This story scares me!
The thing is though, washing your hands in the bathroom is great, but then what? The first thing you do is grab the bathroom door handle and you've just re-populate your hands with another set of new bacteria. Mind you, they may not be sickness causing bacteria, but bacteria non-the-less. Then you grab all the door handles, stair banisters etc etc etc all the way back to your office if you're working. You can't possibly keep bacteria off yourself and many sick people touch things outside of the bathroom environment that you could come into contact with. Heck, have you ever noticed when your walking down the street on a cold winter day you can see people's breath? If you're walking behind that person you may not have noticed but you walk right into the same 'air space' as that person and probably breath in some of the same air they just breathed out. I wonder how many people have gotten cold in the way as well?
I used to wash my hands constantly, and had hand sanitizer on my desk for when I went out anywhere and came back. I was sick ALL the time. I ditched the sanitizer and instead just covered my hands when I touched any public doorway with my sleeve, on top of the washroom break hand washing. Same thing in the bathroom....I don't touch anything in the washroom with my bare hands, even flushing the toilet. I cover my hand with a little piece of toilet paper and flush it down too. Haven't been sick in over a year (keeping fingers crossed). Another trick is to use your elbow to dispense paper towel, don't touch the dispenser with your bare hand as you're more likely to touch your face or mouth with you hand afterwards than your elbow.
I'm not actually germ-a-phobic at all, I just work in an extremely public place and the bathrooms here are the filthiest I've seen anywhere. I go to bars and compliment them on their nice clean bathrooms in comparison to the one where I work.
Ick, I'm grossing myself out now.
Urban Coyote
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