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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing that pathogens capable of living on surfaces haven't wiped us out already. Thanks immune system.

Doorknobs and handrails in public buildings transitioned from wood and stone, to polished metal during/after the 1918 pandemic. Turns out wood is a fantastic, warm material to make doorknobs and handrails from, but it's almost impossible to clean and sanitize in a functional fashion.

> it's almost impossible to clean and sanitize in a functional fashion.

Metals are not all equal in that either. Stainless steel is markedly worse than brass for door handles. Clean brass is antimicrobial and also kills influenza and other viruses.

I firmly believe the number of upper respiratory infections I have each year is directly proportional to the number of doors I have to touch throughout the day. Once worked for a well-known fruit company with a reputation for paranoia and secrecy, and because of that secrecy, everything was behind locked doors. Therefore, I constantly had to handle doors throughout the day to do anything at work. I'm pretty sure during those years I was on average sicker than ever.

Upper respiratory infections don't seem to transmit by contact that much. They do, but not as much as through the air. Stomach diseases are more likely to be transmitted this way.

But there may be some correlation. Closed doors possibly means poor ventilation. Also, more doors to touch can mean being more active and in contact with more people.

Or maybe that office had drier air?

Dry air isn't an infectious entity

Dry air is hard on the lungs and makes infection more likely.

For public doors I use every part of the body except my hands to open and close them.

Gross, I can't believe you open doors with your mouth.

You don't want to see how he closes them.

Not a comment to you, personally, but I saw someone the other day struggling to follow this philosophy. She struggled to open the door to a cafe for what felt like a whole minute because she refused to touch the handle with her hands.

All I could think was "if only there was some sort of technology that would leverage our biology to make opening doors easy."

(For the record, I was not close enough nor in a position to help out. I'm not that cruel. But I also feel no guilt for laughing inside - it was a spectacle.)

Some bathrooms have a toekick thing you can use to push the door open, and it extends so you can pull it open with your feet.

But as more and more places install the handicap door openers, the more you can open the door just by bouncing off the very large button.

Lately I’ve seen motion sensors instead of large buttons for the handicap openers. Unfortunately they seem less reliable.

Amazingly brass has antimicrobial properties.

And lead, so it's a bit macrobial too :D

So does silver, to the point it’s used in advanced wound dressing. They aren’t cheap though - ask my insurance company! There isn’t that much silver in them, but a 2x2” square is about $4 or so, compared to a few cents for a plain gauze pad.

These properties also cause some people to attempt injecting or swallowing colloidal silver as a purported panacea, sometimes with unintended results:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria

Silver is 0.72 USD/g at the moment so the price of silver alone does not account for the difference in price. A two inch square piece of silver weighing a gram would be more than a tenth of a millimetre thick.

Brass does, but the oxide layer that forms quickly does not.

And the only brass knobs he used were in his own home!

Never mind surfaces, which are probably cleaner in the 20th century than at any time previously, it's the airborne ones people seem to have forgotten about.

Washing your hands regularly really helps

Also, your skin already has a ton of pathogens.

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