How often do you wash your towel? Some people wash once a week, while some, once a year.
The towel is a fertile breeding ground for millions of microbes, especially those found on human skin and on the gut.
No wonder the towel is one of the objects that facilitate fecal-oral contamination (literally connecting the two ends of the gut).
Worse still, most people keep towels in the bathroom (near the toilet). Every flush of the toilet sends mist with millions of microbes, ranging from H.pylori, salmonella and other deadly bacteria and viruses.
When you wash your hands ready for a meal, and dry them with your body towel, there's high chance you are directly ingesting your fecal matter, or, if in a shared lavatory, someone else's faeces.
Unless cleaned well, viruses such as human papillomavirus (causes warts, anal cancer and cervical cancer) can be transmitted when towels are shared with infected individuals.
So, what to do?
1. Launder towels once a week.
2. Use hot water and detergents like jik to wash towels.
3. Dry towels in the sun. The sun is the most effective agent in killing bacteria and viruses.
4. Use body towels only for that purpose. Don't use them to dry hands before eating.
5. You can have a two-coloured towel. One side is for drying the upper body up to the umbilicus, and the next for the body below the umbilicus. You may have heard the cliche', 'be kind to your rowel because the part that cleans the mouth today may clean the nethers tomorrow?' You can mitigate that.
6. Don't keep your towel near the toilet. Otherwise it becomes the sponge for bacteria, fungi and viruses thrown into mist whenever the toilet is flushed.
Here's to information. Information is power.
Comments