You might not have noticed, but touchless technology is invading the most private of public facilities and the office spaces where we do our dirtiest business.
More and more loos in public and commercial buildings feature hands-free fixtures. This allows us to use the facilities without touching anything that others might have touched. It allows us peace of mind that, if we must use the facilities, we won’t be in danger of picking up nasty stuff.
We won’t be leaving with — eew! — germs left behind by strangers’ behinds.
But research shows that hands-off and hands-free don’t necessarily improve hygiene.
Touchless toilets take care of our business for us. We needn’t toggle knobs to make our blobs disappear. We needn’t touch handles that others have touched after having touched … well, you know.
But the toilets typically installed in non-home facilities tend to ensure the germs we hope have been flushed away have instead been dispersed around — liberally.
When the bottom suddenly drops out of a toilet bowlful of water and waste — when it is flushed — a fountain of micro-droplets shoots up out of the bowl. The invisible, foot-tall geyser of water molecules, undigested food micro-particles, bile and gut bacteria, yeasts, viruses and other yuck, fogs everything nearby — walls, door, your trousers, your shoes.
To contain flush-fountains, toilets need low-tech lids, not high-tech flushers, and the lids need to be down before flushing starts.
Moving from stall to sink, we discover hands-free, electronic faucets present their own issues. Automatic faucets are meant to do away with common washroom germ-transfer points. However, the complicated inner mechanisms of electronic taps make room for undesirable inner-tap lives. A study at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Maryland uncovered persistent communities of Legionella thriving in the centre’s automatic faucets.
Legionella bacteria cause a form of pneumonia called Legionnaire’s disease. They live in warm and tepid water — for example, in hot-water tanks left for days on vacation settings, in hoses of infrequently used spa tubs or in some air conditioners.
Half of the water samples from Johns Hopkins’ hands-free faucets contained Legionella, compared to only 15 per cent of manual-tap samples. Even after the faucets had been thoroughly flushed, almost one-third of the automatic faucets remained contaminated, compared to seven per cent of the manual taps.
There weren’t enough bacteria in the taps to infect healthy people, but Johns Hopkins replaced all hands-free faucets with old-timey manual taps in its patient-treatment areas.
We’ve finished at the sink. We turn to dry our hands.
Air dryers are common fixtures. Even though this is the ultimate hands-off technology with only air touching the hands, studies show these sanitation fixes fail. Most of the studies compare how air dryers disperse germs from the hands being dried — washed or not. All air dryers blast bacteria and viruses all over the place — as far as three metres away for jet dryers. While regular warm-air dryers disperse up to 50 times more microbes from hands to the surrounding environment than paper towels do, jet dryers double the quantities — at least.
One study isolated five species of bacteria of health concern from the air flows of warm-air dryers, with no hands anywhere near — suggesting the dryers might have been the source of the germs.
Another study shows drying with jet dryers leaves fewer microbes on hands than do warm-air dryers — comparable to the number of microbes left after drying with paper towels.
Overall, most of the studies suggest paper towels dry hands efficiently, remove bacteria effectively and contaminate the washroom environment less than air dryers do. Even the Mayo Clinic weighs in by recommending paper towels for hospitals and other locations where hygiene is paramount.
What to do? Being aware of the hands-free-hygiene paradox is the first step. Options are increasingly limited, but when traditional fixtures are present, we can use them to our advantage. We can drop the lid before flushing, scrub our hands for 20 seconds or longer with regular soap and water and dry them thoroughly with paper towel.
Then use the towel to turn off any manual faucets and open the door.
Because we don’t want to pick up any nasty bugs.
