I visited a service area on the motorway Thursday and Friday and while drying my hands after washing them after a pee, a thought occured to me.
Because of the high velocity of the air from the hand driers, could I get an embolism through a cut on my hands?
Dave
The reasons service areas use hot air dryers are because paper towels, which most peope prefer, are simply a PITA. Not just the cost, but storage, the re stocking of the dispensers and the problem of removing literally tons of paper waste.
The paper towel industry have the larger guns, the producers are huge multinationals compared to the relatively small hot air dryer manufacturers.
The paper guys have been trying to oust hot air dryers for years, using smear campaigns claiming that hot air dryers are dermitalogically bad and more so that they generate airbourne bacteria. They have used every trick in the book to try & demonise the hot air dryer - and failed.
The only argument I've never heard is the embolism one. If there was the slightest evidence, they would have jumped on it bigtime.
The air isn't especially high velocity, rather its hot & high flow. Or was until the Dyson Airblade
I really like the airblades and if I could afford/justify an airblade at home, I'd buy one tomorow... However, they're about £600 ish last time I enquired )-:
Gordon
No.
Nor can you catch VD from teacup handles.
Your face won't stay like that, if you pull a funny face and the wind changes.
If you eat apple pips, a little tree will *not* grow inside you.
That thought crossed my mind too. Actually you can do it without any cut if you blast compressed air at your skin -- it will go through, which is one reason you should never use a compressed air line to blow debris off your hands.
If you've ever opened one up which has been in public use for a year or more, it is frankly a most disgusting sight, as no one ever cleans out the insides. Normally I try to repair appliances which break, but in two cases of these, I removed them very carefully and placed straight in the bin, without disturburing the contents. How harmful this debris is I can't comment on (I doubt the bacteria would survive for long inside the machine), but they sure are full of it, and you are blowing it on warm damp hands.
Bollocks.
No way can low pressure air cause an embolism via the hands.
A hypodermic syringe into a blood vessel can.
Really high pressures such as diesel injector pumps can go through the skin, as can certain very large industrial pressure washers.
But hot-air hand dryers are really, really not going to do it.
I thought this was going to be a very different story. Any motorway services I have been near have "special interest" groups stalking people and hiding in cubicles that need clearing out by staff/police all the time. As for the hand dryer, unless it's 100+ PSI I doubt it would harm you. Cover the cut up to stop infection.
Very unlikely, I should think!
However, whilst on the subject of hand driers . . .
I can never understand why there is such a wide variety in the effectiveness of these devices. Some have a decent flow of air at the right temperature to dry your hands quickly but most are *pathetic* - either having hardly any airflow, or just having a blast of cold air. And that pre-supposes that the sensor which detects the presence of your hands works without needing to have your hands in one precise spot - which many don't! Obviously price comes into it - but many are simply not fit for purpose. Is it really *that* difficult to design something which actually *works* without costing an arm and a leg. And do the people who purchase these things on behalf of the toilet owners never try to *use* one before placing the order?
[In those rare places which provide both driers *and* paper towels, I find that using a paper towel in the airstream from a drier usually works pretty well].
No one claimed they were.
I'm not so impressed. I reckon their slogan should be "half as dry in half the time"
i dont know about vd but you can actually be infected from all sorts of bacteria from handles, especially if you touch your mouth and eyes?
there have been cases of people stretching the face in some way and have had acute muscle spasm!
there have been many cases of trees growing inside of people from seeds.
Most people I've seen pull their hands out too quickly. Give it the full
10 seconds they say. Count 10 elephants as you slowly pull your hands out. Once I realised that, it's worked first time every time for me.Gordon
Could you point a paper published in a peer-reviewed medical journal which supports your view that compresed air (let alone high veloicty air from a hand dryer) can cause an air embolism in such circumstances?
I've performed a reasonably diligent search for evidence to support the claim and I can find none. I can find the possibility discussed, without any references, on a Wikipedia page and I can find a reference to an air embolism being cause by a high-speed cutting too which uses jets of water powered by compressed air. However that incident actually occured during surgery when the tool was being used to cut into a human liver. That's a very different situation to using either a hair dryer or an
8-bar compressed air line.There are hazards to blowing compressed air onto the skin, venous or arterial air embolism is not one of them, as far as I can see. I wonder if the people asserting that such an even is possible have mistaken an embolism of the colon caused by compressed air for venous/aterial embolism? An embolism of the colon is a known hazard of misuse of industrial compressed air, and occurs usually when some idiot thinks it would be funny to blow air up the arse of someone else.
Anyhow, since you have asserted that compressed air blown on th eskin can cause an embolism I wonder if you could provide the soruce of your information? Thanks.
Why on earth are you asking that question of a salesman?
And the problems of the loos and basins getting blocked by them.
Owain
Oh go on, show me a reference to a *credible* source of medical information on this - such as a medical journal.
Wrong! My Mum told me many times that that would happen and my Mum was always right!
In message , RubberBiker writes
Because he has a daughter in the medical scene.
Dave
I'm not a salesman anymore f****it, I'm a handyman.
Apart from which I spent 30 + years in the cleaning industry and am a British Institute of Cleaning Science instructor, so I know more than a little about the cleaning & hygiene game.
I've also written the high pressure cleaner and carpet cleaning FAQ's for the group. Thats called a positive contribution. Oh sorry, you wouldn't understand what that was, having never made one.
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