Poland: 'We want to live in a country that doesn't stink'
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."
Dry hands are 1,000 times safer than damp hands; or so say PR types
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?
The rise of the space toilet
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.
Space toilet is plugged
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.
flushable wipes might not be so flushable
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
Raleigh News and Observer 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
News and Observer,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.
Food safety on the road: Bite Me '09 tour
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.
Memories of Guelph: Don't kiss toilets
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.
What Brits do on the toilet
I remember when Chapman got a blackberry, the first in our little group to get one. He sent me an e-mail, and then another shortly thereafter:
.jpg)
“I wrote and sent that e-mail while sitting on the toilet.”
Today, it’s almost impossible to enter a public restroom without wondering who’s talking – it’s someone sitting on the toilet with verbal diarrhea into their cell phone.
So in honor of World Toilet Day, a survey of more than 2,000 people commissioned by charity Tearfund found that reading, chatting and texting are among the favourite activities of Britons on the toilet.
The study suggests more than 14 million people in the UK read newspapers, books and magazines on the loo.
The poll points to eight million people talking - either on the phone or to family - and one in five send texts.
The study also suggested people mostly thought about food while on the toilet, and that men were more likely to look around for a distraction than women.
Something I can get behind ... or on: World Toilet Day
The World Toilet Organization, the other WTO, has proclaimed Nov. 19, 2008, World Toilet Day.
That’s because 2.6 billion people, or 4-out-of-10, have no access to a toilet.
CNN reports that Singaporean social-entrepreneur Jack Sim founded the non-profit World Toilet Organization in 2001, as a support network for all existing organizations. The group meets once a year to network, discuss sanitation issues and work together toward "eliminating the toilet taboo and delivering sustainable sanitation."
Goal number one: Making sanitation speakable. "What we don't discuss, we can't improve," insists Sim.
I’m all for that. With only a couple of weeks left till the increasingly uncomfortable Amy delivers, my conversations are soon to be dominated by the color, consistency and frequency of our baby’s poop. Oh, and the explosivity of it all.
.jpeg)
Although as guest barfblogger Michelle of New Jersey points out, shouldn’t World Toilet Day come before Global Handwashing Day, which was Oct. 15, 2008?
Michele Samarya-Timm, guest barfblogger: Seattle has officially washed its hands of the five self-cleaning toilets
Oh, the news stories that catch the eye of one immersed in public health.
While we spend most of our time on this blog discussing issues that have to do with what comes after toilet use (handwashing, hopefully), the toilet facilities themselves occasionally come into the spotlight ….
The Seattle Times recently reported that Seattle has officially “washed its hands” of their self-cleaning public toilets. Which leaves visitors to that city without a convenient place to, uh, relieve themselves – as well as leaving them without a convenient place to wash their hands. 
Too bad Seattle did not work toward finding a way to deal with any problems these public toilets may have caused. Finland found they could reduce/eliminate illicit behavior in their roadside toilets by allowing one to unlock the door by text messaging with a mobile phone. The toilets have been secured, and a sign outside explains that the user just sends the word "open" (in Finish) to a short code and the door will be unlocked remotely. The company managing the service will keep a short-term record of all users’ phone numbers, simply so that if the toilet is then damaged by criminals, they can be traced by the police.
And across the globe, even now, more than 600 cities have automatic public toilets -- Singapore alone has 750, London 678, and Athens 500. And there are traditional facilities across the globe as well.
So what’s a tourist in Seattle – or elsewhere -- to do? Do you ask a stranger for directions? Advocate for conveniently located facilities? Or map out toilet and handsink locations before you ever leave the comfort of home? How about all three:
• Visiting England? The Public Toilets-Gut Trust recently began a campaign, Can’t Wait, Won’t Wait: Public Toilet provision in the UK to educate stakeholders on need to retain or provide adequate public toilets:
• How about those travels down under? Australia’s National Continence Management Strategy Project readily publishes locations of rest rooms on their searchable public toilet map: www.toiletmap.gov.au
• Traveling wherever the world will take you? The Bathroom Diaries www.thebathroomdiaries.com lists, describes and rates toilet facilities in cities throughout the world. Whether you stay close to home or are planning a trip, say, to China, Turkey or Florida, you can print out a list of public facilities in the cities you plan to visit. One can also enter search terms such as “soap” “changing table” or “don’t eat poop.”
• Do you ever find yourself desperately looking for a clean toilet in the city? MizPee purports to find the closest, cleanest toilets in your area and sends the information to your cell phone. One can add and review rest rooms, and check their toilet paper ratings.
• Then there’s Diaroggle which helps one locate public toilets from a mobile phone. In addition to location, the website includes user ratings for cleanliness, the rules of gaining entrance, and occasionally even pictures snapped by users to show how good or bad the porcelain sanctuary is. According to the site, this is “ for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience.”
In Seattle or elsewhere, we all can map our comfort breaks along with our travel itineraries. What a wonderful resource for a discerning on-the-go handwasher.
--
Michéle Samarya-Timm is a Health Educator for the Franklin Township Health Department in New Jersey.
Bathroom horrors in the friendly skies
And how to go under the door if you don’t have a quarter?
A frequent flying food safety friend and barfblog reader sends along her latest observations from the friendly skies:• No offense against your species, but about 90 per cent of the men did not shut the door upon exit; reached over and closed it a couple times, but became hopeless over time.
• Repeatedly, folks of both species came out with toilet paper on their shoes that scraped off on the carpet next to my seat or just in front/behind it. The stewardess did discrete rounds and picked the paper scraps up in a swift arc from the floor to a plastic bag attached (also discretely) next to the lavatory door. Handwashing didn't appear to be part of the toilet paper pick-up protocol - so far as I could tell.
• People are way bigger slobs and poop a lot more on planes than I ever imagined, pew.
Seattle's automated toilets plagued by filth, drugs
.jpg)
In the end, the restrooms, installed in early 2004, had become so filthy, so overrun with drug abusers and prostitutes, that although use was free of charge, even some of the city’s most destitute people refused to step inside them.The dismal outcome coincides with plans by New York, Los Angeles and Boston, among other cities, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for expansion this fall in their installation of automated toilets — stand-alone structures with metal doors that open at the press of a button and stay closed for up to 20 minutes. The units clean themselves after each use, disinfecting the seats and power-washing the floors.
Going number 2 -- downtown
Mary Ann Racin, founder of thebathroomdiaries.com, a website that rates more than 12,000 public restrooms worldwide, said Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and San Antonio are some of the cities that have automated public toilets (APTs), with most in the past five years.Atlanta was the most recent to add them, in March, paying $300,000 for each of the five units and signing a two-year maintenance agreement for $1.5 million.
With the push of a button, and the drop of a quarter depending on the city, the automated door opens, and a sanitized toilet awaits. After the user is finished, the system cleans the toilet and is ready for the next user.
Not all cities are happy: Seattle has moved away from its program after a report prepared by the City Council said the APTs became a haven for drug use, drug deals and prostitution.
Don Schaffner, guest barfblogger: Perhaps it will help keep poop out of food?
I've always found it interesting when disparate objects or ideas come together.
One such collision was the subject of an earlier barfblog contribution when I wrote about a norovirus at a boy scout camp, integrating my interest in food safety and the the volunteer work I do with the boy scouts.
It also happened twice this week. The first example has nothing to do with food safety, but hey, if Doug can write about Blacky the donkey, all's fair. I just can't resist plugging this amazing YouTube video, where the band Phish covers the Lou Reed classic "Sweet Jane". Hippy culture meets New York grit. Cool stuff.
Anyway, on with the food safety story, sort of. I need to explain: I'm a productivity pr0n addict. For more on this addiction look here. I think that one of the most entertaining and useful productivity gurus out there is Merlin Mann (yes, that's his real name), the editor and founder of productivity website 43Folders.com. Anyway, when Merlin is not blogging about productivity, talking at The Google or Macworld, he's scouring the interweb looking for cool stuff.
And... now we get to the point of this article... and the second collision, where productivity guru meets food safety: Bottom Toilet Tissue Aid Self-wipe Cleaning: Health & Personal Care. As Merlin quips, "Why is all the cool stuff for "disabled" people? I could totally use this". And maybe he right. This might be something we could all use, and as Amazon notes "After use the tissue is discarded by pressing an easy-to-use release button on the end of the handle.
This might be the solution to fecal cross contamination, and allow us all to avoid what O. Pete Snyder calls "toilet paper slips", helping us all to eat less poop.
--
Don Schaffner is an Extension Specialist in Food Science at Rutgers University, the newly appointed director of the Center for Advanced Food Technology, and a self-confessed productivity pr0n addict.
Should sinks be beside toilets or next door?
Sally Bloomfield, honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has similar wonderings about bathroom layout and has criticized Norwegian Cruise Lines for ditching cabin bathrooms in favor of separate basin and toilet cubicles.“Norovirus spreads by person-to-person contact and through contact with surfaces that have been touched by people carrying the bug. Everyone should wash their hands as soon as they have been to the toilet and the toilet area should be designed to encourage that. That means putting the sink by the toilet.”
A spokesman for NCL said,
“Having the basin outside the commode gives guests more space within the bathroom and allows guests the ability for one to shower while the other is using the sink.”
Which is why apartments like the one we stayed at in Paris are designed such, but is it best to control disease transmission?
The best places to poop in Canada
The paper lost thousands of dollars in advertising from disgruntled bar owners.We found new advertisers, and the idea is still going strong.
powderroom.ca has launched a national, interactive map that allows Canadians to chart their favourite restrooms across the country, evaluating each one on a five-star system that reflects overall accessibility, cleanliness, lineups, location and decor.
Canada.com reports that although the online map is part of a campaign to promote awareness of overactive bladder, a condition affecting 12 to 18 per cent of Canadians, it's likely to benefit anyone planning a road trip - especially those accompanied by kids.
A similar effort already has proven successful in Australia where, since 2001, the government-funded National Toilet Map has given folks the loo lowdown on roughly 14,000 private and public bathrooms in the area.
Every bathroom should have running water, soap and toilet paper. If it doesn't, let someone in charge know.
Dude, wash your hands.
'Mr. Toilet' and his latest creation
Today's the, The USA Today, reports that in South Korea, Sim Jae-duck has earned the moniker "Mr. Toilet" for his work in beautifying public restrooms.
Now, though, he's taken his work to a whole new level.
Jae-duck is building a toilet-shaped house (complete with a luxury lavatory) just in time for the World Toilet Association conference this month in Seoul, South Korea.
