Okay, what is with the use of toilet seat covers? The people who use these things must be germ-phobic or have really delicate buttocks. Usually when I enter a public restroom, I check the toilet first. If it’s very dirty, I use another stall. If it’s just a little damp, I wipe it up – not that I understand how women manage to spray all over the place anyway, and then walk away without taking care of it. But before I plunk myself down, I tidy up a bit.
Even if I didn’t, though, my ass is not that thin-skinned. Butts are not entirely clean. They stay in your panties all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re immaculate. They’re also easily washed. I’m not afraid of getting diseases from a toilet seat – if there were something on the seat that carried disease, I’d have wiped it up. So why do so many of the women on my floor feel compelled to use these things? Even worse, they leave them on the toilet seat or in the sanitary napkin dispenser. These things are lightweight, biodegradable, and are supposed to be flushed after use.
Good grief, people, quit worrying so much about your pert little bums. Sit on the toilet seat and be done with it. (Then again, if it hadn’t been for the existence of these things, Negative Space 6 would never have come to be.)
Poor Sensitive Asscheeks
13 Jun 2002 at 16:13
Meredith
2 Comments
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by gwen
13 Jun 2002 at 20:21
toilet seat covers rule. at the very least, i am avoiding picking up crabs, which are small and hard to see and happy to live atop all those toilet seats you sit on without your noticing them at all. and there are several types of germs you can pick up from toilet seats [i believe one of the hepatitises can live for some time and get into your system that way, along with sundry other airborne things like common cold, flu, etc.]
from the hypochondriac’s handbook:
what you don’t see can still get you [e. coli, streptococcus viridans, staphylococcus aureus, candida, bacillus, neisseria, diptheroids, staphylococcus epidermis, aspergillus, shigella, vibrio vulnificus, saprophytic fungi, and dozens more].
30% of americans do not wash hands after using public bathroom.
almost 50% of people don’t wash their hands after petting an animal, and one third don’t after coughing or sneezing. pets carry bacteria such as salmonella, insects such as ticks and fleas, and fungal infections such as ringworm [which chad is dealing with at the moment, and it's nasty], as well as roundworm and toxoplasma. all disgusting little puppies carry roundworm.
ha! found it:
there are 120 viruses, including hepatitis A, that live in feces. when you flush the toilet, water droplets containing more than 25,000 virus particles from 600,000 bacteria fly from the bowl, hover for a few hours, then finally land on surfaces as far away as six feet. closing the toilet lid won’t help; the next time it’s opened, a cloud of virus-carrying water particles will burst out. [toothbrushes are a common target of this vapor [and aren't i relieved that our toothbrushes and toilet are in different rooms].] for a truly clean toilet, regular disinfects won’t do, so you will have to spray lab alcohol in the bowl and light it. a flambéed toilet bowl is guaranteed to be bug free for at least one flush. [caution: do not spray the alcohol on the seat and do not try this with a plastic bowl.]
i don’t care if i’m paranoid. public toilets are disgusting, no matter how clean you think they look. and don’t get me started on the door handles. ugh. yuck. i avoid them except in the direst circumstance, and generally try to wait til i get home in any case, ugh. yuck. handrails, every single surface in malls, ewwwww. yuck. but public toilets are the worst and there’s a reason it’s a law that they provide seat covers [at least in california. i don't know about federally; some states are backwards]. you might be a conscientious hand washer and generally clean, but most people aren’t and they strew their figurative and literal crap and its accompanying disease and decay everywhere. ew. yuck.
by An Interested Reader
14 Jun 2002 at 15:41
Dr. Harold Oster is an infectious disease specialist at Scripps Clinic Medical Group in San Diego, California:
Toilet seats are not common vectors (transmission of infections. If you use the toilet seat in the usual manner, it is very unlikely that you will become infected with any disease-causing microbe. Specifically, there is no evidence that HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) or the viruses responsible for hepatitis B or C (chronic forms of liver inflammation) can be spread in this manner.
There are some organisms that conceivably could be acquired by contact with toilet seats, such as the strep (streptococcus) and staph (staphylococcus) bacteria that we routinely carry on our skin. It is possible that you could become colonized with a specific organism (become a carrier) after sharing a toilet seat with someone carrying that organism. But I think that the risk of such transmission is very small, and I personally do not worry too much about it.
Some infections are commonly spread in restrooms in areas other than the toilet. The classic source for bathroom infections is the reusable towel roller — the device that holds a length of toweling that you pull down for drying your hands. Other people end up using the same area to dry their hands, aiding in the potential spread of infections. Towel rollers can spread several different viruses and have been linked to outbreaks of conjunctivitis (also called pinkeye), inflammation of the membrane that lines the inner surface of the eyelids and the front of the eye. It is also possible that touching contaminated doorknobs and faucets can spread these sorts of infections, as well as the viruses that cause colds.
Bathrooms might seem the logical place for the spread of diseases that may be transmitted through fecal matter, particularly some viruses that cause gastrointestinal illnesses. However, the Norwalk viruses, the most common viral causes of gastroenteritis in adults, are much more often spread by contamination of food and water. When food handlers do not wash their hands after using the toilet and then return to their jobs, they may transmit such viruses through the food they prepare. It’s possible, too, that if you touched a faucet or other surface soon after they did, transmission could occur. (Most bacteria that cause gastroenteritis require a large load of bacteria to cause infection, making it less likely they would be transmitted by touching surfaces.)
There is no way to know how frequently such infections are spread in bathrooms, but it probably is rare enough to justify continued use of public toilets. I do want to make clear that we should still use some common sense in public restrooms. But I would not become too concerned if there were a small lapse in the usual hygiene.
http://www.ivillagehealth.com/experts/infectious/qas/0,11816,167105_165150,00.html