I
’m a small adult and I was a small child. One day at my babysitter’s house when I was somewhere shy of five-years-old, I slipped off the seat, sank into the toilet bowl, and cried and screamed until the sitter, Mrs. Anderson, came and saved me and my soaking wet shirttail. That’s what this picture that Katie sent us made me remember. Thank you, Katie.
photo credit: http://thechuckler.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/toilet_boy.jpg
Poland’s soccer team may suck, but the co-host of the 2012 UEFA Euro championships wants to make sure the toilets sparkle.
Arkadiusz Choczaj, leader of the so-called "Clean Patrol" campaign, told reporters in Warsaw,
"Our toilets are better prepared for these championships than our football players.”
"Clean Patrols", made up of volunteer inspectors dressed in white overalls, recently sniffed around 200 public toilets in six Polish cities slated as Euro 2012 venues or back-ups. The "Clean Patrol" project was co-sponsored by CWS-boco, a sanitary products supplier.
Public potties were rated on accessibility, hygiene, smell and whether toilet paper, soap and hand towels were available.
Just one toilet scored a perfect 100 points, while a three-quarters majority rated 65 points, the basic acceptable standard.
Loos in airports, hotels, restaurants and cafes were rated the highest by both the patrols and tourists surveyed by the independent TNS OBOP pollsters. Poland’s tourist-magnet southern city of Krakow received the highest ratings.
At the bottom of the rankings were a quarter of public restrooms — in train and bus stations, on trains and in camp grounds — rated as danger zones by the patrols and foreign tourists alike.
Jan Orgelbrand, head of Poland’s Chief Sanitary Inspectorate said,
"Regardless of the Euro finals, we have to improve standards because, let’s face it, we want to live in a country that doesn’t stink.”
"Not every football fan or tourist will get to the stadium, but all will visit our public lavatories and their standard speaks about Poland as a nation."
What Would Don Draper Do? He’d reject the crappy ad copy, leave it to his underlings if necessary, and walk away. After a large glass of whiskey.
Mike Kapalko, SCA Tissue`s Environmental & Tork Services Manager says,
"Our hands touch 300 different surfaces every 30 minutes. And, according to the CDC, up to 40 percent of Americans could contract the H1N1 virus through 2010.
So properly washing and, equally important, effectively drying your hands is a simple way of dramatically decreasing your risk of being infected. As a leader in
hygienic solutions, Tork provides businesses and consumers with handwashing resources such as posters and educational videos through our website."
The press release says damp hands spread 1,000 times more germs than dry hands2.
This is the reference:
2Patrick, D.R., Findon, G., Miller, T.E., Epidemiology and Infection
That’s not a reference.
“It is therefore as important to dry your hands as it is to wash them carefully with soap and warm water.”
Nah, water temperature doesn’t matter much either.
How hard is it to get it right?
Borrowing medieval battle tactics, a 24-year-old Australian man poured boiling oil over his sleeping housemate last August because he bought a whole takeaway chicken instead of a quarter.
Today he was sentenced to six years in prison.
Justice Mark Weinberg said the man’s act was "of extraordinary violence bought about by your feelings of anger and resentment towards your victim. Yours was a cowardly act and one of great cruelty."
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind on the surface of the moon forty years ago.
On this special anniversary, Craig Nelson, author of Rocket Men, released ten little-known facts about the Apollo 11 mission that took Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon and back. 
The list highlights several aspects of space travel that have been updated and improved upon since that time, including restroom facilities.
Nelson writes that in 1969 "urinating and defecating in zero gravity…had not been figured out; the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it."
The waste ejection predicament of the Endevour at the international space station just seems to pale in comparison.
The Associated Press reports today that one of the international space station’s toilets is out of order. As an often user of a plunger in my house, I know the embarrassment (or pride for some folks) that arises from plugging the commode.
While flight director Brian Smith declined to speculate whether overuse caused the toilet trouble, he was quoted as saying "We don’t yet know the extent of the problem. It may turn out to be of no consequence at all. It could turn out to be significant. It’s too early to tell right now."
The situation might get stickier as the space station guests, crew of the Endevour, are restricted to relieving themselves in their own vehicle. The AP says that the Endevour is parked next to the Japanese porch and can’t eject waste, Cousin Eddie-style, without spraying it all over the porch.
NASA, the food safety equivalent of the always-prepared Boy Scouts (without the funky green uniforms) was a catalyst in the creation of the modern food safety risk reduction system. In the 1960s NASA commissioned Pillsbury to rethink how to address risks in food processing and moved away from the use of end product testing as the only check. The result, hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) was created and seen as the best way to keep astronauts from acquiring foodborne illness and the avoiding awkwardness that would be created by explosive diarrhea in weightlessness.
The toilet repair work reportedly fell to Belgian astronaut/plumber Frank De Winne who wore goggles, gloves and a mask.
Maybe it was barfblog influenced, maybe not. My previous post on Mark Bittman’s garlic and other stuff in oil was a letter to the editor I submitted to the New York Times on Friday night. As the Times likes to have exclusive first printing right I held off on posting the letter until last night (since I hadn’t heard whether it was going to be printed). 
This morning, esteemed New York Times watch-dog blogger NYTpicker, noted that the botulism-promoting Bittman article has been updated to include some safety tips:
Correction: July 1, 2009
A recipe on Page 4 today with the Minimalist column, about infused oils, corrects two errors that appeared in the recipe when it was published at
Having a baby around the house has introduced me to a bunch of new life necessities like soothers, gripe water and wipes. I’m not a huge diaper-changing fan, but when it’s my turn I try to do everything in a quick, fluid-like step but it doesn’t always work out. The wipes help a lot.
I have a close friend back in Guelph who also uses wipes. And he doesn’t have a baby.
A couple of years ago he led a discussion at a party about the political-correctness of adults using baby wipes for the not-so-clean trips to the restroom. As the
r puts it, wipes can provide consumers a "shower-fresh" feeling for their bottoms. Since the discussion, this friend reports that he has been buying wipes, stashing them in his desk and covertly grabbing one daily as he goes to have a dump.
According to the
it turns out that flushing the wipes, even if they are the flushable ones is not a good idea for the sewer systems (at least in Raleigh).
Tissues and wipes of all stripes get balled up with hair and grease in the city’s pipes, creating clogs that send sewage cascading from manholes. The problem has gotten worse in recent years with the introduction of wipes designed to disappear down toilets, Wastewater Treatment Superintendent T.J. Lynch said.
"What we see a lot of times in the collection system are overflows caused by those types of materials that don’t degrade like they’re supposed to or they claim to," he said.
Lynch knows this from experience and because he asked the lab at the Neuse River Wastewater Treatment Plant to test several kinds of wipes to see how quickly they break down in water.
The test, performed in March, was simple: Put a wipe or a tissue in a beaker of water with a magnet on the bottom that rotates, creating a vortex not unlike a flushing toilet. The lab put nearly a dozen products through this process, letting them spin for an hour.
Toilet paper begins to break down into a milky mush almost immediately, lab supervisor Darrell Crews said. Other items survived more or less intact. Some, such as Kleenex and other facial tissues, are well-known to people in the sewage business.
"A lot of people flush Kleenex thinking that it’s just like toilet paper," Crews said. "But I can tell you, Kleenex doesn’t break down. You can stir it, beat on it, it’s just not going to break down."
It turns out that flushable wipes don’t break down either, Crews said.
I’m not sure that public data exists around the extent of use of the wipes, but I doubt my Guelph friend is the only one sneaking around with them. Having them disposed in waste baskets beside the toilet, or elsewhere in the restroom after a clean-up probably isn’t a great public health strategy. Flushable wipes, if they breakdown and don’t lead to sewage spewing from manholes, are a good idea.
Amy, Sorenne and I (right, not exactly as shown) started out this morning on our Spring Food Safety Speaking Tour – Bite Me ’09.
First stop is North Carolina State in Raleigh, but it’s 1,200 miles from an apparently snow-covered Manhattan (Kansas) and, with a three-month-old in tow, the stops are frequent.
One of those stops was at a Panera Bread in Columbia, Missouri. The restaurant rated an A according to the sign in the window (below, left) but when I went to the bathroom, the toilet handle was broken and wouldn’t flush. And I really should have flushed.
Guest barfblogger Don Schaffner sent Doug and I the below picture from one of his favorite blogs, blame it on the voices. The picture, likely staged, reminded me of something similar I had seen before my food safety geekdom. 
During my first couple of years of university, I used to go to Retro Wednesdays at the Trasheteria, an-aptly named bar next to Sun-Sun’s in downtown Guelph. There wasn’t any Journey or Foreigner played — it was early nineties retro with the Beastie Boys and Rob Base, with some Nine Inch Nails mixed in. Pretty much the same stuff I still listen too.
One of those Wednesday nights, I hit the restroom and saw what I think was a lipstick mark, akin to the Rolling Stones logo, on the lip of the toilet. I returned to my table and sent a couple of my friends in to confirm. I hadn’t really thought of it until Don sent the pic, but maybe we need a "Don’t kiss toilets" website.
