After going to the toilet and washing their hands in public places, many people will choose to wipe their hands with paper towels, while others are accustomed to putting wet hands on the dryer to dry. They feel that compared with using paper wipes, drying hands with dryer phones will not contact other things, and it seems cleaner and more hygienic. But is that really the case?
Recently, Nicole, an American college student, had a competition. She put a petri dish under the dryer in a washroom for 3 minutes, and then left it alone for 48 hours. She found that there were so many bacteria. When she posted her photos online, netizens were stunned. Has she been doing things in the wrong way for so many years?
Why is the dryer so dirty
In fact, before Nichol, Dr. Ed Roberts and others from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, USA, had done similar experiments. They collected dust and dirt attached to dryers everywhere in the local area for laboratory analysis and research, and found that the number of "latent" bacteria in dryers was amazing, and many of them were bacteria in feces, which was very easy to cause disease. For example, Klebsiella may cause fever, nausea and vomiting; Enterobacter cloacae may cause serious respiratory tract infection, and even staphylococcus aureus has been found, which may cause poisoning shock Syndrome, cellulitis food poisoning Etc.
Why are there so many bacteria in the baking machine? The study found that toilets and toilets are considered to be high-risk places for bacteria breeding and transmission. Every time the toilet is flushed, an aerosol will be sprayed into the air, which may contain various pathogenic fecal bacteria. In addition, a disease control expert in Beijing said that the place where the dryer is installed is usually wet, which makes it easy to breed bacteria in the dryer. In order to reduce the risk of bacteria breeding in the dryer, it is necessary to disinfect it frequently to keep its surrounding environment dry and clean.
How can it be cleaner to wipe your hands with paper
So what is the best way to dry your hands after washing them? Some researchers used online electronic databases to analyze and compare many studies since 1970, and proved that paper towel drying is the best method. Generally, it takes 45 seconds to dry the phone to reduce the hand humidity by 97%, while it takes only 10 seconds for paper towels to achieve the same level. Most people only use the dryer for 22 seconds, and the hand dryness is less than 70%.
In addition, when wiping hands with paper towels, the friction between their surfaces and hands also plays a key role in sterilization, and most bacteria are rubbed onto toilet paper as a result. Compared with all kinds of hand dryers, drying with paper towels is the best way to sterilize hands (especially fingertips).
Although from the perspective of environmental protection, paper towels are not as good as baking mobile phones. However, someone on the Internet has proposed a paperless way to wipe your hands: after washing your hands, shake them 12 times, and then wipe them with folded paper towels.
