Back in the 1970s, the millionaire lunatic Howard Hughes moved into a hotel penthouse suite in Vancouver for an extended stay. Eventually word leaked out that Hughes was morbidly afraid of germs, and resorted to such hygienic measures as walking around wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet.
Now the Boston Globe reports that Hughes may have been saner than we think: They check out, but their germs don't leave. Excerpt:
When sick hotel guests leave their rooms, they frequently leave something important behind: the virus that gave them their colds.
During an overnight hotel stay, people with colds left viruses on telephones, light switches, and television remotes, researchers said yesterday at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco.
Infectious disease specialists caution people to wash their hands and avoid touching their noses and faces to avoid catching colds that infect about 60 million people in the United States annually. The study, sponsored by Reckitt Benckiser PLC, maker of the Lysol cleaner, suggests that infectious cold germs may survive longer in the environment than has been thought.
"When you touch surfaces a day later, the virus may still be there," said Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville who led the research.
Hendley and his team had 15 patients infected with rhinoviruses, a common cold germ, spend the night in a hotel. Each volunteer spent at least five hours awake in the room before sleeping, and then another two hours awake before leaving the following morning.
The Virginia researchers then swabbed objects and surfaces that had been touched during the stay. About 35 percent of those objects and surfaces had cold viruses.Some of the patients appeared to be more efficient spreaders of the virus, Hendley said, contaminating as many as eight of 10 surfaces they touched.
Granted that a study commissioned by Lysol is predictably going to find we live in a world urgently in need of disinfection. But SARS exploded out of Hong Kong in a hotel corridor among guests waiting for an elevator...one of the guests being a Chinese doctor who had brought the virus from Guangdong province.
Between writing that paragraph and this one, I just rubbed my hand over my mouth, pondering what to write next...and recalling that some US psychology professor is supposed to promise $100 to any student who can keep from touching his or her face for two hours. He hasn't had to pay anyone yet.
My college has little stickers above the urinals reminding us to wash our hands, and we now have motion-activated faucets instead of taps. Knowing what I do about my fellow-males, I expect most don't wash their hands. But every one of them will grab the handle of the men's-room door.
During the Spanish flu, at least one medical specialist tracked all the surfaces and objects that he came in contact with in the course of a day. It was a large number. In the next pandemic, the number will no doubt be even larger.
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