New (Gross) Study: Most Men Don't Wash Hands After Bathroom - BY L. K. REGAN

PUBLISHED OCT 30, 2009

Here's some news that will make you think twice about the casual handshake: British researchers have found that less than a third of men wash their hands after using the toilet. In these days of swine flu pandemic, that's a pretty scary statistic. Worse yet, the researchers found there are few ways to persuade guys to clean up their act.

The British study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, depended on a devilishly simple design: place sensors in bathrooms at service stations on British highways. These sensors were set to survey the water-and-soap behavior of the quarter of a million or so people who came through in the course of 32 days of observation. The researchers were hoping to find that people dutifully scrub their hands with soap after each visit—since, as the study authors write, "Hand-washing with soap has been ranked the most cost-effective intervention for the worldwide control of disease." In fact, if people would wash regularly with soap and water, over a million deaths from diarrheal diseases per year might be prevented. And that's not to mention that the CDC recommends hand washing as one of the most effective ways of slowing the spread of the swine flu pandemic.

Sadly, the study's results were not particularly auspicious. Less than a third of the men and two-thirds of the women who passed through the bathrooms during the study washed their hands with soap and water after using the toilet. So, researchers tried presenting bathroom users with a variety of messages to try to impact those statistics, and find out what motivates people to wash up. Electronic message boards at the bathroom entrances flashed a variety of hand-washing warnings, allowing the researchers to see which messages impacted behavior within the bathroom.

The messages showed a full range of approaches to hand-washing. Some were gentle reminders of the facts of hygiene; for instance, "Water doesn't kill germs, soap does." Others were more, well, explicit—for example, "Don't take the loo with you—wash with soap." Men and women differed in their behavioral responses to the messages. Women reacted best to the basic reminders that they ought to wash. Men, however, responded best to the gross-out effect, with messages like, "Soap it off or eat it later."

Not surprisingly, the most effective message overall involved shame and peer pressure. "Is the person next to you washing with soap?", when flashed on the board, got 12 percent more hand washing out of men and 11 percent more from the women. So the next time you're in the bathroom, wash your hands with soap and warm water (rubbing the soap into your hands for long enough to sing the alphabet through twice—that's about 20 seconds). It's the best thing you can do today for your own health and that of everyone you encounter through the day. And if the guy next to you isn't using soap, make sure he sees you staring!

Simi Automatic Rest Rooms

So you have seem the many new advances mad to make public rest rooms more sanitary. There are the automatic soap dispensers that since when your hand is under and give you a little dab to wash ur hands, the sensing hand blowers, self flushing toilets, self flushing urinals, faucets that come on when you put your hands under and go off when you remove them, even paper towel dispensers are automatic. Its amazing to think that you can walk into a bathroom and touch only your self to come out relieved, clean, sanitized and dry.

But you have also noticed that no completely automatic bathroom exists. There is only the semiautomatic ones that create awkward moments.

Being a guy using the public restroom is already cumbersome. All those rules we had to learn in our years of going from lavatory to lavatory. We had to teach ourselves not to let our eye wonder to keep everyone else comfortable and keep us from getting into a fight. We learned to skip a urinal to keep guys with wondering eyes away from us. The courtesy flush was one we learned to keep others who could not see us from making embarrassing comments such as “What the hell was he eating?” and “OMG I’ll go find another room to use!” and finally no talking, you do not have conversation until you are at the sink (usually).

So in today’s restrooms you never know what to expect. You enter in and go to the urinal which hardly has a divider and commence taking a piss while keeping your eyes forward and junk guarded. When all is done you go to flush only to find no Handel as you are accustomed to. Just a blinking light to indicate its automatic. You then walk timidly to the sink as not to make an ass of yourself and figure out if you just put your hands under or pull a knob lift a lever or push down on the hot and cold knobs. With out think you go to get soap from the dispenser and low and behold its another automatic thing. You wave your hand under to get some soap it gives you what looks like a melting pink maggot hardly enough to clean a man sized hand. To rectify the situation you stand there like an insane person waving your hand back and forth to get an adequate amount of soap.

Just when we think the ordeal is all over and we are assured we know all the possible drying solutions we find not a hand blower but a paper towel dispenser with no lever. Once again, we wave our hand to get the right amount of towel to dry man sized hands.

To top it all off and make us almost never want to use a rest room again we see that our female friends are waiting for us.

The perfect men’s room of course would be one where everything is automatic from the door to the hand blower. It would be best if the bath room would stop accepting people once its reached maximum capacity. Or just leave it how we are used to it, completely manual and disgusting. We were trained to use those and we find it much simpler and inviting. Put frankly men are simple.