A simple experiment involving hand dryers has gone viral online, with many people now determined to just shake it off or use a trusty paper towel.
In a TikTok posted by the user, @phonesoap an experimenter collected bacteria samples by first waving a petri dish through the air to simulate drying your hands by shaking them, and then collecting samples from various different types of hand dryers.
The samples are then left to incubate for three days, to see what grows there.
The dish simulating merely shaking your hands dry fared the best, with no visible growth.
The hand dryers at a gas station produced the most bacterial growth - no surprises there.
While not exactly a large-scale study, it was enough for people to swear to never use a hand dryer again, with one user on TikTok describing them as "the wind of a thousand farts".
That’s an image that we won’t be able to get out of our heads for a while - yuck!
If you’re sitting there thinking a silly little TikTok experiment doesn’t prove anything well, we have some news for you…
Several studies from the University of Leeds School of Medicine have shown that hand dryers promote the spread of bacteria.
In one experiment, to simulate badly-washed hands, researchers contaminated people's hands with a harmless bacteria called Lactobacillus that's not normally found in bathrooms.
They then dried their hands using jet hand dryers, warm air hand dryers, and paper towels. Samples were then taken from around the hand dryers and a short distance away.
Levels of Lactobacillus in the air around jet air dryers were found to be 4.5 times higher than around warm air dryers, and a whole 27 times higher than around paper towels.
“Next time you dry your hands in a public toilet using an electric hand dryer, you may be spreading bacteria without knowing it," Professor Mark Wilcox, who led the experiment, said in a statement.
Okay, that’s enough to swear me off the use of a windy fart machin ever again - anyone else?
