How Good Are Your Used Towels?
Germs like you and me enjoy the warm and slightly damp embrace of a bath towel. (Hey, if it’s not wet when you first put it on, it gets wet.) But these germs are only here to snuggle against them; routine use of a bath towel is unlikely to cause nausea.
Many of us were momentarily intimidated by a tweet that compared an unwashed towel to washing our face in the toilet. Source: An article on apartment therapy titled ” You are definitely not washing enough bath towels . “ The article was inspired by a survey that showed that we should all wash more. The survey was sponsored by a company selling washing machines.
But wait a second. We have no evidence that people get sick from their own towels. The wonderful joke about cleaning the toilet came from the scientist originally quoted in this Time article , which also cites other scientists who say, “Our bodies are designed to live in this environment with all these germs” and “As long as it dries. completely between uses, there is almost no chance of transmitting bacteria from one person to another. “
In truth, there are bacteria on our towels because they are all over the place. “After all, where did the germs on the towel come from? We are with you, ”says Mark Martin of Puget Sound University. (I’m assuming he means his own towels and mine. I don’t share towels with the microbiologists I meet on the Internet.)
Martin notes that studies that detect E. coli, or “coliform” bacteria, are usually just looking for gram – negative bacteria that can metabolize lactose. These bacteria are not necessarily bad for us, and they don’t necessarily come from faecal contamination. You will need to do additional tests to confirm that the bacteria you detect in this way are putting people at risk, plus you will need to find out if there are enough bacteria present to cause the person to get sick.
Martin washes towels once a week, as does fellow microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago. More frequent washing “will do little if people don’t have intestinal infections and you rub [the towel] over their mouth and eyes,” he said. So don’t do it.