Can You Get the Flu From Someone Else’s Cloud of Diarrhea?
It’s time for another round of Burning Questions, a column where I’ll find experts to answer the health questions you’ve been secretly interested in over the years. Today we’re going to talk about the awful smell your colleague left behind in the bathroom.
I have a nasty public health question. If I walk into a public toilet stall and the person who used it before me left smelly gas air behind them, as if they might have diarrhea or vomiting, could I get sick (flu? Virus?) Just from the smell of their emissions? Should I quickly move to another booth or is it okay if I wash my hands and use the seat cover as usual?
I got sick with the flu shortly after I was in the next stall with a woman with a terrible intestinal upset a few years ago, and always wondered if I was getting sick from an airborne infection.
An inquiring mind (in this bad flu season) wants to know?
Signature,
Anxious in the toilet-villa
First, Troubled in Toilet-ville, I’m glad you gave yourself a nickname, but a little less glad that now I have to call you TIT. Maybe TITV? Can we go with TITV?
Anyway. About a cloud of stinking gaseous air. It is well known that odors alone do not cause disease. At least this is well known in our time. Only a century or two ago, there was a theory that odors cause disease, which makes sense that smelly air tends to accompany germ-contaminated sources of disease , such as feces or decaying corpses. With this mindset, you could protect yourself from disease by sniffing perfume or vinegar as you cruise through sewage-strewn streets.
But times have changed. We know that influenza is caused, for example, by a virus and is spread mainly by airborne droplets through coughing and sneezing. Other diarrhea-causing stomach bugs are also caused by microbes such as norovirus and the bacteria Clostridium difficile, to name just a few.
But you are not writing from Victorian London, TITV. You know that disease is caused by germs, and you want to know if there may be enough of them in the air to infect you. So I called Dr. Lisa Maragakis , senior director of infection prevention at Johns Hopkins.
“This is not a stupid question,” she says. (Phew) “This is actually an active area of infection prevention research.”
The bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhea are known to spread through droplets that are released into the air and either land directly on you or settle on a surface that you later touch. But there is some evidence that they can also spread through tiny droplets that remain in the air for a while.
One notable example is the SARS outbreak that spread through a residential complex in Hong Kong in 2003 . Defective plumbing and ventilation combined with the spread of aerosol bacteria from bathroom to bathroom. This is not how your typical flu virus gets to you, and the flu is not as contagious as SARS. But this story shows that airborne transmission is possible.
However, your risk of catching the flu from a cloud of aerosolized feces is probably much less than your chance of catching it by touching a handrail or doorknob, or standing next to someone at a bus stop who just got up and sneezed at you. … On the other hand, Maragakis says, someone who has the flu so severe that it causes them explosive diarrhea is more likely to go into hiding at home than go out into the world to infect public toilets. Meanwhile, there are many reasons why someone might have diarrhea – or, as it is politely called, “an upset gastrointestinal tract” – that are not contagious.
Your chances of getting the flu this way are very small, TITV. But I made sure that Dr. Maragakis told us the bottom line: how much should you worry if someone has spray at the kiosk next door? She says: “If there is a possibility to get out of the bathroom or be on the other side of the bathroom, I would do it.”
That’s it for this Burning Questions series. I’d love to hear what else is on your mind, so please write down your weirdest and most wonderful health questions and send them to me at beth.skwarecki@lifehacker.com . (please indicate the REQUIRED QUESTION in the subject line). You can also submit them anonymously at bethskw.sarahah.com . Bonus points for a smart name! And until next time, please don’t create clouds of diarrhea in public restrooms if you can.