By hiding in toilet cubicles for a new study, psychologists observed how long people spend using the loo, and how long they wash their hands for afterwards. That men usually wash their hands less conscientiously than women is a well-established finding. Thomas Berry and his colleagues wanted to find out more about the reasons for this gender difference.
For one day, between 10am and 4pm, a male researcher secreted himself inside one of three cubicles in a gents toilet facility at a U.S. University. For optimal observational purposes he chose the cubicle adjacent to a row of three urinals. Nearby, in a similarly designed female toilet facility, a single female researcher positioned herself in one of the three cubicles available. Don’t worry, both researchers were provided with a “customised wooden bench” for comfort.
They were also equipped with stopwatches. The researchers used an “unobtrusive sight procedure” – that is, they spied on other visitors to the lavatories using the gaps beneath and by the side of the cubicle doors (for some reason, US toilet cubicles always have a gap of about a centimetre either side of the door). The researchers also used an “acoustic procedure”. That is, they listened to the visitors’ actions. The study authors explained:
“… research assistants recorded the facility [urinal or cubicle], and then started a stopwatch when the patron’s feet stood relatively still. For the men, the research assistants also recorded the orientation of the feet to gauge the patron’s use of the commode (i.e. as a commode or a urinal). When research assistants heard the flushing of the patron’s commode or urinal the stopwatch was turned off … and the duration of the restroom event was recorded.”
Similar procedures were followed for recording each visitor’s “hand washing event” if there was one. A clever twist was that for part of the study, the researchers put “out-of-order” signs over the men’s urinals. This was to see how much they’d hand wash if they were forced to urinate in a cubicle, rather than at a urinal.
The psychologists managed to observe the toilet behaviour of 34 women using cubicles; 32 men who used a cubicle to defecate; 40 men who had no choice but to use the cubicles for urinating (because of the out-of-order signs); and 64 men who used a urinal. The bare statistics show that the hand-washing rates for these four groups were 91 per cent, 87.5 per cent, 75 per cent and 59.4 per cent, respectively.
The difference in hand washing rates between women using a cubicle and men using a cubicle (for defecating) was not statistically significant. In contrast, both women using a cubicle, and men using a cubicle (for defecating), showed significantly higher hand-washing rates than men who used a urinal.
The data are somewhat compromised because, as the researchers delicately put it – the women’s “facility use is a constant (i.e., commode) and their behaviour (urination, defecation, or menstrual care) is confounded within the one environment.” However, taken together, the results suggest that the reason men wash their hands less than women overall, is not because of gender norms (i.e. men are less bothered about being clean), but because of the differences in the toilet environment and toilet behaviour for men and women. In fact, after using a toilet cubicle to defecate, men tended to wash their hands for longer than women (but remember we don’t know what the women had been doing).
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of 43 cross-contamination events per household. They concluded Thermy had not been successful.(1).jpg)
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burgers, initiated by the introduction of Thermy in 2000, has not been successful. So why do more education?
a dollar per person each year, or an estimated $305 million in the aggregate, for a 10 percent reduction in the likelihood that hamburger they buy in the supermarket is contaminated by E. coli.
Same with blowing the nose or coughing. Health types have been promoting the Dracula-move – expelling your inner germs into the crook of your arm – but when 
Only 1 in 77 pulled the Dracula move, and about 1 in 30 used a tissue or hankerchief.
Or at least try something new – the stuff that is out there just doesn’t work.
* While a bar graph showing the temperature distribution of the finished burgers demonstrated that many were at or near the recommended 160 degrees F, a few of the burgers’ temperatures were recorded to be much lower — as low as 112 degrees F. (Study coordinators observing consumer behavior made sure all burgers were cooked to 160 F before volunteers consumed them.)
Damn you daylight savings.
As outlined by Madeleine Ferrières, a professor of social history at the University of Avignon, in her 2002 book, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, the goal of regulations at butcher shops — the forerunners of today’s slaughterhouse — was to safeguard consumers and increase tax revenues. Animals from the surrounding countryside were consolidated at a single spot — the evolving slaughterhouse, originally inside city walls — so taxes could be more easily gathered, and so animals could be physically examined for signs of disease.(1).jpg)
As part of a flood of handwashing information for today’s World Handwashing Day, the study, published in the American Journal of Public Health found that with no reminders, 32 percent of men and 64 percent of women used soap.(1).jpg)
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