Flesh-Eating Bacteria That Can Kill in Two Days Spreads in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Flesh-Eating Bacteria That Can Kill in Two Days Spreads in Japan

bloomberg.com

116 pointsbelter98 comments

I feel like we get these "flesh-eating bacteria" scares in the media every couple years, and then all of the sudden you just don't hear about it anymore for another couple years. Just has led me to conclude it's something that's always "there" in the background but not really something to worry about except for specific sub-populations that basically always have to worry about it.

Appearing in the media is a bad indicator. Look up antibiotic resistant infection clusters. There might be one near you, but it won't make the news because they've been there for many years.

just like corona, which survived for a five years of effect. Bacteria's impact are for two years, virus impact are for five years.

Then what impacts for ten years?

> Bacteria's impact are for two years, virus impact are for five years.

Did you just make this up?

Yes they did.

Japan has a really old population which makes this a major concern for them (median age >50 a decade more than the US). It makes it also harder extrapolating this to other countries. Density of susceptible persons makes a difference when it vomes to spreading (herd immunity, hospital transmissions).

After seeing the archive text, it's bizarre to me that this article is pay-walled. It's 4 paragraphs long. I don't get it.

Come on, it's Bloomberg, and besides it's not like it's an immediate deadly health risk... oh wait.

Would be nice if the article provided a bit more context / history? Is this a new thing ? Etc

https://www.cdc.gov/group-a-strep/about/streptococcal-toxic-...

Kikuchi urged people to maintain hand hygiene and to treat any open wounds. He said patients may carry GAS in their intestines, which could contaminate hands through faeces.

Not really surprised, in Japan I often find toilets have a single tap with cold water and no soap. It’s quite disgusting. Lots of train stations are like this.

This was a while ago but I found India to be the absolute worst for this. I was working in a modern office in Bangalore at the time, and the building's other tenants were companies like Microsoft and some other well-known big tech companies I'm forgetting at the moment, and not a single bathroom had any soap. I was totally grossed out.

India is probably the worst in the world when it comes to toilet hygiene. The whole country needs potty training.

That is true, but I still can't reconcile how faeces get on their hands in the first place when it's overwhelmingly common to use bidets

With bidets it's ever easier to get feaces in your hands than it's when using just toiler paper

That makes no sense. How is putting your hand within millimetres of faecal matter more hygienic than simply washing it away

You'll still be using your hand on the vicinity, not just some paper, plus water spraying microjets of shit everywhere, and several other factors besides.

The bidet is leaving your ass cleaner, not your hand.

That's why you wash your hands afterwards. I don't think anyone advocates for doing just one.

When I was i Japan the toilet in my hotel room had a remote control with 18 buttons.

How often are the buttons cleaned?

and the extremely difficult to access mechanism for moving anywhere from one to three small, perpetually damp pipes into position inside the bowl, themselves accessorized with numerous little hinges, cavities, crevices to collect and accumulate offal in effectively unclean-able (but mostly out-of-sight) recesses.

Although initially intrigued, after staying in Japan for a few weeks I came to despise those overcomplicated, ironically un-hygenic toilet systems - especially in public facilities, and tried to avoid using them as much as possible.

On the other hand I greatly preferred the old fashioned squat style setup, I would seem to be a lot more practical of a solution on a number of leven.

Honestly you had a luxury bidet.

Lots of Japan may have a bidet but most I’ve come across are in much worse shape.

Are you making things up? The norm, if there's a bidet, is for it to be button controlled. Even a lot of public toilets have button controlled bidets at this point.

Some really old public parks will have squatters, and in the past these bathrooms would also not have had toilet paper (because the assumption is that you'd bring your own tissue paper with you - this is one of the reasons they hand out tissue papers with advertising). But nowadays basically all toilets have paper, and most have nice new bidets.

>Are you making things up?

Are you rude?

>The norm, if there's a bidet, is for it to be button controlled. Even a lot of public toilets have button controlled bidets at this point

Did they say otherwise?

Grandparent said "When I was i Japan the toilet in my hotel room had a remote control with 18 buttons."

And parent wrote: "Lots of Japan may have a bidet but most I’ve come across are in much worse shape."

Not that they don't have buttons.

> Are you rude?

Are you?

> And parent wrote: "Lots of Japan may have a bidet but most I’ve come across are in much worse shape." > > Not that they don't have buttons.

They implied toilets with button controlled bidets are "luxury" toilets, and that most toilets they came across were in bad shape.

I'm saying that the norm in a lot of Japan now, for public toilets, is what they called out as being "luxury" toilets.

Their experience is so outside of the norm that it's either extremely outdated, or exaggerated to make a point (and the point is related to how things are unsanitary, so it has a tinge of painting Japan as a whole as being unsanitary).

I was just in Japan in April just revisiting Kyoto and Kobe for the 3rd and 2nd time.

Then before that I was in Japan in October.

In the past few years I’ve been to Tokyo, Kanazawa, Awaji, Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka, Hakone, and a bunch of smaller cities. All took my time.

So no, my knowledge is neither outdated nor am I exaggerating anything. Maybe I’m going to all the wrong establishments.

You should look up the aerosolization of patterns of toilet contents when toilets are flushed.

Funnily enough a lot of Bidet toilets in Japan have a suction function for this reason.

… I have to think there’s also probably some manner of aerisolization when you spray with water too.

I’m actually really confused by why people like bidets so much. Maybe I just don’t get how they work? On paper, it just seems more prone to the aforementioned issue and also getting the rest of your groinal region as dirty as your anus.

As a fairly hirsute gentleman, a bidet has been life changing for me. I am so much cleaner— the only way to be even cleaner would be to get in the shower! Now maybe that is all in my head?

But honestly if you’ve ever tried to clean, say, peanut butter out of a shag carpet using only dry paper… well you have some ideas of what my struggle has been. With apologies for the graphic image; hopefully it elicits a chuckle from someone :)

I've posted below about squat toilets, but you might want to try them if they are an option. Honestly, I'd glad I practiced a bit and learned to balance in a squat than have to sit on the (usually filthy) seats in most public toilets. But one of the most interesting things is that when you squat, your posterior is in a much more suitable position for the activity and there's a lot less cleanup required. Not always, but fairly often, the first wipe already results in such a clean tissue that you don't even need to bother with a second wipe. YMMV of course, and it also depends what you've been eating!

Is it true that some people are genetically unable to squat?

I imagine anyone born without legs would find it difficult, but that's generally a pre-birth injury rather than a genetic condition.

Some of the best, minimal-cleanup shits I've had were in Japan on a squat toilet. Also in the woods, over a cat hole; the ergonomics of squatting to poop work in our favor.

That might explain why I got bored with my COVID bidet and switched back to toilet paper - after COVID I got laser hair removal in the uh bidet region

This is gotta be one of the funniest HN comments I've seen in my decade+ here.

I'll happily accept my downvotes for this meta commentary.

As the book quips, "Everyone Poops"

I suffer the same affliction. When a bidet isn't available, baby wipes work.

Paired with hair removal, my quality of life has increased greatly.

right there with you, pal…

but honestly, it shouldn’t be a difficult concept for people to grasp. if a bird shit on your arm, would you wipe it off with a dry paper towel?

I’m sorry but that description was laugh out loud hilarious. Felt like I was reading David Sedaris.

I mean, normally I wouldn’t share, but you asked… my wife and I had terrible hemorrhoids to the point I was considering going to the doctor from using toilet paper. I bought a bidet and I’ve never had issues again. I’m happy to say my anus is the least inflamed it’s been in my life, and the hemorrhoids have completely gone away for us both.

If you had shit on your hands, would you consider them clean after wiping them with a paper towel a few times, or would you want to wash them with water? The same applies for your butt.

Different regions of the body, and different uses. Around the anus there's bacteria in a nice warm moist environment to go to town. I don't open doors with my asshole, so I'm happy with enough wipes to get any excess poop off, followed by a spray from a cheap cold-water bidet (or diaper sprayer, left over from when our child was in cloth diapers), followed by a wipe for drying.

Have you ever washed dishes? After the process are they cleaner or dirtier?

If you wash dishes by directly spraying them with the faucet, the dishes will get cleaner and food debris will get splattered around the sink.

If it gets that bad, wash the bidet afterwards.

Uhm… I've never been in japan. But in italy a bidet involves "soap"

And there was me thinking the soap was just that colour because it was made with olive oil...

If you shit on any other part of your body, would you be content with merely wiping it with some paper?

The washlet I have has a dryer function but it doesn't work all that well. I'm told this is pretty common and most people still need to use some paper to dry themselves. There's far less risk of fecal contamination of your hands while drying yourself after having your backside washed but it's still a possibility that when multiplied over an entire population means there are many people walking around with contaminated hands, especially if hand washing isn't the cultural standard.

I have found that using toilet paper to remove the initial debris, then using the bidet, then drying with a new piece of toilet paper is the only way to consistently feel more clean.

Many people still use the traditional Japanese toilet or western with no bidet. There is often options. Plus not everyone likes to use a public bidet.

I honestly much prefer the traditional Asian toilets compared to the western ones with seats when I'm using public facilities. Usually the door doesn't go all the way to the bottom so you can open and close it with your shoe, you can use a pre-prepared piece of tissue to lock the toilet door, go about your business clean up and use another small piece of toilet paper to unlock the door and your shoe to open it, and do all that without physically touching anything apart from your own body or your own clothes. Usually the flush is on a handle that just needs to be pressed and conveniently at foot height too. Unless it's an automatic tap, I'll usually operate the washbasin tap with tissue paper between me and the tap too.

Of course most Westerners have difficulty with the squat itself at first, but it doesn't take too long until you learn to balance properly. While I'd also suggest practicing the squat in the safety of your home first if you think this is going to be a skill you might need, in some ways it's easier to succeed in a public toilet when you're really strongly motivated against falling over! D:

Where I work we had some asian or middle-eastern folks who would try to use the standard American-style toilet as a squat toilet. I'm not sure of if they stood on the seat and squatted down or if they straddled the bowl and squatted but either way there was frequently shit on and around the seat. The janitorial staff became quite frustrated with it and someone posted a sign explaining that you had to sit on the toilet and not squat over it.

It must be a big issue in Japan, because every public toilet around here has a big sign telling you not to do that, and explaining how to use the toilet properly.

Not to be rude but this is usually for foreign tourists. Chinese and Indian seem to do this a lot.

Given that you're washing your hands after I'm not sure the benefit

The bigger problem is then opening the door to leave the room after washing hands

Yeah, I use a tissue barrier for that too. When I'm in Asia I usually carry around those little packs that have 10 folded tissues per pack. I normally tear one into quarters before I leave the street and go into the toilet, and use one quarter to deal with the lock shutting the door, one to open the toilet door (and after opening the door, operate the flush if hand operated), one to turn the tap off and one to open any doors on the way out. I also avoid the hand dryers, if present, as I think they just spread germs around. Hands usually dry pretty quickly anyway.

I'd think Japan of all places would have voluminous quantities of antibacterial soap in public restrooms?

My experience with Japan was that it was simultaneously more and less advanced than you expect.

There's a lot of juxtapositioning of {future}{past}, oftentimes within inches of each other.

AFAIK regular soap, used correctly, is enough in most cases.

Using antibacterial soap might be a systemic problem because it disrupts the bacterial ecosystem in our skin.

I agree; I didn't mean to suggest it should be used. I just meant that my expectation would be something on one extreme rather than the other.

I mean, if people overuse it, wouldn't it be expected to lead to more resistant and nasty infections on the long run?

i wouldn't call it "quite disgusting" considering how there are not more transmission of illness than other nations even in the densest parts of the country. people wear masks when they are ill and restrooms in food establishments typically have soap.

air dryers like dyson in western countries are breeding grounds for germs and pathogens anyway

Do we really need to argue or split hairs that not having soap in a restroom is disgusting? Nobody is saying anything about masks or the pros/cons of air dryers. But not washing your hands after using the bathroom is disgusting.

> ...can be followed by necrosis...

Never a symptom you want to read.

Nor this:

> Many people with STSS also need surgery to remove infected tissue

(From the CDC "Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome" page, link in other comments here.)

This is antibiotic resistant strep. Kids get strep all the time from basically not washing their hands consistently.

oi, pandemic 2.0?

Bacteria can be incredibly nasty but I would guess they are less likely to cause a pandemic than viruses.

It's less likely, but bacteria do cause pandemics. Yersinia pestis, the most well-known example. Or Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is still a major cause of death today.

Or even parasites, such as plasmodium.

Sounds frightening. I hope no one is hurt!

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