Wash your towels regularly to avoid infections

By Alhaji Alhasan Abdulai



Learn to clean your towels regularly. This simple advise would emanate from your parents while you are young but medical scientists the world over are likely to lay emphasis on the advise due to the danger dirty towels pose to human health especially to our skins. Many people have developed the habit of washing loads of their pants, shirts, and underwear regularly. However the same people might be found wanting when it comes to paying attention to their towels week after week. The secret is that you would promise yourself you'll do the towels next week, but when the next laundry day rolls around, you're often too busy again and most likely promise to wash it each passing week. Before long you can't even remember the last time you threw a load of towels in the wash. And suddenly that towel you keep reusing is not exactly fresh.
What you should be worried about must be a skin infection! Or athlete's foot commonly picked up at the gym. Other diseases likely to be contracted may be fungus.
According to Susan Whittier, PhD, director of the clinical microbiology service at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center if the situation persists the very worse health problem would occur to the use of dirty towels. According to the doctor, even though you're clean when you dry off after a shower, you're still transferring skin bacteria to your towel. Those bacteria then multiply, day after day. For the most part, drying off with a towel covered in your own skin bacteria won't cause you any harm. But if you happen to be carrying pathogenic bacteria and also happen to have dry, cracked skin or a cut, you can infect yourself, Whittier says. There's an even smaller chance that infection will go anywhere beyond the skin, but if it does get into your blood; you'll find yourself in the hospital. Even for people who carry MRSA, washing a towel every four or five uses will give the likelihood of infection in the probably-never-going-to-happen range.
Even if you didn't wash your towels after 4 (or 30) uses, you might not get a fungal infection, Whittier says. "Something like a yeast or fungus isn't part of our normal skin flora," she says. "A normal, healthy person wouldn't be carrying fungus on their skin." No fungus on your skin means no fungus on your towel and therefore no fungal infection—even athlete's foot: If you end up with that, you can blame your shower floor and whoever walked on it before you.
What will probably happen is that you’ll walk around smelling like a musty towel. After just four uses, your towel will be covered in thousands—possibly millions—of bacteria. Bacteria that you're then wiping all over your "clean" body to the extent that all you would be doing would be Kind of counterproductive, don't you think so?
From the advice given as mentioned above all adults in homes, schools, barracks and residential areas within the nation and beyond have a duty to perform regularly one duty after having a bath: cleaning their towels regularly, if they are to be healthy and smell good the whole year round.
Executive Director
EANFOWORLD FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
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