I mean it is a Tiktok scientist and all.
I once collected a sample of my dog's water bowl, and compared it to a sterile saline solution. I'll be posting on TT soon so 2.5M people can view the results.
I missed the Tiktok bit - yea, I wouldn't put much stock in that. That said, I suppose I got "got" by the various "health knowledgeable" comments out there like at:
Washing your hands often and well is an important step in preventing flu and other illnesses. But the way you dry your hands can unintentionally spread bacteria.
health.clevelandclinic.org
and
Researchers testing the dispersal of bacteria in public restrooms found that the hand dryers were picking up bacterial deposits, likely from aerosolized microbes caused by the flushing of uncovered...
www.health.harvard.edu
However, more reading brings up snopes:
Do restroom hand dryers spread disease by blowing germs and bacteria around? The jury is still out.
www.snopes.com
Which - says the science is mixed. Though all of these do reference slightly more reputable studies in journals. I will say, this is one that seemed intuitive to me that blowing droplets of water from my hands at high air speeds would lead to spraying them around the room more than wiping on a paper towel. What I didn't really take into account is that we just don't know how "dirty" the average wet hands are to spray around. Most of the studies seem to imply the "dirtiest" people don't wash their hands at all, and presumably don't use the dryer in that case, and even if they for some reason did on dry hands - it wouldn't be able to spread much. I personally will admit that I'm far more likely to wash my hands if there are paper towels to quickly dry my hands after than if there's just the hot air blower that all seemed to be ineffectual or would take SO LONG to work, on the order of like 5-10 minutes, that socially it'd be an issue to do.
That said, everything about most public restrooms seem to be designed to make it hard to do a good job - the auto water controls give you like 5-10 seconds of water, which isn't long enough per the articles, and manual ones mean you usually have to now touch the dirty handles just after washing your hands to turn them off. The doors all seem to open in so require you to somehow pull them open (if there's no paper towels, and just the hand dryers IDK how you're supposed to do that), so again, I'm not sure that skipping the whole thing doesn't leave you in substantially the same place with at least one of your hands after you pull the door open...
