*Bathroom Contamination*
No matter how old or how protected I think I am when it comes to a pandemic flu or similar outbreak along comes a thought or a prompt from the farthest reaches of time and space. Hence the birth of this article.
My wife found a product for our tooth brushes and showed it to me and asked wouldn’t this be a practical
Idea since germs would build up on the toothbrush due to the environment. I thought about this area of contamination for a few days and low and behold along comes a program on Discovery channel about general toothbrush contamination. They took various toothbrushes and ran fecal tests on them and found significant colonies on the bristles. I also ran the tests first hand. (Surely I have not been brushing my teeth with fecal colonies for ½ a century.) So I thought!
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| From 3 month old toothbrush | From UV treated toothbrush | ViroLight Sanitizer and storage |
This was a 3-month-old toothbrush in an open-air cup for toothbrushes in our bathroom.
The second test was run after a 10-minute disinfection cycle.
Contamination would come from any source or activity in use in the bathroom, Showers, Blow dryers, hair spays or moose to name a few. .Even Flushing The toilet
My mind kicks into high gear. I stay on top of the possible effects of H5N1 on human waste since I work at a wastewater treatment plant among others places. Current thinking is that human waste from a sick individual would be just as infectious as bird feces.
So if you have a single bathroom as we do and should have a sick individual that uses the facility, plans should include the use of a portable system for their use. The following visual tests should convince you as it did me.
First I colored the toilet bowl water with portable disinfectant to turn the water blue.
Then I covered the bowl with several strips of toilet paper and lowered the lid and flushed. The blue color here could just as easily represent the aerobic air born virons of H5N1as they do disinfectant.
So if a sick persons waste was in the bowl water, Presto instant contamination via H5n1 virons piggy backing on air borne water droplets.
Shogun
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