Most of us know how important it is to wash your hands after you use a bathroom, especially if it is a public bathroom, but it turns out you might be doing more harm than good if you use a hand dryer after washing up. A new video on TikTok shows just how dangerous the hand dryers might be.
The clip, which was posted by lab worker @the_lab_life1, shows her test some hand dryers by having them blow air on a culture dish. She did it at a mall, at a movie theater, and at her lab, and she also just moved one dish around the air to simulate air drying. The results were disturbing - all three hand dryers blew various types of unspecified bacteria on the culture, while the air drying seemingly had none. Resistance Wire
Trigger warning around 50 seconds 😬 #fyp #science #lab
The TikToker told Fox News Digital, "Well, I wasn't entirely surprised by the amount of bacteria but more by all the different types. I thought it would be a lot of normal skin related bacteria, but I was surprised to find many different colors and genus."
Even the dryers with bacteria-killing lights don't work as well as you might think since all dryers need to be regularly cleaned and maintained, and if they aren't, then they will be filled with bacteria that then winds up on your hands.
So how does the bacteria get there in the first place? Well people who don't wash their hands for long enough still have microbes on them. Those microbes then get transferred to the dryers when those people dry off their hands. Once in the dryer, the microbes will sit until the air blows them onto someone else.
It's not the first time someone as looked into the dryers either. A 2018 study in the Applied and Environmental Microbiology Journal placed data-gathering plates under hand dryers in 36 bathrooms for about 30 seconds each and found between 18 and 60 different colonies of bacteria on each plate. There was also fecal matter.
Quartz Tube Heaters To be safe, it is probably best to just air dry your hands.