around the office with a constant funny look on his face - This mug!
It is also for that reason that I do not touch escalator rails either…
I am still trying to understand the logic of guys where I work, who walk past 20 empty urinals, proceed to the toilet cubicles, and then urinate all over the toilet seat????? What is wrong with the urinals, and if they have a problem using the urinals, why don’t they lift the flippin toilet seats?!?!?!?!
At work, we have one of those pull-down paper dispenser. I pull the thing down, wipe myself and pull some more for the door.
Because i’m a bit weary not to be called some psycho or something, at the Mall…i linger a little longer with that hand-drier machine, eyeing the first person walking towards the door, and then i make the Schumacher sprint to hold the thing with my foot. It’s crazy, but yeah the thought of touching people’s goey stuff…
well,more people die in hospitals ,ges u want to know why .peeps not a calculus equation to figure out.hospitals are germ free…ponder on that and get back to me @
Sorry Sarah, but Mythbusters refuted your flushing with the toilet seat up thing. Whether or not you close the lid, the number of E. coli on your toothbrush remain the same… even if you keep your toothbrush in a cupboard or in another room!! But in any event, latest research shows that you need to be exposed to a certain number of infections, germs & parasites to maintain good health. Sounds contradictory, but without it our immune system never matures fully (called the Hygiene Hypothesis. Google it.). So my advice to you is to stop being quite so paranoid. Tough to do, I know, but it will probably save you a lot of stress.
Scary stuff Sarah. I have a slight obsession about germs and other very small goggos. Your article has made me tingle and itch all over. What really bugs me though is to be cooped up, even for a few short minutes, with other people standing close me, say in a lift, bus, train, etc. I don’t know what kind of evil things are hidden in their mouths and breaths, things that can fly across to me! I try and hold my breath as long as possible. Or one of the worst things is a person sneezing without a handkerchief in front of his/her mouth - that’s when I undergo into catatonic attack. But you know Sarah, another things: How do people generally feel about people who eat and making a chewing noise? Like people eating a crispy salad and you can hear the chewing noise from the other side of the table? At your own home you can do something about it, but when at other people’s place you cannot just get up from the table and go one side. Maybe I need a shrink!
It’s true. For men at least. From my own observations I would say at least 80% of men don’t wash their hands. And then we are supposed to shake the hands on an introduced stranger!
Well, I’m still alive, so it can’t be too bad. It’s those masturbators who don’t wash their hands that freak me out. Maybe that explains the grunting as well. Not a ‘going’ event, but rather ‘coming’.
darkwing, I am completely traumatised by your comment.
Regardless of whether it’s anal, there’s good evidence that colds and flu spread because people don’t wash their hands, and then you go and touch what they touch, and so on, and so forth.
I know someone that did a project on germs once and they tested escalators and found about 7 different samples of semen. This was in a small town mall so you can just imagine the big cities. I have a trick for the bathroom at work, the door doesn’t close fully and there’s a grabbing handle at the top that lets me open it without having to touch the handle - I’m hoping no one else has caught onto this. Also the company has installed hand wash thingamajigas all the building - they dispense that evaporating alcohol hand cleaner stuff.
Thank God my toothbrush lives two doors and a room away from the loo.
Oh! And all those anti-bacterial handwash products are bad for you, Sarah; they deplete your immunity. The hygiene sprays can kill you if you spray shortly before going to sleep. They close down your lungs as they settle.
Hot air dryers just make the germs on your hands frisky and bound to replicate themselves endlessly. You are better to wipe your hands on your dress or jeans.
And the best is about babies: many parents spend months sterilising everything within miles and then, one day, the little charmer goes crawling across the floor, glorying in all those dust mites and the germs their shoes picked up walking on a pavement the neighbour’s dog relieved himself on yesterday!
And I hated sticky fingers on the furniture… where was I at?
I’m sorry - but if we were to obsess about the existence of germs all day like obsessive-compulsive nuts, we wouldn’t be living a quality life. Better to just expose ourselves to all those germs (within reasonable limits of course) so that we develop immunities to them instead of freaking out at poor innocent door handles!
With this kind of paranoia, I wonder how you (and many of the commentators) go through life.
Suggestion: they offer these plastic wrappings on airports. Maybe Durex can develop a body condom.
The discussion on men not washing hands has been on this site some time ago. I wash my hands before using a public toilet to avoid “things I do not like” coming onto my private parts which I wash regularly and I do not pee over my fingers.
Only when the toilet paper is of such quality that my fingers go through it when wiping my bum, do I wash my hands and clean my nails.
interesting, though i have to assume that if we could not handle a couple of germs off a door handle then we should all be dead. i always wash my hands anyway.
what bothers me is using publics pens and money is an interesting germ carrier too, it travels all over the country from the dirtiest to the cleanest places.
So - what do you do when someone hands you some change?
I wash my hands after using the loo, because I was brought up properly and it’s habit, but I’m now left wondering what most people do in there that makes so many of you so paranoid.
I’m like Sello, I think our immune systems were designed to cope with these things. Mine seems to have been, anyway - I haven’t had a cold for years.
I read somewhere a while back that the Japanese are obsessive about making things germ free especially for their infants and as a consequence when they reach adulthood they get infectiions which adults should never have.
We are, and always have been, just one life form amongst many and in general, up until the invention and marketing of disinfectants, our species has managed to survive with out the use of disinfectants. Disinfectants are useful in particular circumstances, like in an operating theatre for example, but their blanket use will, in the longterm, fundamentally weaken our immune systems.
It’s true. For men at least. From my own observations I would say at least 80% of men don’t wash their hands. And then we are supposed to shake the hands on an introduced stranger
——————
I would like a few more details on your observations. I don’t believe the 80% for a minute. I know a lot of guys don’t play the game but we are not as animalistic as that.
I figure if most germs can be eradicated with relatively low doses of alcohol we can keep most of them at bay with a fair intake of alcoholic beverages….no harm in washing hands too though!
I once stood in a queue at a Joburg Post Office watching some little kid running his tongue along the underside of the front counter whilst his Mom was busy. I almost told her but then figured the deed was done, why freak her out after the fact.
Glad to know I’m not the only nut out there who waits for someone else to pull open the public toilet doors.
Darkwing, you’re seriously in need of meds and a room with padded white walls
Why oh why do public toilet doors open inward?
It would be so much easier to just push them open with your foot after seeing people go out without washing
So, lets say everyone starts washing their hands and we manage to stop flu and colds and other nasty thingies spreading year after year we are all healthy and free of sniffles UNTIL one day these germie things make an airborne comeback off a porcine vector in Mongolia and we are like waaaay out of date with our immune responses and we all die in droves.
I also thought kids were supposed to grub around in the dirt and on the floor licking and chewing the gunge from the soles of our shoes because it developed the little guys’ immune systems little by little to a point where they could fight off the big nasties. If kiddies get to sample the shoedoo why are we, the big tough adults, so precious?
So, be careful of this clean sterile washy washy envirnment you want, it might just kill you one day…
P.S. I wash my hands after a visit to the great white elephant from a mostly psychological perspective but happy to eat with dirty paws from time to time just to keep the little soldier suckers battle-ready! Also eat things that fall on the floor for the same reason. Eeeww grosssss right? Wrong, its natural vaccination, minute quantities of nasties that we can cope with. And why waste the poor wine gum that fell under the cinema chair?
I would also like to propose a new law of social microbiology - the hand washing/alcohol inverse square law:
Amount of handwashing in a male jazz is inversely proportional to the square of the total amount of alcohol consumed in the establishment plus a constant of sober non-washers.
The more guys drink, the less they wash hands and the more likely it is that you will see them resting their open beers on top of the urinals that they are spraying down less and less accurately as the night goes on. So much for your toothbrush…how about the microbiology report on those open beers!!!
whats new? this has been happening for years and we’ve managed to survive. nothing to worry about unless if your man does’nt wash his hands and then come & touches you on your face..now that is something you should be worried about. my woman always complains about that one.
How many of us with the tweezer touch in public toilets go to the gym and just pick up the weights? Seen too many folk ’shake ‘n break’ without a thought to washing their hands.
The reason women go to the loo in pairs is that one squats while the other holds her hands to enable a non-touching hover.Then they swop over. The delay in their return to company is the period needed for their quads and triceps to recover.
Personal hygiene is imperative to stop germs invading our bodies. It has been that for so long, that it has become an aesthetic argument.
But apart from the aestethics: Why is it that regular scuba divers only rarely catch the cold? Why has working outdoors always been considered healthy?
Eat garlic!
(- or mustard, or other growings with the similar oils).
It mobilizes the immune system like few other remedies, apart from the direct exposure to germs. If your system is not used to exposure, you will definitely get sick in this world.
mmm, this is all delicious. I don’t like other people’s germs but my house isn’t particularly shiny. My kids are pretty healthy in spite of the minor chaos.
Storm has a good point though. First thing I always do before I leave the gym, even if I’m off to shower at home and all, is wash my hands. I don’t suck my fingers after using the equipment but I’m sure as hell not eating breakfast without washing off the snot, spit and sweat.
The other thing, all you guys are complaining about toilet doors, not much complaint about tap handles. Imagine what they look like, all those people who think a two-second rinse under cold water washes off the poo germs. I don’t go as far as covering them up with paper (you’re supposed to, you know) but I tend to slosh a soap/water mix over them to at least rinse off the really obvious. More necessary at home in fact as the kids have got handwashing down (dad trains catering staff in hygiene principles, see) but don’t always realise the stuff they’re putting on the tap beforehand.
Hygiene soaps are useful. Hands are gross. The problem is when you use antibac on everything thinking it does jack. Unless you live in a little white cell with no corners, your house ain’t never clean. Ask hospital administrators about resistant germs.
Lyk my tjy is ‘n bietjie OCD! First I thought it was ACDC, what with the anal en all. But, be that as it may; the training manual on how to hover in a matrix mid-air frozen, crunching dragon, hiding tiger,stance was recorded in oral history and handed down the maternal line of my San foremothers and perfected over time. Chapter 2 is on hand washing: if you see any one you know or someone who would think you’re an uncivilised coloured or look at you skeef (Cavendish and Waterfront), wash your hands as there is no point in explaining that Chapter 2 clearly states: “”!!!$**! Moenie annie blerrie teps vattie! Don’t touch the doggone taps, my dear!
PS: in my home town a tiger is a big pussy
Germs are found all over the world, in all kinds of places. There are four major types of germs: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. They can invade plants, animals, and people, and sometimes they make us sick.
Bacteria (say: back-teer-ee-uh) are tiny, one-cell creatures that get nutrients from their environments in order to live. In some cases that environment is a human body. Bacteria can reproduce outside of the body or within the body as they cause infections. Some infections bacteria cause include sore throats (tonsillitis or strep throat), ear infections, cavities, and pneumonia (say: new-mo-nyuh).
But not all bacteria are bad. Some bacteria are good for our bodies — they help keep things in balance. Good bacteria live in our intestines and help us use the nutrients in the food we eat and make waste from what’s left over. We couldn’t make the most of a healthy meal without these important helper germs! Some bacteria are also used by scientists in labs to produce medicines and vaccines
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Sarah Britten has written three books on South African insults. During the day she is a communication strategist in the ad industry; by night she writes books and blog entries. It helps to have insomnia.
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Sarah, nail.head.hit.you.
Escalator hand-rail thingies really disturb me, as do trolleys and you cant even avoid touching the trolley-handle..aaaargh!! The common computer/laptop mouse is another seemingly innocent but deadly germ hogging everyday-use object.
Since moving to the UK, I’ve had to up my germ-dodging antics and manoeuvres cos don’t believe what they say about Africa, its a jungle out HERE!
Tram, train, tube orange handle-thingies, the ’stop’ button on buses, the button to open the train door, the petrol pump handle cos we have to pour in the juice ourselves, the buttons on the pay-and-display parking ticket machines..I need back-up. Over.
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