We know fecal bacteria shoots into the air when a lidless toilet flushes — a phenomenon known, grossly, as a “toilet plume.” But in bathrooms where such plumes gush regularly, where does all that fecal bacteria go?

Into a hand dryer and onto your clean hands, perhaps. That’s what a new study suggests. Researchers examined plates exposed to just 30 seconds of a hand dryer compared to those left in, you know, just plain feces-filled air.

The findings: Air-blasted plates carried 18-60 colonies of bacteria on average, whereas two minutes’ exposure to the mere bathroom air left fewer than one colony on average. What’s more, the inside of the dryer nozzles themselves had “minimal bacterial levels.” The results were published recently in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

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