I always thought "Shit Magnet" was just an edgy book title by Jim Goad, the arch-nemesis of Matt Forney.
But, alas, it appears that they are in fact real and located in almost every public toilet in the world in the form of hand dryers sucking in actual fecal bacteria and blowing it all over your hands.
As reported by USA Today:
We know fecal bacteria shoots into the air when a lidless toilet flushes — a phenomenon known, grossly, as a "toilet plume." But in bathrooms where such plumes gush regularly, where does all that fecal bacteria go?
Into a hand dryer and onto your clean hands, perhaps. That's what a new study suggests. Researchers examined plates exposed to just 30 seconds of a hand dryer compared to those left in, you know, just plain feces-filled air.
The findings: Air-blasted plates carried 18-60 colonies of bacteria on average, whereas two minutes' exposure to the mere bathroom air left fewer than one colony on average. What's more, the inside of the dryer nozzles themselves had "minimal bacterial levels." The results were published recently in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
"These results indicate that many kinds of bacteria, including potential pathogens and spores, can be deposited on hands exposed to bathroom hand dryers, and that spores could be dispersed throughout buildings and deposited on hands by hand dryers," the authors said.
What's unclear, they admit, is just why the air-blasted plates showed so many more spores. Dryers could act as "reservoir" for bacteria, they suggested, or perhaps their intense blowing simply provides more exposure to the already contaminated air. And while evidence shows dryers can cover hands in bacteria, they said, it's not certain whether they deposit bacterial spores.
I'm not sure when the next great plague or super virus will strike, but already the infrastructure for its rapid spread -- cramped airlines, the exhaustion of antibiotics through overuse, and now air dryers that function like disease aerosols -- are already in place.
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