October 31, 2021

Paper Towels Empowering Home Healthcare

After pandemic, everyone is even more conscious of how important environment cleanliness is.

And your home is the place you should look after the most.

So, make sure to stock up on paper towels as they can give you a huge hand to keep your house spotless and healthy.

Ready to empower your place health?

Disposable hand towels vs reusable cloth

While a reusable cloth can help you reduce paper waste, it’s a risky choice when it comes to healthcare.

Although not as dangerous as when used for wiping your bum, reusable paper-free towels can spread germs around if not stored and washed safely.

According to a microbiologist, washable hand and bath towels are one of the most trendy place for bacteria to hang around in your house.

And we’re talking about fecal bacteria too. Sometimes we don’t clean our hands properly and we may carry some of these invisible microorganisms with us.

The trouble is that once they get onto your towel, you’ll struggle to wash them off. That means other people may get an undesired present when drying their hands and spread them even more.

The result of this vicious contamination circle?

Cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and other unpronounceable nasty diseases.

So, how can you wipe these terrible bugs away from your house?

Using disposable hand towels. Which, not surprisingly, is the common practice in most public washrooms.

But that doesn’t only apply to your bathroom.

Bacteria from food can pile up in the dishrag you use for cleaning your kitchen counter. Which ironically gets even dirtier. The same happens to fridge door handles and sink taps you may hang those cloths on.

You don’t want to share your dinner table with infection-riddled sneaky friends, right?

Once again, switching to kitchen paper towel is the solution to that.

For this reason, single-use hand towels played a heroic role in getting a clean break from pandemic. Being health institutions recommended tool for disinfecting surfaces, they limited the COVID spreading.

When the outbreak was at its peak, leading hygiene experts suggested people to carry paper towels around as a defensive weapon.

Placing a disposable hand towel on public bathrooms taps and door handles was a not-so-dirty trick to shield your fingers from the virus.

Disposable hand towels vs hand dryer

One of the first good hygiene practices we learn in our life is to wash our hands properly, especially before eating. That’s because hand hygiene is crucial to protect us from diseases and infections.

But looks like we forgot the good manners. At least, that’s what the sickening stat shared by the Michigan State University is revealing. Based on their experiments, only 5% of people wash their hands long enough to kill disease-causing germs.

It would be interesting to repeat the test now as the Coronavirus pandemic made us rediscover the importance of this life-saving habit.

But drying your hands is as vital as washing them. And that’s because bacteria spread more easily from a wet skin.

So, what’s the safest way to dry your hands?

Well, if you’re thinking to buy one of those high-tech hand dryers for your bathroom, just think again. Although they’re greener than paper towels, health & safety is not their forte.

After checking the relevant scientific articles published between 1970 and 2011 (that’s a lot of paper, by the way!), researchers concluded paper towels are more hygienic than electric air dryers. That’s because they remove bacteria more effectively and minimise the contamination within your bathroom.

In 2014, a study reported that around jet air dryers there were 27x more germs than those hanging near paper towel dispensers.

A year later, other scientists revealed that jet dryers splattered viruses in the bathroom up to 1,300 times more than single-use hand towels.

And it gets even scarier.

Based on the research, you can still catch a lot of pathogens up to 3 meters away from the hand dryers. Instead, none of the viruses spread by paper towels went further than the 1.5-meter mark. However, at this distance, the particles jetted by the dryer were 200 times those launched by paper towels.

Plus, the machine virulent potential lasts longer. After 15 minutes, the particles sprayed by the hand dryer in the nearby air were 100 times more those slung by disposable hand towels.

That’s what we call a viral hurricane. This is very dangerous because viruses preserve their infectious potential much better than bacteria.

So, looks like you need a full protective vest whenever you get close to a hand dryer.

The bottom line? When it comes to drying your hands, stick with single-use paper towels rather than sticking them into a jet dryer.

Are bamboo paper towels good for home healthcare?

Out of all types of single-use paper towels, bamboo rolls are ideal for keeping your home bacteria-free.

Why?

Bioactive compounds contained into the raw bamboo make it a natural antibacterial pro. After mild processing, bamboo fibres may keep this bacteria-repellent property. Which means bamboo paper towels are a very good weapon to fight against infectious microorganisms.

That’s a big advantage over its competitors considering bacteria may lurk in tree-greedy paper towels. Researchers found this to be the case especially for recycled rolls, whose viral load could be up to 1000-fold higher than that found in virgin paper towels.

The reason behind this is that bacterial growth is often seen in recycled paper mills. Also, recycled paper contains starch and fillers which bacteria feed on. According to researchers, these types of microorganisms can give you food poisoning or infect your eyes, blood and even brain.