Infectious Diseases: One Person, One Towel

For a year and a half respectable professors from the Düsseldorf Academy of Medicine sneaked around public washrooms on an odd mission: checking the hand towels in 136 inns and restaurants. They worked with stealth, lest owners get mad at the implied aspersion on their premises. Not until he was unobserved did a researcher pull out of his briefcase a letter-sized sheet of sterile, moistened collecting paper and press it against a towel. Then he folded the paper and slipped it back into his briefcase. Back at the laboratory, the sheets were checked for bacteria. Though the public hand towel has long been recognized as insanitary, it is still widely used in Germany, and Dr. Walter Kikuth and Dr. Ludwig Grün wanted to study just how dangerous roller towels were. They wound up appalled.

Of 70 old-fashioned cloth towels, seven were so saturated with germs that no count could be made. Another 63 averaged 16,527 germs per square centimeter, but even worse than the germs' quantity was their quality. Half the towels were loaded with staphylococci, which cause boils and wound infections. A third of the towels bore colon bacteria, which spread dysentery, typhus and typhoid.

Surprisingly, the doctors found that many hospitals and clinics also use common towels. And some of the hospital bugs were the deadliest of all staphylococci—the strains that are resistant to most forms of penicillin and many other antibiotics. Among the worst places was a maternity ward, where women picked up infections and took them home with their babies.

The Düsseldorf doctors are confident that infectious diseases can be reduced by getting rid of the common towel. But the hot-air dryer, they say, is far from an effective replacement; it spreads germs faster by blowing them into the air. The Dusseldorf doctors prefer either the long roll, in which each part of the towel is used only once, or individual paper towels. Either way, they urge: "One person, one towel."