Bathroom dryers are certainly useful and more ecological compared to paper towels. But a new study shows that your freshly cleaned hands can get a lot of bacteria, fungi, and other nasty stuff from them.
Air Hand Dryer
By Stilfehler GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons
The situation is obviously the worst in public bathrooms. Maybe this will be news to you but whenever someone flushes a toilet the nasty stuff can get up 4.5 meters high. The dryers then suck them in a blow them straight onto your hands. Recently experts from the University of Connecticut put Petri dishes under several dryers and let them blow for 30 seconds. During the analysis, they then found 18 – 60 bacterial colonies. The control Petri dishes that weren’t blown over usually had only a single bacterial colony.
The results were so convincing that the University of Connecticut decided to start to offer an alternative to dryers – the old school, unecological paper towels. Obviously, bacteria and other microbes are all around us and the vast majority of them have no adverse effects. And the immune system actually needs to be subjected to bacteria but when we wash our hands for example before eating we want to get rid of most of them. That means that using a dryer right before that could lead to potential contamination.
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