Impacts of lid closure during toilet flushing
ajicjournal.org
ajicjournal.org
This makes me want to see some physics simulations of cow shaped particles.
There's also fun to be had trolling toddlers. Sometimes when my 2yo closes the toilet I'll sneakily open it with the remote and she'll yell at it "NO!" and slam it shut again.
As to why they have the remote outside of the bathroom apparently.... I took have questions.
Posting from one right now lol.
Similar to how many (?) cases of patients getting sick from a doctor’s neck tie or a nurse having used a touchscreen. It’s almost certainly not zero. Is it a lot though?
When one child gets sick in our house, we take some efforts to keep them somewhat isolated, and these measures have been usually successful.
The bathroom is the weak link in their routine as they continue to share it with siblings. This report reinforces us asking them to spray disinfectant.
Before we enacted some of these policies in our home, one kid getting a bug from school meant the entire family would get it. Now that's much less common.
No such conclusion is made, though.
I've read elsewhere today that anything under 95% vaccination will result in outbreaks; the r-naught is 12-18 if google is correct.
Masking.
TBH when my friend's dog links my face, I sometimes lick my lips. The odds of that making me stronger are 1000x the odds of it killing me. Mind you, I'm not going to lick a toilet bowl. But perhaps some minor exposure to such things isn't so bad in the broader sense?
Again, the species developed in a less than sterile environment, and suddenly we're going to clean that up and there are no unintended consequences?
People are chugging soda and eating over-processed food are...worried about flushing the toilet? Let's weigh the risks here.
Yes, and early death from disease was incredibly common.
The discovery of penicillin is estimated to have saved over 200 million lives.
fwiw, if we keep doling out antibiotics as we are, we'll be happy with only losing 200 million.
So again, are we making gains or grabbing a balloon?
I literally said "early death from disease". Do you need me to enumerate specifically which diseases penicillin was able to treat?
Your comments reek of survivorship bias. Just because we're alive today doesn't mean things weren't terrible before. Imagine how different the 14th century could have been if we had antibiotics to treat the bubonic plague.
You've gone hyperbolic to make a point - typical ofmn HN - that simply doesn't apply. It doesn't address the question. That question is - again - is too clean a good thing? (Hint: probably not).
Thanks for taking the time. But please, let's stay on topic. Thanks.
So is living in houses
Ignoring the fact that exposure may be a problem from E. coli to sewage, I read Robynne Chutkan's microbiome book at the suggestion of my doctor several years ago and nothing has come closer to the truth on our lack of exposure also being part of the problem.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Try finding the median there and there's a Nobel waiting for you.
We always hear "People with pets live longer" and "couples live longer", right? While I can imagine the emotional value of those relationship and how it enables better health, my theory is that the constant presence of other microbiomes - human and/or pet - is also a major contributor to better health. Live alone? Without a pet? You aren't exposed as much.
p.s. Thanks for the book suggestion. I'll add them to my Wish List on ThriftBooks.com
Chutkan deserves the success she's had since that book shipped. The book is not an easy read. It requires a strong stomach, to say the least.
I was lucky to have a doctor who was thoughtful enough to connect my obsessions with diet and exercise to continuous improvement by leveraging my hyperlexia against the root cause that I have a stomach in each leg. ;)
I like your theory. It would be interesting to see a group of biology students debate the merits of such a theory and how they might prove or disprove such a theory.
I'm sure there are some game theory problems lurking there.
There are many sickness that basically don't exist anymore or are very rare, but used to be normal in the past.
Reality: to most audiences the toilet (and sanitation technology in general) is just a punchline, and the show's producers know that. That's why. We're getting what we pay for, and we vote with our eyeballs.
The proposed sealed toilet seat[0] is honestly a good idea, and it's a sensible implementation of the concept. I wish them luck. The TV segment felt oddly like a modern-day version of when John Snow said that maybe we shouldn't drink cholera water, everybody. :-\
Lid up (1014 PFU MS2) 11.02 ± 10.77 3.64 ± 3.19 6.23 ± 6.47
Lid down (1014 PFU MS2) 4.25 ± 4.48 1.77 ± 1.97 2.31 ± 2.54
That said, I have no expertise with the field of, uhh, toiletology, to know whether they handled this data appropriately or not.
Edit: Sorry, just to add that typically with non-normal data like that, my inclination would be to report the median (which will be less affected by skew than the mean), and perhaps the interquartile distance (difference between the 25th and 75th percentile) rather than SD. But most statistical models are still designed around means and SDs, so you may still be inclined to report means and SDs since that's what you statistically tested for differences.
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/36734 has additional supporting material
> Up to 145,000 droplets were produced per flush, with the high-energy flushometer producing over three times as many as the lower energy PAT and over 12 times as many as the lowest energy HET despite similar flush volumes. The mean numbers of fluorescent droplet nuclei particles aerosolized and remaining airborne also increased with flush energy. Fluorescent droplet nuclei per flush decreased with increasing particle size. These findings suggest two concurrent aerosolization mechanisms—splashing for large droplets and bubble bursting for the fine droplets that form droplet nuclei.
Ever since myth busters my toothbrush almost always have a cap on it and I always close the lid before flushing the toilet.
For something so low effort, this one new study isn't going to change my habit of closing it "just in case."
Now, everytime I switch the toilet fan on I think about the researches on airplanes during covid that showed that there was little contamination thanks to cabin air intake being at the floor level and fresh air coming from the top.
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Viral aerosols from toilet flushing pose a possible route of pathogen transmission.
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Toilet lid closure prior to flushing is believed to mitigate cross-contamination.
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We show toilet lid closure prior to flushing does not mitigate cross-contamination.
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Brushing toilet bowl without disinfectant results in contamination of surfaces.
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The use of a disinfectant during bowl cleaning reduces cross-contamination of surfaces.Funny enough my sister was the opposite, she could read a book and write a thesis in a weekend. I guess different people have different preferences.
Lid’s always closed at home - I have a cupboard above the toilet that’s full of stuff likely to fall.
So neither was a tanked washdown toilet, as is universal in Europe. I wonder if those behave any differently.
This study is not saying anything new because everyone knows the toilet seat is dirty regardless what you do, while everyone’s concern is aerosols flying on their faces.
Like, I get it - it's gross. But humans can be exposed to a certain level of gross and not die, it's fine.
Not saying you should stick your toothbrush in the toilet, but unusually strict hygiene measures are unlikely to be net beneficial for you. My reading of the research is that greater exposure to bacteria is very healthy and desirable as much as possible without actually getting sick.
I'm reminded of this every time someone posts a link to FDA regulations of what is acceptable as "food", what level of contaminants are allowed in "food", and other things that really make you not want to eat "food".
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.
The lid could be transparent to make sure no surprises are left behind.
Specifically, we need a fan that runs while the light is on in the toilet and for 5 mins afterwards and can do perhaps 1 full air change per minute (that's a lot of air moving, but toilets tend to be small).
And that air should go outdoors (maybe via a heat exchanger and filter)
Why is the title of the paper about lid closure when it says that does not help? It should be about disinfecting as that does help.
I kept thinking the toilet in a gas station, but I'm sure they did it in an isolated, purpose-built toilet in a research facility.
But shit is shit, and how did they "deploy" the object for repeatable experiments?
>A surrogate for human enteric viruses (bacteriophage MS2) was added to household and public toilet bowls and flushed. The resulting viral contamination of the toilet and other restroom surfaces was then determined.
I fear the collision of safety culture and robot technology that will make it cheap and easy to actually keep bathroom surfaces sterile. We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome.
The same kind of objections apply to things like clothes, shelter and agriculture. I'm not advocating that we do away with these, or the idea of cleanliness. But our dependence on them comes with a cost that isn't always worth paying. Particularly where the cost is a compromised immune system.
It's important to note that this has not been demonstrated conclusively, and when medical professionals talk about it they stress that it's not worth exposing yourself to fecal matter intentionally to "build resistance." Personal cleanliness is still one of the more important things you can do for health.
A reasonable compromise seems to be: let your kids play in the dirt, but also teach them to wash their hands after using the bathroom.
That said, your compromise seems right, but it missed the point of the parent post. Living in a hyper-sterilized world is going to have consequences.
I think that flatteringly overstates modern human abilities: Almost every surface on Earth either has life on it or is about to be get recolonized in short order. (Often after we did some temporarily-effective thing involving brute force radiation or unusual heat or volatile chemicals.)
At best we'll end up with almost-sterile bathrooms that we're OK with because life that is both process-resistant and dangerous hasn't popped up yet.
> We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome.
There are two flavors to this that I think really need to be distinguished, because they lead to very different experiments and recommendations:
1. "Hygeine Hypothesis" - "Our immune systems need to be toughed up by winning battles against actual pathogens."
2. "Old Friends" - "Our immune systems need additional calibration by harmlessly interacting with the suite of benign things we co-evolved with."
The former suggests that a certain level of (literal) inner turmoil and danger is required, whereas the latter suggests that it's a much more general issue of micro-ecological diversity and no pathogens are needed.
It might be like the difference between being in an airport for 5 minutes with a Covid stranger vs. sharing a bed with a Covid family member.
He was right. We got dirty on the farm. We ate dirt in the form of working and playing in the dust and mud. We would get "cleaned up" on the hot summer days by swimming in the river. Not only did we survive, we thrived. It was some of the greatest years of my life, eating a pound of dirt a year...
This is a huge oversimplification on how the immune system works, same as saying "what does not kill you makes you stronger". No.
Clothing will be redesigned around it. [0]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/12/04/...
https://www.introba.com/news/5-reasons-vacuum-toilets-are-fu...