HEALTH ALERT..........Check Your Bathroom...

Faucet fixtures......

My wife has has months of swelling in her limbs and face. Tuesday her Dr. sent out a lab tech to take samples of air,paint and other locations. The tech took samples from behind the faucet handle and found a build up of a jelly like mold substance. They had it tested and found it to be related to STAFF.....on tuesday we elected to clean the handles and this morning my wife woke up with no swelling anywhere, the first itme in months.


Do Yourself a Favor and Take off the Handles and see if there are any Koodies growing there.

*going to check for jelly faucets*

someone on the discovery channel put die in a toilet bowl and then flushed. then, with an infrared light, he showed where the water went from the centrifuge action of the toilet. it not only hit the seat good, it threw droplets up to four feet out onto the walls. MEN! SEAT DOWN, DAMN IT!

Imagine, your pee and poop all over your bathroom walls ...

RV, concluding the health lesson.

and :puke:

Glad she is doign better and thanks for the gross but helpful warning.

...on this. OMFG, just the mental picture this conjures up is absolutely sickening.:puke: So much for lunch!:puke:

edited for spelling

I personally find the idea of jellied STAFF behind the faucets _really_ horrific.

:spray:

:rofl:

staph is a bacteria...mold is a fungus. They're completely different things.

When I had an infection last year the doctor said these things are notorious in bathrooms.
Toilet Seats are a breeding ground for Staff and other fun little problems.

Clean with bleach.

including all over your skin - there are many different types of Staph. Staph aureus is generally harmless and a natural colonizer on the human skin. Other staph can be pathogenic. It depends on the bacteria and on the host's (your wife) immunocompetence

they also live in your nose.

Can be some nasty stuff. Had an ingrown hair in my nose get infected with staph...most of my face swelled up...and I had to have my lip drained of the accumulated pus.

:puke:

like disinfecting bathroom surfaces, like toilet seats, faucet handles, etc. And you don't need bleach. Any good disinfectant will do. I often use Roccal, a quaternary ammonium product.

And good handwashing technique with soap and hot water also helps.

Bathroom germs are old news.

sure, it can. But it isn't related to mold.

And it's staph (sorry, I'm a spelling nazi) - Staphylococcus aureus is one of the more common varieties.

YOu should clean the toilets and sink with bleach, of course, but you can't evade STAPH forever.

How do you take off the handles? Do you have to turn off the water? Thanks.

To be on the safe side, I'd turn off the water. Underneath the sink, there should be shutoff valves for the water supply. Turn them all the way to the right -- check that they're all the way shut by turning on the faucet to see if there's still water flow. (Water will dribble out and then stop once the water's been shut off.) If you haven't used the shutoff valves in a long time, they could be frozen in place but you can spray them with WD-40 or there's some sort of lubricant specially made for plumbing that's supposed to be even better for that task. My #1 home plumbing rule is that I don't do any action that is irreversible until I've thought about it for a long time.

That's very helpful.

I might go the extremely safe route and add it to a list of small projects I'm getting a handyman to do. :dunce:

A lot of home plumbing jobs are fairly simple things like replacing faucet washers or toilet tank valves.

Use old toothbrushes to scrub the gunk from faucets and other little nooks and crannies.

The rest of my house is a junkpile... but my bathroom is clean. Seems like you have to be careful when people are crapping just a few feet away from your toothbrush.

not to keep them in the bathroom -- because when you flush stuff gets aerosolized. Yuk, I know.

At least keep them as far from the toilet as you can.

flushing, so things WON'T get aerosolized.

I saw this on some tv show. Makes sense to me:).

The kitchen is the other area that can be a breeding ground for nasty stuff, more related to food, like salmonella, e coli, listeria.

Even if you're not picky about housekeeping, always keep the bathroom and kitchen clean.

It's cheap and does one helluva job getting rid of scale and any other gross stuff building up around the sink and elsewhere. Doesn't hurt to pour some down the drains once a week, either.

Edited to add: BTW, if you have one of those home water dispensers (the kind that use 3 to 5 gallon bottles) make sure you clean out the jug on a regular basis! Soaking it in hot water with a few drops of bleach does the trick but make sure you rinse it well afterwards. Just because you buy bottled water doesn't mean you never have to clean the dispensers! The first time I cleaned mine out I found some black, moldy stuff growing on the inside around the tap! ICK!!!

With Kim and Aggie, the cleaning gurus?
Now THERE are some disgusting bathrooms!
My bathrooms have been spotless ever since watching that show.
It really is a health issue.

Now I'm gonna have to go in there and do it.

Seriously, thanks for the info, rsmith6621. :)

Keep a good supply of those clorox or lysol wipes. Pull out a couple and use them to wipe down all your bathroom surfaces, then throw them away. Quick and easy.

- Wash your kitchen sponges and dishcloths in the dishwasher every couple of days. Your kitchen has way more bacteria than your bathroom.


- When flushing a public toilet, hit the handle (me, I use my foot), then turn around quickly. Why? "Toilet plume" (see link below) is much greater with public toilets (which use water pressure to flush) than your toilet at home (which uses gravity from the tank to flush).

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a990416.html

Love your highlighted quote :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

is disgusting. The Mythbuster fellas measured it and GAG ME WITH A FECAL CONTAMINATED TOOTHBRUSH!

Luckily in this house, our toilet is seperate from the bathing room. So the toothbrushes aren't anywhere near the toilet.

But once I learned the fecal factoid, those toothbrushes went under lock and key and the toilet lid IS ALWAYS DOWN when flushing.

Plus, fecal coliform bacteria can often be found on kitchen sponges and dishcloths. Our sponges go into the dishwasher daily.

They were nowhere near the bathroom, iirc.

facilities.

fixtures, there's a chance it'll take the finish off the chrome or whatever. I've worn out a fixture or two cleaning them up. I guess I'll go back to diluted (9parts to 1 part) bleach. That should do it.

I'm glad you found the culprit and your wife is better.

and maybe a blowtorch to get those really tough germs. (Remember the SNL motel bathroom cleaning skit?)

It's the littlest things that can cause the biggest problems.

I am impressed that her physician had her problem investigated so thoroughly. That's awesome. Thanks for the heads up :hi:

I spent a lot of time picking the best faucet for cleaning. It's a single handle model and the only nook or cranny is the one faucet handle.

By the way, TV shows I've seen on the subject of germs show that kitchens have even more germs than bathrooms, because of the habit people have of re-using one dishcloth to clean everything and not using a clean one each time.

time to go back to the lounge.

aureas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcus_aureas