6 reasons to use paper or cellulose to dry your hands

At workplace, it is essential to use paper or cellulose to dry your hands. Although it seems incredible a survey carried out by Initial Washroom Hygiene among more than 100,000 people came up with the fact that 62% of men and 40% of women never wash their hands after going to the toilet.
Therefore, those people come back to their workplaces with an average of 200 million of bacteria per square inch in each hand, microorganisms that are transmitted when you touch any object at the office…Turning them into places where workers can get in contact with an average of 10 million bacteria per day.

To avoid unnecessary contagions or infections a research from University of Westminster and Eurofins-Inlab has shown that as well as washing your hands it is essential to use towels or cellulose to dry your hands rather than using hot blow dryers. These are the 6 reasons:

–Hot blow dryers are less effective as wet hands might transmit more microbes. Moreover some microbes can stay permanently on your hands even after washing your hands with soap.

–Hot blow dryers are at higher risk to spread microbes as they scatter the water that contains the bacteria in the hands. It might be a way to contaminate other people and the toilets in general.

-After getting your hands dried with a hot blow dryer the total number of bacteria increased an average of 194% on the fingertips and 254% on the palms. With a hot blast dryer the increase was 42% on the fingertips and 15% on the palms. However, after using a towel, the amount of bacteria was is reduced an average of 76% on the fingertips and up to 77% on the palms.

–Hot blast dryer users might be more exposed to microorganism. In fact up to a thousand times more than towel users. Concretely the exposition to staphylococcus might be up to 800 higher. More than half of hot blow dryers are contaminated with coliforms, whereas these microorganisms were not found on the towels.

–More bacteria are also found on the floors of bathrooms with hot blast dryers. Up to 27% more staphylococcus (under the dryer) or 46% of coliforms (only 10% was found on the towels).

–Hot blast dryers propel microbes 2 meters away. Hot blow dryers propel 0.25 meters. On the other hand, the propagation of with the towels is not significant.