David: A Few Words about Comfort Facilities and Hygiene

I wash my hands a lot more than I used to.

I haven’t turned into Howard Hughes just yet, but it’s been impossible to ignore the occasional news stories about various unnerving studies.

For example, unless regularly cleaned and disinfected (and they rarely are), office desktops and computer keyboards are often filthier than nearby bathrooms.

Grocery shopping carts carry more germs -- from contaminated meats and infant riders as well as, one presumes, fellow shoppers who don’t wash their hands –--than the toilet seats in their stores … because the latter get cleaned and disinfected more often. Swabs taken from shopping cart handles turned up saliva, blood, fecal matter, mucus (and worse), plus Listeria, Salmonella, Staph, E. Coli, and general individual bacteria. The only public surfaces found to be more disease-ridden are playground equipment and bus rails.

And of course, going back to what Mom always told us: communicable diseases are most often contracted through one’s hands, so wash them often.

More and more, I not only wash my hands before meals and after using the toilet, but exit from public restrooms carrying paper towels to shield my fingers from the door handle; push open other doors with pressure on the door itself (as opposed to the marked handle; the best is a door that opens away with a kick-panel I can shove with my foot) or pull them open by whatever I guess is the least-handled portion of the door handle; and press elevator buttons with the back of my clothed wrist.

Better than all these options is when someone else is present to push the buttons, pull the handle, etc., and I can glide through behind them, with no more than a clothed shoulder or elbow to keep the door from closing on me. But I haven’t gotten to the point where I wait around for someone to show up, or turn on faucet taps with my foot, as an acquaintance told me a truly germ-phobic coworker does.

U.S. society in general has become more and more sensitive to the issue of germ transmission and its avoidance. Over the years we’ve seen the introduction of motion-activated flushing on urinals and sit-down toilets (but why do the latter make that weird squealing sound that, for an instant, make me think a live rodent has entered the stall?), motion-activated faucets, motion-activated hand blow-dryers and paper-towel dispensers.

The only other thing we have to touch with everybody else is the bathroom door, and the one solution I’ve seen to this is the space-devouring option that only airports can afford: an open passage of overlapping walls through which you wend your way.

All of this is prefatory to comments about preparing for my latest vacation last month, and what I observed on it.

Overseas travel offers an opportunity to see how well (or poorly) other countries handle comfort hygiene. Like languages, restrooms in other lands can vary astonishingly in how they address basic human functions.

But first, there’s the getting there and back. Every time we’ve flown anywhere in the past two decades, it seems that Carole has caught a cold. When hundreds of people file through an enclosed space in a day, the law of averages says a few of them are going to bring germs along.

Commercial airline toilets are incredibly germ-ridden. I was determined to have as little contact with them as possible. I packed breathing masks in my pockets but felt too inhibited to put one on until I noticed -- of course -- the older gentleman in the seat next to me coughing steadily. I actually timed him, surreptitiously, hacking once a minute or less, roughly.

This is one time I’m hoping that’s a smoker’s cough, I murmured to Carole, and quietly put on a mask. Oddly enough, the man stopped coughing as soon as the plane was airborne (an anxiety cough?), so after a while I took off the mask.

Through careful planning -- timing of a bathroom break before boarding and a sparing amount of drinking on the plane -- I managed to avoid the airline toilet altogether on the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland to New York. I knew that probably wasn’t going to be practical on the roughly nine-hour London-to-Chicago leg home. As it turned out, I visited that toilet for “number one” only once and didn’t have to touch anything: a couple of facial tissues in my hand protected me (I hope) from the door and toilet flusher.

Our trip to England took us to a land that was not considerably less “civilized” in this area than the U.S., via a route (the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2) that was even more sensitive to these issues than most.

We encountered nothing like the pair of foot-shaped pads above a small hole inside a blank stone room that constitutes a toilet in Muslim lands like Morocco (summer 1969, with my family); nor the home toilet in Tallinn, Estonia (summer 1994) that has a dry catchment, so you get a good strong whiff of your deposit before it gets washed away; nor again the long open pit at the equivalent of a fairgrounds in Estonia (I thought “I hope I don’t drop my wallet!”). Nor were there any bathroom foyers where an old lady in black sold individual toilet paper squares to the patrons as they enter, as in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Forewarned, we carried our own.)

On the other hand, none of the places we went had quite caught up to Finland (where, my bother Toby has shown us, showers have complicated faucet designs that allow you to set your ideal temperature, and then turn the water on and off at that preset level, to conserve without getting hit with overly hot or cold laving again) or Japan (where some toilets have a warming element in the seat and buttons for various other "services" for your backside, from a jet of warm, washing water to a blast of warm, drying air).

As I said, the ocean liner was considerably more sensitive to these issues than most tourist facilities. The welcoming line at the Britannia Restaurant for every meal actually included a staffer who held a large squeeze bottle of hand disinfectant, so diners could avail themselves of hand-washing gel before sitting at table. Many of the bathrooms had small cloth towels -- about the size of a wash cloth -- rolled into tubes and lined up in straw baskets for drying one’s hands (and a separate disposal for the used ones) as an alternative to paper towels.

I saw a lot more hot-air hand dryers on this trip than I think one encounters in the U.S. Some were motion activated, some had a button (though you can usually activate those with a poke of the elbow). The most impressive one was, I think, in Shakespeare’s Globe theater, because you put your hands inside a horizontal chamber where they were blasted with stiff warm air on both sides. It was faster and more effective than any other I’d seen. As I recall, it was motion-activated so you didn’t have to touch anything.

In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, I encountered the first significant improvement on the old James River semi-opaque paper toilet seat covers: a seat with its own built-in, revolving or replaceable plastic seat protector. A plastic wrap encloses the entire toilet seat like a sleeve around a donut, with fresh plastic coming out of a compartment on the right rear side (as you’re looking down at it), and circling around the seat into the “used” compartment on the left rear side. Here’s what the instructions said:

“SaniSeat [with a registered trademark “R” in the circle next to it]
To use
1. Place hand in front of sensor
2. Wait for fresh cover to encircle seat
3. Seat now ready for use
After use sensor off for 20 seconds
Old plastic is destroyed and NEVER used again!”

The “never” was spelled out in italics. Pretty impressive, if it had worked. But it didn’t. After waving my hand in front of the sensor several times and getting nothing, I ended up pulling fresh plastic out of the right side and bunching up the used portion near the rear left side before sitting down.