Are air dryers more sanitary than paper towels?

Air hand dryers are actually not as sanitary as using paper towels when you visit a public bathroom. Public health specialist Peter DeLucia, MPA, explains why drying your hands well, with paper towels, is the best way to stay healthy.

Transcript

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One of the things that they do is actually they can spread the germs from your hands up to 6 feet away from the dryer.

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Actually, recent studies have shown that the air hand dryers are not as sanitary as using good old paper towels.

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The reason is, number one, people don't have the patience to actually stay under the air dryer long enough to get their hands dry,

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even those turbo ones that are actually blowing so much air on your hands so quickly. One of the things that they do is actually

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they can spread the germs from your hands up to 6 feet away from the dryer. Also, typically in the bathroom after you flush toilets,

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you have fecal bacteria that's like a cloud in the air. The agitation from these strong air dryers

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brings that fecal bacteria into the dryer element itself. Then, when you go to dry your hands, guess what?

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You're getting an extra surprise coming on your hands, that fecal bacteria that's been floating around in the restroom. So the best thing to do is use paper towels.

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And surprisingly, when you use paper towels, you're going to get your hands dryer. And when the action of using the paper

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towel on your hand, that friction, it removes those extra germs and bacteria from your hands and transfer them to the paper towel.

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You can even take that same paper towel to open up the restroom door and leave. So you make sure you don't get anybody else's germs that didn't wash their hands.