Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down.

• Hawke@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  10x reduction doesn’t even make sense. It’s not possible to reduce by more than 1x, as that would be 100% of the bacteria gone.

  And your link doesn’t support what you said at all.

  The floor and the walls of the restroom were contaminated after toilet flushing, but no significant differences were observed between the contamination occurring with lid position up or down. Wall contamination was minimal, regardless of lid position, and there was no significant difference in contamination level between the surfaces assessed, but data indicated that the trajectory of the aerosol plume contamination may have changed. Floor contamination was not found to be reduced consistently by toilet lid closure prior to flushing.

  Am I misreading something?

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  • tburkhol@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m not interested in their narrative, I’m talking about their numbers. They measured plaque formation - colonies - of bacteria from surface wipes around the toilet after flushing a contaminated toilet bowl. Depending on the location & lid state, they got, generally 10^3-10^6 plaques. 10^5 with the lid closed, 10^6 open, which is a 10x difference. There’s no difference in the surfaces directly facing the bowl; hardly surprising that there’s little contamination left by the time you get all the way to the walls - 1/r^2 effect. Look at the surface you sit on.

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    • Hawke@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m much more interested in the conclusions and the meaning of the numbers, for two big reasons:

      • It doesn’t matter much if the reduction is 90%, if the remaining 10% is still enough to be a problem. It sounds like a lot, but I have some doubts that it actually makes much difference.
      • I care a lot more about locations outside the toilet than the specific locations in and on the toilet. The toilet is assumed to be contaminated regardless, the question is whether or how much it is contaminating the rest of the room.

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• FishFace@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  But how does it compare to what’s already there? How does it affect the average toilet user’s bacterial load, and how does that compare to an approximate threshold for infection?

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