How to use a public toilet: Should you line the seat with paper or hover?
When visiting a public toilet, we start inventing complex schemes to protect ourselves from germs. We'll tell you what actually works and what's just self-deception.
Everyone has faced this: you enter a public toilet stall and find traces of previous visits and a dubious odor. You immediately want to turn around and run away. But if your body demands it, there's no choice.
Professor of Microbiology and Hygiene Markus Egert, in an interview with Tagesspiegel, explained which methods actually save us from microbes.
The most common fear: "I'll sit down and catch a gastrointestinal infection." Of course, the risk of encountering dangerous bacteria still exists. For example, if someone with norovirus and diarrhea used the toilet shortly before you. This is a very insidious pathogen: even a tiny amount of the virus is enough to catch the infection.
But there is an important detail that will help you relax. According to the expert, the risk of catching a gastrointestinal infection simply through skin contact with the seat is minimal.
"What gets on your thighs or buttocks won't make you sick. To get sick, microbes must get into your mouth," notes Professor Egert. According to him, the main danger is not the toilet itself, but our own hands, which we use to touch dirty surfaces and then bring them to our faces.
Why you shouldn't line the seat with paper
When using the toilet, you can minimize the number of microbes that get on your hands. "The main thing is to touch as little as possible," says Markus Egert.
Therefore, the microbiologist considers carefully lining the seat with toilet paper a bad idea.
"The more unnecessary movements you make in the stall, the higher the likelihood that you will touch dirty surfaces that you could have avoided," he argues. While you are spreading the paper, adjusting it, if it slips, you are actively collecting bacteria on your fingers.
If the idea of sitting on a public toilet is unacceptable to you, it is better to use the half-squat tactic (when the buttocks hang over the seat). But this requires strong legs and, importantly, accurate calculation. After all, if everything goes awry, the next visitor will be very unpleasant.
Golden rules of hygiene
Instead of fiddling with paper, the expert recommends following these three simple rules:
1. Close the lid before flushing! This is very important. When you press the flush button with the lid open, a cloud of tiny droplets with bacteria and viruses rises into the air, which you then inhale.
2. Don't linger. The less time you spend in the stall, the fewer aerosols (those same droplets) you inhale.
3. Wash your hands! This is the most banal, but the most effective advice. You need to wash with soap, slowly, for at least 20-30 seconds, rinse well and dry thoroughly (preferably with a paper towel).
So worry less about skin contact with the toilet and pay more attention to the cleanliness of your hands.
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