Do toilet seat covers really protect us from anything?
Most diseases, in order to spread, have to get inside the body. When you sit on a toilet seat, your touching it with your skin, whose whole purpose is to keep you in and everything else out. It’s pretty good at that job, too. Even if a toilet seat is covered in filth (which, sadly, it often is), it can’t actually get into your body. You could get it on your hands, which then convey it to your mouth, but that applies to everything you touch in the bathroom. So wash your hands when you use the bathroom. (If nothing else, just because you happen to be where a sink is.) You can’t even get herpes from a toilet seat; the virus is just too fragile. There have been exactly zero reported cases of toilet-seat-mediated herpes transmission. There are a very few rare skin diseases that could be transmitted, but that’s just theoretical; I’m not aware of a single case of it actually happening. Other people’s urine is kind of gross, but it’s also usually sterile. Even when it’s not (such as a bladder
Though it may make you go “ick”, there is very little, in the way of germs that are going to affect you from a toilet seat. So long as there isn’t something clearly sitting there, the benefits of the seat cover are purely mental. Penn & Teller did a story on this on their Showtime series, Bullsh!t. Here’s the link to the episode http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/prevepisodes.do?episodeid=s2/safe. Here are links to the episode on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kCSC_0SUwE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy6NZ91vrss&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_46RaGTpP0&feature=related If the links don’t work, do a search for “Penn & Teller” and “
I think that perhaps they can protect you from sitting in a “wet spot” or getting other traces of other people on you (eww), but I don’t know if I’d want to believe that a flimsy piece of tissue paper could protect me from something nasty like crabs, or some disease. Most germs don’t live too long on a plastic toilet seat, but some can – and if it’s a busy restroom, sometimes the seat is only empty for a few seconds. Best bet – use 2 or 3 and then hover anyway.
The paper liners we put over public toilets can help protect us.. there are some bacteria out there which may lay dormant on a hard plastic surface for many hours.. It assumes that there is no standing liquid on the seat – if so, that has to be cleaned off first. I usually just wipe off the toilet seat, and sometimes (rarely) even wash it, since the paper gets in the way of finishing up the job. Women probably don’t have the issues of the ($%^#$) guys who don’t raise the lid in public restrooms, but usually the toilet seat looks pretty clean, and just a wipe is at least psychologically helpful. Happy Holidays!
