A Royal Flush
When you flush a toilet, does all of it go down the drain or does some of it escape into the air? Bill was asked to test this because of the theory posed around a decade ago that you should always put the toilet seat down because if you don’t, part of what’s in there comes flying out of the toilet and clings to walls, and it can even fly across the room to contaminate the toothbrush.
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Is this really a problem? Let’s see. Bill went over to the biology department at the University of Utah and linked up with Professor Colin Dale. Dale, along with graduate student Adam Clayton, set up an experiment to find out if these bacteria could travel after the lavatory was flushed. They first grouped billions of E.coli bacteria in a flask. To collect whatever bacteria spread after flushing, Dale and Clayton placed Petri dishes around the toilet; on the seat, on the wall, on the bowl and on the floor.
In the men’s room, being careful that no-one else was using this lavatory, Clayton dumped the flask of bacteria into the water of the toilet. They let it sit for a few minutes and then, with the seat in the raised position, flushed.
Dale and Clayton decided to let the bathroom sit empty and quiet for five minutes and then they collected the petri dishes and placed them in an incubator to allow whatever fell into the Petri dishes to grow for 24 hours.
Twenty four hours later, what were the findings? Each Petri dish had a couple of bacteria cultures growing, but that’s what you would expect, just from the air. “I am 99.999 per cent sure that nothing from the flush was delivered to a plate,” said Dale. “So I guess we’ve debunked that myth.”
So should you always close both lids before you flush the toilet? Well, that experiment from a decade ago says maybe you should think about it, but our experiment shows, don’t worry about it, the bacteria goes down the drain.
