Well, it's a bold hypothesis that a household washing machine should sterilise clothes. It's a machine to reduce the load of microorganisms to a manageable level and to remove dirt, fat, and odours.
I don't get how the authors arrive at their hypothesis. Before washing machines, people washed clothes with their hands. Cooking them in a pot was only viable with very robust fabrics made from cotton/hemp/flax. I seriously doubt that the microbial load would have been lower before the invention of washing machines. And with older washing machines, using those nasty aggressive washing agents: Maybe, but your clothes would not last that long (there's this difference between old US-style washing machines that just stir and don't heat and EU washing machines that have a drum that turns and always heat the water).
And then, "potential pathogens" in the biofilm in the machine. Ah, well. My skin and mouth are also full of potential pathogens. I don't know what this study is trying to show. Washing machines are not sterile, I guess.
That hospitals should clean their employee's uniforms to prevent the spread of antibacteria resistant strains in a hospital setting, in the UK and elsewhere.
Washing on cold or warm, gentle cycle, and then either tumble drying on low or hang drying will greatly extend the life of your clothes. Washing on hot with a more vigorous cycle and then drying on hot not only risks shrinkage in the short term but will cause your clothes to wear out and fall apart much faster.
In Europe most people don't use cloth dryiers. You just hang the clothes on lines (usually on your balcony or in your bathroom if you live in a flat, or in your backyard if you live in a detached home). Clothes are dry the next day anyway, what's the rush?
I wonder if the UV from sun vs the longer time to dry results in less bacteria overall.
This is how it was in the US too growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, everyone had a clothes line in their yard. But by the late 1980s it seemed everyone started getting clothes dryers.
Solar UV helps a little, but UVC (180-280 nm) is necessary to thoroughly kill many bacteria and viruses (including COVID) and UVC doesn't reach the Earth because the atmosphere absorbs it.
Are people perplexed by the prevalence of bacteria in residential washing machines? That’s what the smell is when clothes are left wet for too long or the door is left open, preventing drying.
Though I wonder what effect a standard load with bleach would have when used in a load or if that’s simply what the article refers to as their disinfectant test.
I guess a lot of people don't leave the door open so the machine can dry between loads. None of my washing machines have had issue with smell but I also run a 90 degree boil wash once a month to clean things out.
It's almost as though people forget these are machines that require maintenance and cleaning.
My Maytag Neptune retains so much water from the previous load, that leaving it open is absolutely ineffective. It molds after 3-4 days no matter what. I can spin the drum after leaving it open for 2 weeks, and it still makes a pronounced sloshing noise, there's still a ton of water left in there.
I suspect this was meant to reduce the fill water used in the subsequent load, but that's only sensible if you're doing laundry every day or two. If you go longer between washing sessions, it's just making clothes stinky. Perhaps it's backwash from water left in the discharge hose after the pump shuts off?
So for years, I just run the first cycle empty, hot, with a bunch of bleach. It wastes more water than this stupid measure could ever possibly save, but it keeps my clothes from being stinky.
That machine was just damaged in a flood so I'm shopping for a replacement as I write this, and I cannot for the life of me find this information in any reviews. Does it drain fully? How much water is left behind?
A friend pointed out that some machines have a little pigtail hose out the back with a manual drain valve on it, presumably meant to completely empty the machine before transport. Their theory is that I could put a solenoid valve on this and install my own tiny pump to finish draining the machine after a session, possibly a peristaltic pump which wouldn't be susceptible to backflow from the lift. But again, I can't find information in the reviews about whether any given new machine I might buy, has this little drain pigtail.
I too am very annoyed by the "save water" trend in appliances that then produce inferior results. Yes, I know there are parts of the world where this is a concern, but I'm in the great lakes region on a well that produces 20GPM of water and I do not have this concern. Water for me is copious and basically free and when I'm done with it it goes into my septic to reabsorb into the water table.
We switched from a front loading washer back to a top-loading one hoping we'd get results similar to the top-loading washers from our youth. But nope. Funky smells, poor distribution of detergent, clothes that don't fully clean.
We had bad smell with just drying all reachable areas and leaving open the door, cleaning everything that is easy disassembled (tubes, water outlet area of the pump) from tine to time.
2 months ago we discovered the boil wash. With some detergent containing bleach it stopped the smell, even if we leave the machine closed during the day.
I our case it's not we have forgotten but never discovered this function.
For almost 100% of the history of washing textiles, sterilization was never even remotely a goal. In most cases, sterilization is undesirable and would likely contribute to the growing proportion of autoimmune deficiencies.
Do you also sterilize your kitchenware? Well, given the population bias of HN, probably some of you do, but the vast majority of humankind do not. If you don't sterilize things you put into your mouth, I don't see why you'd expect this for clothes.
So it is amazingly unsurprising that consumer washing machines don't sterilize clothes. Just as you need to take extra care to sterilize kitchenware when you're doing anything fermenty, hospitals shouldn't have been relying on home washing machines.
Hospitals, for the most part, are not sterile. Some parts of them are, like operating rooms, but the vast majority of the space is not and is not expected to be.
Dishwashers get _quite_ hot for a long period of time, and there's relatively harsh chemicals in there too. Does anything realistically survive that anyway?
Also no need to, bacteri and virus are a normal thing. The problem is, if too many of the wrong type get in your system. So reducing them in general (and also normal washing machines do that) is mostly sufficient.
(And dishwashers indeed kill microscopic life with heat and chemicals, but that is a side effect of cleaning)
With the prevalence of vanity scrubs from figs now I doubt most nurses and doctors I’ve seen recently are throwing their fancy scrubs into the communal wash.
60C held for 15+ minutes should be enough for sterilization. The research paper says they washed at 60C but that the quick cycle was especially poor at sterilization. Other than that I didn’t read the paper closer to see if it was a temperature control problem or not enough time at 60C or something else.
It depends on what you're trying to do. Some bacteria and viruses will survive 60 degrees. There's a reason running a very hot wash (>60C) can quickly get rid of weird smells inside of a washing machine occasionally.
Extra annoying: enabling eco mode (the one that is tested when generating the power usage stats on the sticker for these machines) on some machines will make it run "60 degree equivalent", which usually means "longer but at a lower temperature", which obviously doesn't work for sterilization at all.
Of course, this is rarely an issue for consumers who don't need to sterilize their clothes (except when a family member is sick with some specific illness maybe?). But, for hospital workers, which this paper is about, that's a different story.
The study says none of the machines reached 60C, and 2 out of 6 only heated up for 5-13 minutes. No doubt this is so manufacturers can get the Grade A "energy rating" mandated under EU/UK regulation. (It's even worse for "Eco 60" - that only heats up to about 30C).
I think that they had at least one faulty machine. The 'full cycle' failed on only two machines, 'E' and 'G'; 'E' had an unusually low temperature of about 20c - so probably had a failed heater? (It was 9 years old) 'G' seems to have had the shortest hold time (about 5mins) - so again that might explain it; but why is it so short? Both E and G were Indesits; perhaps they need to build their machines to detect failures.
Still, maybe a failed machine is still a valid test - how many hospital staffs machines are unknowingly faulty?
A quick fix would be to swab staffs clean clothes every so often (or put a test patch in with their washes?) and check it.
Since less water would increase the detergent concentration, I was wondering if the opposite was the case. My family's old washer filled up the entire tub with water, so any detergent (and any pathogen, to be fair) would be quite diluted.
Short cycle length certainly makes sense to be correlated with pathogens. The lousy LG "TurboWash" only takes 28 minutes to do a full load of laundry but certainly doesn't get very much clean in that time.
I have to admit it was surprising that textiles have been identified as the source of hospital acquired infections. You'd think that even if the laundering didn't eliminate pathogens, it would greatly reduce them and make any clusters more diffuse.
The ones in this study are all relatively new front-loaders. I would've liked to see some much older and top-loader machines in there too, along with "traditional" TSP-based detergent.
HOA rules and local ordinances are written by the most petty people who have the least other stuff going on and the strongest desire to use threat of violence to control other people.
With selection bias like that it's not surprising what you get.
I live in the UK and I've never heard of that - do you have any examples? The one thing I could find is leasehold covenants prohitibing it, but that's almost always moot and ridiculously difficult to enforce.
The thing that always surprises me about HOAs is that a country boldly calling itself "land of the free" is the one where people are willingly entering agreements telling them what they can or cannot do with their washing, how they can park their vehicle on their property, or how much and how often they can cut their own grass in their own garden. I don't see how these two are mutually compatible, I always expect a more boisterous "don't tell me what to do" attitude from Americans but it looks like a lot of them do in fact enjoy being told what to do(or they put up with it, at least).
Obviously other countries have various regulations around this stuff too, but it's just not as aggressive and not as wide spread as HOAs are in the States.
This is fair - no it won't work in every situation, just didn't see good old air and sunshine mentioned in the thread anywhere.
Surely the only scalable solution in a medical context is to get workers to change out of uniform at work and hand over to industrial laundry service, everything else relies on procedure outside the work environment which not everyone is going to do reliably and is difficult to supervise / QC.
? You dont cook the cloths in a auto-clave- you just move it in warm water with soap- and the soap dissolves the fatty hull of the pathogens. Of course you can still detect them- the dna is still there floating around.
Yes. When I started working in hospitals it wasn't the case. We had an onsite laundry facility and tailor. You would obtain your uniform from the tailors, tailor made to fit, they would also repair any damaged uniform.
You would place worn uniform in a bag labeled with your name and drop if off at the laundry to collect the next day.
Then privatisation came, first they shut down the tailors and you were expected to both purchase your uniform and pay for alterations and repairs (costs you could claim back as a tax rebate if you knew how, how not being advertised.) Then they privatised the laundry, shutting down the one on site and shifting everything to a central location, by everything I mean just the bedding, you were now expected to wash your uniform at home.
The only exception I am aware of is Surgical scrubs, those were provided in sterile wraps and were to be returned to a certain laundry bin for cleaning.
You're right about the food industry, when I worked in kitchens that days uniform was provided, freshly cleaned and returned for laundering at the end of my shift.
I don't know about today, but when I worked in microbiology in the 70s & 80s all our lab coats and similar clothing were washed in central facilities - in most hospitals, the central laundry was (and still is) one of the biggest facilities in the hospital.
restaurants have laundry service for kitchen pants, jackets, aprons, right along with all the towels, napkins, and tablecloths. They aren't the employees own clothes they got from walmart, they are provided by the laundry service like the towels.
I have worked at sit down dining and fast food, and neither places did my laundry for me. Aprons, sure, but not the rest of the clothes. The clothes which I had to buy in the first place.
In most of the world, most healthcare workers launder their own scrubs and uniforms at home. I used to have a specific washing machine for it because I hated putting forgets
uniforms with patient bodily fluids in my normal washing machine.
Things like scrubs exchange machines and central laundries washing staff gear is rare even in hospitals in the developed world.
After watching The Pitt, they have a mini-plot line around the scrubs exchange machine like it's a normal thing. It was the first I had ever seen one, but I don't work in the medical industry. It felt like something used just to allow for the script to work.
After seeing that machine, the only way I could make sense of that machine being used is a corrupt hospital exec buying it from their cousin’s company or something.
They're probably more common in large hospital systems, especially in the OR or ER departments where scrubs are more likely to get contaminated. And where lawyers are afraid of liability.
First, I neither have an eidetic memory or links to the patents nor lawsuit. However....
I remember finding a lawsuit, if I remember correctly, between Samsung and a certain municipality of an unremembered state.
The patent involved a lining within surfaces of the washing and drying systems for hospitals which impart silver particles. The marketing part suggested it would spare x amount of bleach and have equal or greater efficacy.
The municipal water waste management objected based on the breakdown phase of the sewage relying on bacteria. The silver, they surmised, would obviously hinder this process and so on.
Then, as a side note, you have products from waste management called eg Sludge, which is used as fertilizer. Supposedly it is forbidden on vegetable crops, but I once interviewed a cattle rancher who said his subsidies were dependent on his acceptance and use of Sludge.
Further aside, the real problem here is the 'forever chemicals' that accompany these products. It tends to permanently compromise the land it's used on.
I remember the rancher telling me he's seen his cows chewing on condoms.
Hard to know what to make of this when the types of detergent are not disclosed. I recall in 2022, Oxyclean was recommended for destroying MPOX virions.
For what it's worth the supplemental methods file has this to say about the detergents selected
> Two commonly used UK washing detergents were selected for the assay: a non-biological liquid detergent (15-30%:Anionic surfactants; 5-15%:nonionic surfactants; <5%:phosphonate, perfume, soap, optical brighteners, methylisothiazolinone, octylisothiazolinone) and a non-biological powder detergent (5-15%: oxygen-based bleaching agents, anionic surfactants; <5%: nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, soap, perfume, phosphonates, optical brighteners, zeolites)
This doesn't really mean anything to me, but maybe it means something to you?
In some sense I think the real takeaway from the study is "we shouldn't be having healthcare workers wash their own patient/pathogen facing uniforms", and that takeaway seems robust against the hypothesis that only some detergents would solve the problem. As a population we can be sure that some of the healthcare workers are going to use the detergents that don't solve the problem.
> But your quoted passage describes two non-biological detergents. So did they use a biological detergent or not?
It depends on what experiment in the paper you are looking at.
The supplemental section is addressing the "Laundry detergent tolerance induction assay" (a heading you can ctrl-f for) where they only used the non-biological detergent, "as biological detergent contains enzymes and other potentially disruptive components that may influence the assay".
If you go to the results section you will see results for both the biological and non-biological detergent under "Decontamination efficacy of domestic laundry machines" and so on. I didn't see anything specifying what biological detergents were used.
Well, it's a bold hypothesis that a household washing machine should sterilise clothes. It's a machine to reduce the load of microorganisms to a manageable level and to remove dirt, fat, and odours. I don't get how the authors arrive at their hypothesis. Before washing machines, people washed clothes with their hands. Cooking them in a pot was only viable with very robust fabrics made from cotton/hemp/flax. I seriously doubt that the microbial load would have been lower before the invention of washing machines. And with older washing machines, using those nasty aggressive washing agents: Maybe, but your clothes would not last that long (there's this difference between old US-style washing machines that just stir and don't heat and EU washing machines that have a drum that turns and always heat the water).
And then, "potential pathogens" in the biofilm in the machine. Ah, well. My skin and mouth are also full of potential pathogens. I don't know what this study is trying to show. Washing machines are not sterile, I guess.
> I don't know what this study is trying to show.
That hospitals should clean their employee's uniforms to prevent the spread of antibacteria resistant strains in a hospital setting, in the UK and elsewhere.
> Well, it's a bold hypothesis that a household washing machine should sterilise clothes.
That's on the manufacturers for adding "sanitize" cycles: https://cdn.avbportal.com/magento-media/GrandBlog/mhw8630hc%...
>your clothes would not last that long
Washing on cold or warm, gentle cycle, and then either tumble drying on low or hang drying will greatly extend the life of your clothes. Washing on hot with a more vigorous cycle and then drying on hot not only risks shrinkage in the short term but will cause your clothes to wear out and fall apart much faster.
In Europe most people don't use cloth dryiers. You just hang the clothes on lines (usually on your balcony or in your bathroom if you live in a flat, or in your backyard if you live in a detached home). Clothes are dry the next day anyway, what's the rush?
I wonder if the UV from sun vs the longer time to dry results in less bacteria overall.
This is how it was in the US too growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, everyone had a clothes line in their yard. But by the late 1980s it seemed everyone started getting clothes dryers.
Solar UV helps a little, but UVC (180-280 nm) is necessary to thoroughly kill many bacteria and viruses (including COVID) and UVC doesn't reach the Earth because the atmosphere absorbs it.
> don't get how the authors arrive at their hypothesis
They didn't. The “health care workers who wash their uniforms at home" did.
Are people perplexed by the prevalence of bacteria in residential washing machines? That’s what the smell is when clothes are left wet for too long or the door is left open, preventing drying.
Though I wonder what effect a standard load with bleach would have when used in a load or if that’s simply what the article refers to as their disinfectant test.
I guess a lot of people don't leave the door open so the machine can dry between loads. None of my washing machines have had issue with smell but I also run a 90 degree boil wash once a month to clean things out.
It's almost as though people forget these are machines that require maintenance and cleaning.
My Maytag Neptune retains so much water from the previous load, that leaving it open is absolutely ineffective. It molds after 3-4 days no matter what. I can spin the drum after leaving it open for 2 weeks, and it still makes a pronounced sloshing noise, there's still a ton of water left in there.
I suspect this was meant to reduce the fill water used in the subsequent load, but that's only sensible if you're doing laundry every day or two. If you go longer between washing sessions, it's just making clothes stinky. Perhaps it's backwash from water left in the discharge hose after the pump shuts off?
So for years, I just run the first cycle empty, hot, with a bunch of bleach. It wastes more water than this stupid measure could ever possibly save, but it keeps my clothes from being stinky.
That machine was just damaged in a flood so I'm shopping for a replacement as I write this, and I cannot for the life of me find this information in any reviews. Does it drain fully? How much water is left behind?
A friend pointed out that some machines have a little pigtail hose out the back with a manual drain valve on it, presumably meant to completely empty the machine before transport. Their theory is that I could put a solenoid valve on this and install my own tiny pump to finish draining the machine after a session, possibly a peristaltic pump which wouldn't be susceptible to backflow from the lift. But again, I can't find information in the reviews about whether any given new machine I might buy, has this little drain pigtail.
I too am very annoyed by the "save water" trend in appliances that then produce inferior results. Yes, I know there are parts of the world where this is a concern, but I'm in the great lakes region on a well that produces 20GPM of water and I do not have this concern. Water for me is copious and basically free and when I'm done with it it goes into my septic to reabsorb into the water table.
We switched from a front loading washer back to a top-loading one hoping we'd get results similar to the top-loading washers from our youth. But nope. Funky smells, poor distribution of detergent, clothes that don't fully clean.
We had bad smell with just drying all reachable areas and leaving open the door, cleaning everything that is easy disassembled (tubes, water outlet area of the pump) from tine to time.
2 months ago we discovered the boil wash. With some detergent containing bleach it stopped the smell, even if we leave the machine closed during the day.
I our case it's not we have forgotten but never discovered this function.
For almost 100% of the history of washing textiles, sterilization was never even remotely a goal. In most cases, sterilization is undesirable and would likely contribute to the growing proportion of autoimmune deficiencies.
Do you also sterilize your kitchenware? Well, given the population bias of HN, probably some of you do, but the vast majority of humankind do not. If you don't sterilize things you put into your mouth, I don't see why you'd expect this for clothes.
So it is amazingly unsurprising that consumer washing machines don't sterilize clothes. Just as you need to take extra care to sterilize kitchenware when you're doing anything fermenty, hospitals shouldn't have been relying on home washing machines.
> it is amazingly unsurprising that consumer washing machines don't sterilize clothes
The article is about “health care workers who wash their uniforms at home.”
Hospitals, for the most part, are not sterile. Some parts of them are, like operating rooms, but the vast majority of the space is not and is not expected to be.
I sanitize my dishes by getting the things pathogens eat off. Then they sit in the cupboard overnight which is plenty of time for pathogens to die.
resteraunts that reuse dishes several times need a better plan but not my house.
Dishwashers get _quite_ hot for a long period of time, and there's relatively harsh chemicals in there too. Does anything realistically survive that anyway?
Some pathogens also survive hard radiation in space.
Even desinfection does not kill everything.
https://xkcd.com/1161/
Also no need to, bacteri and virus are a normal thing. The problem is, if too many of the wrong type get in your system. So reducing them in general (and also normal washing machines do that) is mostly sufficient.
(And dishwashers indeed kill microscopic life with heat and chemicals, but that is a side effect of cleaning)
With the prevalence of vanity scrubs from figs now I doubt most nurses and doctors I’ve seen recently are throwing their fancy scrubs into the communal wash.
Drying is far more destructive to pathogens. The "sanitize" option is on the dryer, not the washer.
On my dryer, it says "sanitize with regular fabric selected (and manual time set to maximum)".
60C held for 15+ minutes should be enough for sterilization. The research paper says they washed at 60C but that the quick cycle was especially poor at sterilization. Other than that I didn’t read the paper closer to see if it was a temperature control problem or not enough time at 60C or something else.
It depends on what you're trying to do. Some bacteria and viruses will survive 60 degrees. There's a reason running a very hot wash (>60C) can quickly get rid of weird smells inside of a washing machine occasionally.
Extra annoying: enabling eco mode (the one that is tested when generating the power usage stats on the sticker for these machines) on some machines will make it run "60 degree equivalent", which usually means "longer but at a lower temperature", which obviously doesn't work for sterilization at all.
Of course, this is rarely an issue for consumers who don't need to sterilize their clothes (except when a family member is sick with some specific illness maybe?). But, for hospital workers, which this paper is about, that's a different story.
> means "longer but at a lower temperature", which obviously doesn't work for sterilization at all
Lower temperatures (e.g. 30-40 degrees C) may even provide a better environment for bateria and/or viruses to grow.
The study says none of the machines reached 60C, and 2 out of 6 only heated up for 5-13 minutes. No doubt this is so manufacturers can get the Grade A "energy rating" mandated under EU/UK regulation. (It's even worse for "Eco 60" - that only heats up to about 30C).
I think that they had at least one faulty machine. The 'full cycle' failed on only two machines, 'E' and 'G'; 'E' had an unusually low temperature of about 20c - so probably had a failed heater? (It was 9 years old) 'G' seems to have had the shortest hold time (about 5mins) - so again that might explain it; but why is it so short? Both E and G were Indesits; perhaps they need to build their machines to detect failures.
Still, maybe a failed machine is still a valid test - how many hospital staffs machines are unknowingly faulty?
A quick fix would be to swab staffs clean clothes every so often (or put a test patch in with their washes?) and check it.
Not true. It depends on the pathogen.
A hot dry cycle will also help with this through desiccation but is more damaging to clothing. Should be fine for scrubs though.
I'll wager the ones that do the poorest job in removing pathogens are also the most power and water efficient. Trade-offs matter.
Since less water would increase the detergent concentration, I was wondering if the opposite was the case. My family's old washer filled up the entire tub with water, so any detergent (and any pathogen, to be fair) would be quite diluted.
Short cycle length certainly makes sense to be correlated with pathogens. The lousy LG "TurboWash" only takes 28 minutes to do a full load of laundry but certainly doesn't get very much clean in that time.
I have to admit it was surprising that textiles have been identified as the source of hospital acquired infections. You'd think that even if the laundering didn't eliminate pathogens, it would greatly reduce them and make any clusters more diffuse.
As I understand, it's been identified as one possible vector, not conclusively proven to be the only (or even largest) source.
I'm not familiar with the machines in this article, but you can look up the specs on them and see what you find.
Dna of a bacteria being in your machine surely doesn't mean there are live bacteria in the machine
The ones in this study are all relatively new front-loaders. I would've liked to see some much older and top-loader machines in there too, along with "traditional" TSP-based detergent.
That's why you dry your clothes on the washing line in the sun?
My HOA has decreed that clotheslines are prohibited.
But my state has also made it illegal to prohibit the use of clotheslines, a "right to dry" law.
It seems insane to me that a group of people who live near you can tell you how you dry your washing. From a UK perspective, HOA's seem mad.
HOA rules and local ordinances are written by the most petty people who have the least other stuff going on and the strongest desire to use threat of violence to control other people.
With selection bias like that it's not surprising what you get.
The UK also has homeowners associations and some of them ban outdoors clothes drying.
I'm surprised you didn't know that.
I live in the UK and I've never heard of that - do you have any examples? The one thing I could find is leasehold covenants prohitibing it, but that's almost always moot and ridiculously difficult to enforce.
> My HOA has decreed that clotheslines are prohibited.
Is there a reason for this? I'm struggling to come up with a sensible reason tbh...
Many HOA rules are purely esthetic. Which can vary from person to person.
The thing that always surprises me about HOAs is that a country boldly calling itself "land of the free" is the one where people are willingly entering agreements telling them what they can or cannot do with their washing, how they can park their vehicle on their property, or how much and how often they can cut their own grass in their own garden. I don't see how these two are mutually compatible, I always expect a more boisterous "don't tell me what to do" attitude from Americans but it looks like a lot of them do in fact enjoy being told what to do(or they put up with it, at least).
Obviously other countries have various regulations around this stuff too, but it's just not as aggressive and not as wide spread as HOAs are in the States.
So, are you drying your clothes outside?
Do a lot of apartments have access to a washing line? Also seems kinda slow?
This is fair - no it won't work in every situation, just didn't see good old air and sunshine mentioned in the thread anywhere.
Surely the only scalable solution in a medical context is to get workers to change out of uniform at work and hand over to industrial laundry service, everything else relies on procedure outside the work environment which not everyone is going to do reliably and is difficult to supervise / QC.
If 90% of workers are able to effectively sterilize their uniforms, will that solve 90% of the problem? Less? More?
Less because pathogens multiply again once they are back in the clinic.
slow? much faster than hanging them up to dry inside
It's slower than throwing them in a standard dryer, in both clock time and human effort time.
Depends a lot on the climate and season.
A lot of people I know would be constantly sick from allergies if they did this.
? You dont cook the cloths in a auto-clave- you just move it in warm water with soap- and the soap dissolves the fatty hull of the pathogens. Of course you can still detect them- the dna is still there floating around.
I like Dr Annie's laundry experiments:
https://www.dranniesexperiments.com/laundry-experiments
Well c difficile is an exception rather than the rule in terms of resilience
Do hospitals seriously allow people to launder their own uniforms?
That would never be allowed in the food industry.
Yes. When I started working in hospitals it wasn't the case. We had an onsite laundry facility and tailor. You would obtain your uniform from the tailors, tailor made to fit, they would also repair any damaged uniform.
You would place worn uniform in a bag labeled with your name and drop if off at the laundry to collect the next day.
Then privatisation came, first they shut down the tailors and you were expected to both purchase your uniform and pay for alterations and repairs (costs you could claim back as a tax rebate if you knew how, how not being advertised.) Then they privatised the laundry, shutting down the one on site and shifting everything to a central location, by everything I mean just the bedding, you were now expected to wash your uniform at home.
The only exception I am aware of is Surgical scrubs, those were provided in sterile wraps and were to be returned to a certain laundry bin for cleaning.
You're right about the food industry, when I worked in kitchens that days uniform was provided, freshly cleaned and returned for laundering at the end of my shift.
I don't know about today, but when I worked in microbiology in the 70s & 80s all our lab coats and similar clothing were washed in central facilities - in most hospitals, the central laundry was (and still is) one of the biggest facilities in the hospital.
Yes, but does the central laundry wash all nurse and med tech uniforms?
I would be genuinely surprised if the answer was "yes".
I'm willing to bet they launder bed linens almost exclusively. (And perhaps the food service uniforms) :-)
What do you mean? I've never heard of a restaurant that launders the employees' clothes for them.
restaurants have laundry service for kitchen pants, jackets, aprons, right along with all the towels, napkins, and tablecloths. They aren't the employees own clothes they got from walmart, they are provided by the laundry service like the towels.
Now I'm wondering where you live because this is definitely not a thing in the overwhelming majority of restaurants in the continental US.
A few different places in different cities in NY, Albany to Saratoga. Years ago though. Mostly just for the cooks not every dishwasher or waiter.
I have worked at sit down dining and fast food, and neither places did my laundry for me. Aprons, sure, but not the rest of the clothes. The clothes which I had to buy in the first place.
Every place I've worked that had a uniform for the waitstaff and bussers had laundry service for the uniform.
Probably helped it was a hotel ...
Lucky! Chilis had me washing my own aprons.
I would guess that most restaurants already have a laundry service for their tablecloths, etc… which would also take on the staff clothes?
But i never worked in a restaurant, just guessing here.
they probably do aprons and stuff like that but even places with uniforms it's super rare that the restaurant would handle laundering clothing.
"Allow" is a funny word.
"Require" might be more appropriate.
And I agree - the medical industry (specifically in the United States) cares more about profit than care. It's nuts.
In most of the world, most healthcare workers launder their own scrubs and uniforms at home. I used to have a specific washing machine for it because I hated putting forgets uniforms with patient bodily fluids in my normal washing machine.
Things like scrubs exchange machines and central laundries washing staff gear is rare even in hospitals in the developed world.
I was a bit surprised by that when I first learned that from a healthcare worker, but it's true.
I think this should be taken care of by the employer.
So should sane work hours and good pay but here we are.
After watching The Pitt, they have a mini-plot line around the scrubs exchange machine like it's a normal thing. It was the first I had ever seen one, but I don't work in the medical industry. It felt like something used just to allow for the script to work.
After seeing that machine, the only way I could make sense of that machine being used is a corrupt hospital exec buying it from their cousin’s company or something.
They're probably more common in large hospital systems, especially in the OR or ER departments where scrubs are more likely to get contaminated. And where lawyers are afraid of liability.
Nor firefighting PPE.
You need to add sanitizer to the wash cycle, not just detergent.
I agree… I add a capful of something like this if I think the wash needs it :
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/312705939
I thought that was the point of the dryer? The washing machine just removes dirt.
First, I neither have an eidetic memory or links to the patents nor lawsuit. However....
I remember finding a lawsuit, if I remember correctly, between Samsung and a certain municipality of an unremembered state.
The patent involved a lining within surfaces of the washing and drying systems for hospitals which impart silver particles. The marketing part suggested it would spare x amount of bleach and have equal or greater efficacy.
The municipal water waste management objected based on the breakdown phase of the sewage relying on bacteria. The silver, they surmised, would obviously hinder this process and so on.
Then, as a side note, you have products from waste management called eg Sludge, which is used as fertilizer. Supposedly it is forbidden on vegetable crops, but I once interviewed a cattle rancher who said his subsidies were dependent on his acceptance and use of Sludge.
Further aside, the real problem here is the 'forever chemicals' that accompany these products. It tends to permanently compromise the land it's used on.
I remember the rancher telling me he's seen his cows chewing on condoms.
Hard to know what to make of this when the types of detergent are not disclosed. I recall in 2022, Oxyclean was recommended for destroying MPOX virions.
For what it's worth the supplemental methods file has this to say about the detergents selected
> Two commonly used UK washing detergents were selected for the assay: a non-biological liquid detergent (15-30%:Anionic surfactants; 5-15%:nonionic surfactants; <5%:phosphonate, perfume, soap, optical brighteners, methylisothiazolinone, octylisothiazolinone) and a non-biological powder detergent (5-15%: oxygen-based bleaching agents, anionic surfactants; <5%: nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, soap, perfume, phosphonates, optical brighteners, zeolites)
This doesn't really mean anything to me, but maybe it means something to you?
In some sense I think the real takeaway from the study is "we shouldn't be having healthcare workers wash their own patient/pathogen facing uniforms", and that takeaway seems robust against the hypothesis that only some detergents would solve the problem. As a population we can be sure that some of the healthcare workers are going to use the detergents that don't solve the problem.
Interesting, the materials and methods says:
> Each wash cycle was performed with either biological (14g per kilogram of fabric) or non-biological detergents (20g per wash).
But your quoted passage describes two non-biological detergents. So did they use a biological detergent or not?
Anyway, the first one sounds like Persil liquid:
https://www.ocado.com/products/persil-laundry-washing-liquid...
> 15-30%: Anionic surfactants. 5-15%: Nonionic surfactants. <5%: Perfume, Phosphonates, Soap, Optical brighteners, Methylisothiazolinone, Octylisothiazolinone
And the second one sounds like Persil powder:
https://www.ocado.com/products/persil-fabric-cleaning-washin...
> 5-15%: Oxygen-based bleaching agents, Anionic surfactants. <5% Nonionic surfactants, Polycarboxylates, Soap, Perfume, Optical brighteners, Zeolites, Tetramethyl acetyloctahydronaphthelenes
Not quite the same, but similar. Both are perfectly normal brand-name household laundry detergents.
> But your quoted passage describes two non-biological detergents. So did they use a biological detergent or not?
It depends on what experiment in the paper you are looking at.
The supplemental section is addressing the "Laundry detergent tolerance induction assay" (a heading you can ctrl-f for) where they only used the non-biological detergent, "as biological detergent contains enzymes and other potentially disruptive components that may influence the assay".
If you go to the results section you will see results for both the biological and non-biological detergent under "Decontamination efficacy of domestic laundry machines" and so on. I didn't see anything specifying what biological detergents were used.
The second one sounds similar to oxyclean.
Maybe use a long cycle for the washer.