A couple of days ago Bloomberg's John Lauerman had an interesting story about guests leaving viruses behind in their hotel rooms.
During an overnight hotel stay, people with colds left viruses on telephones, light switches, television remotes, and even ice buckets, researchers said today at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco.Infectious disease specialists caution people to wash their hands and avoid touching their noses and faces to avoid catching colds that infect about 60 million people in the U.S. annually.
[snip]
"When you touch surfaces a day later, the virus may still be there,'' said Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville. In cold germ transmission, "surfaces may matter,'' he said.
Hendley and his team of researchers found 15 patients infected with rhinoviruses, a common cold germ, and sent them to a local hotel to spend the night in a room. He wouldn't give the name of the hotel, or say whether it was part of a chain.
"It was a hotel room just like yours,'' Hendley said in an interview yesterday. "You sure hope the cleaning people did a good job.'' (Bloomberg).
Yes, you sure do hope the person who is being paid a minimum wage with lousy or no benefits and a fixed number of rooms to clean and a heavy cart full of linens to haul round and maybe another job or two to be able to survive is doing a good job. Flu season is here.
But how serious is this? The Bloomberg story is missing a lot of details and the study has only been presented orally at a scientific meeting. According to Lauerman, the study involved following volunteers around a hotel room, swabbing objects and surfaces they touched, like door handles, light switches and the hotel pen. About a third of those swabs had cold viruses on them. The researchers said some people were much more efficient than others spreading the virus.
This sounds pretty nasty, but Stuart Levy of Tufts School of Medicine, one of the world's premier infectious disease experts, asks the relevant question:
"It's an interesting study,'' he said. "But they haven't shown infectivity. I'm not going to go around opening doors with my elbows.''
"Surfaces may matter" is a long way from "surfaces do matter. Indeed the role of inanimate objects in spreading flu is unknown. It seems like it should be able to happen, but there is very little evidence that it does, so far, anyway. Moreover, rhinovirus isn't influenza virus. So it's a data point. Good hygiene is useful in any event, but surface and object phobia is not a healthy or appropriate response.
One more thing. I almost forgot to mention it. The study was sponsored by Reckitt Benckiser Plc, maker of Lysol cleaner.
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Seems the places that ran this story forgot to mention it, too?
Were they looking for anything except cold viruses?
What would have been interesting is to have seen what all might be found on commonly-touched surfaces in airplanes, daycares, schools, dorms, and ER or Dr. waiting rooms, or, sampled out of the air.
crfullmoon: The story implied they only looked for rhinovirus and I presume they used PCR or some technique that only identified whether some bits of the genetic materials was there. I'm guessing they didn't actually isolate it via cell culture, but I don't know. Usually you need to specify in advance what you are looking for to do this kind of thing, so just "seeing what's there" isn't very feasible.
Wasn't it Lysol that used to end its commercials with the nonsensical line: "You can't clean germs; you have to kill them"?
As a teen-ager, I worked maintenance jobs at two hotels, one being a very shoddy $30-per night type. I also worked the front at a drycleaning facility as my very first job, which lasted 2 years. Every day I sorted and tagged others' dirty clothes. In all these instances, I did not find myself getting sick any more frequently than had been typical for me and peers.
Carpet dust from the vacuum cleaner bags might have been an interesting place to look for pathogens, and while they are at it, many other unpleasant things as well....
Anecdotal evidence, at best but here goes...
My husband is an airline pilot and stays in a different hotel every night, sometimes three nights a week. These hotels range in quality from good to very, very nice. He is always very careful to wash his hands or use alcohol gelss and never touch his eyes or face or eat unless he does so. So far he has not gotten any colds since he started this regime. Before he did so, he was sick with one at least once or twice a year.
My daughter is a high school senior, who follows the same routine as her dad and myself. She gets sick maybe once a year if that and has had a near perfect attendance rating since she started to be more careful with cleaning up her hands before eating.
The bad side is, you use a lot of hand lotion since most soaps and alcohol gels dry out your hands. But it's a small price to pay for being able to make it to school or work.
It's a data point and I take it seriously. And good hygiene is good in general, unless it turns into a obsession. So we'll see if someone can examine this and settle the question. It would not be an easy study to do, epidemiologically. Perhaps using molecular epidemiology (molecular markers), but that would not be easy either. None of the interesting questions are easy and some of the most important aren't even interesting to scientists.
R: "~some of the most important aren't even interesting to scientists."
Some examples, Dr Professor?
tympanicus: "R: "~some of the most important aren't even interesting to scientists."
Some examples, Dr Professor?"
An example from my own experience: We once surveyed urban residents for what environmental issues most concerned them in their neighborhood. I am interested in chemical exposures, especially to carcinogens. There are plenty in the urban environment. Here is what was on the top of their list:
What are the health effects of rats getting into garbage in the alleynext to our apartment houses?
This was a big deal for them and in fact science doesn't have the answer to this question. Nor did I have an easy way to answer it. It was both too hard and not "interesting" enough to engage funders and academics. There are lots of examples like this, very mundane issues that are very hard to answer and also without a lot of interest to scientists. Those two things are connected, too. We are much more interested in questions we know how to answer than ones we aren't.
Uh huh. I gather there's also the interesting problems where research may be constrained by politics or corporate interests despite their potential for understanding and resolution.
I did my high school years in Hurley, NM. The town featured the binary economic indicator of a couple tall smelter stacks (one a replacement of the other). If there was smoke, times were good. But no one seemed particularly interested in the other local economic effects of the waste gases except perhaps the local paint and body shops and the occasional overly educated rancher who wondered what his livestock were eating.
OK, so can one conclude that spraying certain surfaces in hotel rooms (doorknobs, toilet seats, etc.) with Lysol kills enough germs to be worthwhile?
Anecdotal data point: I wash my hands before preparing food, before eating, after using the toilet (sometimes before if my hands are overtly dirty), and when I come in from being out of the house (work, shopping, etc.). I carry a small bottle of alcohol gel to use before eating when out in the field and soap/water aren't available or convenient. I get one or two mild colds per year if that. I caught a flu last year but the last time before that was probably > 10 years ago. The usual trigger for catching a cold is going outside in fall or spring w/o appropriate clothing, so I've started being more careful about wearing a coat & hat (and sometimes a scarf) at those times, and this appears to have reduced colds further.
Re. rats & garbage: Rodents carry various bugs and in some places carry hantavirus which can be shed in their droppings. Rodents also scatter garbage making it accessible to flies which in turn are archetypal vectors. Seems to me the best prevention for rodent problems in refuse storage areas is to keep all refuse in sturdy bins with tight-fitting covers and make sure the covers are on, and occasionally wash & scrub the bins with soapy water to prevent them getting smelly and attracting pests. Also sweep up around refuse storage areas to prevent accumulations of small bits of spilled material that might attract pests.
Re. methodology: set live-catch traps around refuse storage areas, and then test any caught rodents for pathogens that are known transmissable to humans. If the rodents are carrying, you can't rule out all possible transmisison paths, so take steps to eliminate rodents from those areas. Pretty simple, if not airtight in terms of analyzing the possible transmission paths. One assumes that if a potential path exists, the probability of it being active is high enough that simple prevention methods are justified. The place where you need to analyze transmission paths more closely is where preventive measures are expensive or complicated or have other risks.
g510: We know that the most effective kind of rodent control is to deny them food and shelter. In an inner city neighborhood, though, that's now so easy to do. Rats are theoretically the carriers of disease in that kind of situation, but do they? Does anyone get sick from it? When was the last time you heard of hantavirus in Baltimore?
My points was that the scientific question wasn't that interesting to scientists. The response was just like yours. We're not interested in the anwswer because you can cure the problem by rodent control. But it reamins very imortant to the residents.