Happy Global Handwashing Day! Don’t laugh. Handwashing is serious business. So serious, the all-powerful Centers for Disease Control has a five-step guide to how to do it properly. Handwashing is the third part of the trinity of health and hygiene, along with good sanitation and clean water. If you have all of those things, you cut your risk of diarrhoea, disease and death by about 80%. Hence the Global Handwashing Day. Actually, although I am of course in favour of more and better handwashing - and now never forget the wrists or fingernails - I suspect the UN is promoting a Global Handwashing Day to promote the cause of sanitation because the world wouldn’t stomach a Global Have A Decent Latrine Day but never mind. Sanitation activists take any publicity they can get because it doesn’t come along very often.
The Global Handwashing Day site is very developing country focused, which makes sense, as the children dying every fifteen seconds from diarrhoea live in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and a host of other poor countries. But lest we feel superior, consider this research from the wonderful hygiene team at the London School of Hygiene, which swabbed 409 commuters (as you could gather from the great BBC headline “fecal bacteria joins the commute”). They found that one in four people had faecal bugs on their hands. (And, shamefully, as I’m a northerner, the further north they swabbed, the more filthy hands they found.). This doesn’t surprise me, for two reasons. First, the valiant research of Dr. J. A. Cameron, an Oxfordshire doctor, who in 1964 surveyed the underpants of 940 men from his county, and found faecal contamination in nearly all of them ranging from “frank massive faeces” to “wasp-coloured stains.” The other reason is simple common sense. Toilet paper does not clean. How can it? We wouldn’t rub ourselves with a towel and assume we were clean. A towel would never replace a shower. The toilet paper world is actually using the least effective hygiene to clean the dirtiest part of the body.
I’m often asked how my own behaviour has changed since I’ve done the book. Three things mainly: I always put the toilet seat lid down now that I’ve understood that the flush sprays tiny particles of whatever is in the bowl around the room. I wash my hands better. And I find toilet paper rather gross and inadequate. That’s why I intend to install bidets in my new house, and it’s why I intend to buy, now that I am in the US, a country that sells them, a TOTO travel washlet. That’s a practical but expensive solution to the grave shortcomings of toilet paper. American-born Muslims have better ones. In an exhibit called Lota Stories, they contributed their experiences of trying to wash themselves - a “lota” is a cup used to hold water for cleansing in the anal-washing world - in a paper culture. One contributor had some good advice for subterfuge. When you fill a cup of water at the sink, a beige or black cup will draw less attention. In a shared house, keep a plant in the bathroom to explain away the watering can.
Like the person who wrote that, I am flummoxed by the toilet paper world’s hostility to the concept of washing. 90% of French houses used to have a bidet and now it’s about 10%. A French friend who has bought an apartment which had a bidet asked me very seriously what the point of it was, and then removed it, because she was unconvinced. In the US, TOTO’s attempts to promote bottom-washing - with an expensive “Clean is Happy” campaign - have so far not convinced the vast majority of Americans. It’s weird. But I know one thing: I will henceforth touch as few things on buses and trains as possible.
I think you should start importing the washlets.
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if this whole book-writing charade of yours was just some cunning pre-publicity for the launch of your new UK bumwashing business.
Straight from the French bidet times, i miss the convenience.
When mother came to visit me in the U.S. she was appalled to note that Americans keep their toilets in the same room as the bathtubs.
At least Europeans have water closets.
In the countryside the small rooms are segregated by purpose. Religious practices are of special interest as they exemplify the social customs.
Thanks for the specificity, to the end..
When at theatre or restaurant I go to the mens room with a friend, I say: “Washing your hands before is more important than washing after. Of course you can do both. But I believe it doesnt make sense to reach in with dirty hands to your most cleanly protected body part. Typical reaction is rolling eyes & ignoring what I said.