Do you wipe off the handle of your shopping cart?

[Kulindahr]

It's a dry environment and thus not conducive to bacterial growth, although Kulindahr's point is taken. You'd need to leave them untouched and optimally warm for a while in order to see significant levels of growth, I'd wager.

I'd be interested to see if there has been any decrease in transmission of anything since this craze began.

-d-

There's the point.

When I was in a house with 48 other guys at OSU, I convinced the house manager to require that all dishes set out for meals had to be washed even if no one had used them, and all the tables wiped with a mild bleach. Within a couple of weeks, the number of people in the house who were coughing and sneezing dropped noticeably (I'm thinking by half, but memory isn't certain). Then I convinced the work manager to add the cleaning of all railings and bannisters and doorknobs and door edges to the list of regular chores -- when I explained that the black streaks on the bannisters were not an antique finish but a buildup of dead human skin cells and oils, he didn't believe it until two bio majors took samples and, first, looked at them under university microscopes, and, second, put them in petri dishes and grew some really gross cultures... so I got assigned a pair of guys and we didn't just clean the bannisters but stripped them and refinished with a very smooth spar coat that was easily wiped and didn't break down from alcohol & ammonia wipes. Again the sickness rate dropped.

From that experience I suspect that most infections come from closer to home, but when looking outside to see where they come from something like a shopping cart handle has to count as a high-risk surface just because of the large number of people getting their deposits layered on.

Interestingly, if they used hardwoods for the handles instead of plastic, it would reduce the passing of disease -- many hardwoods have oils and other substances in them that kill off many bacteria and even viruses (to establish this, a guy in the house at OSU used one of the old cutting boards for his snacks from two weeks -- cheese, meat, veggies, bread -- and afterward tested it for bacteria, and it came up cleaner than the house cook's big plastic board that was washed after every meal).


As far as shopping cart handles being in a warm environment, more than one store I've been in has them parked right under big radiant heaters just inside the doors -- talk about a science experiment!

 

[Kulindahr]

A factor that has to be kept in mind here is the number of different people touching a given surface in a day. With shopping cart handles, it can be in the hundreds, whereas with your doorknobs at home it's the few who live there. Wiping doorknobs and other surfaces at the house where I lived at OSU was effective because with 49 of us in the house, plus study group friends and girlfriends and whomever coming and going, knobs and railings and such were touched by dozens of different people per hour, so those were also serious vectors.

Of course glass and metal doorknobs don't sustain bacteria well at all, so they're not as much a risk; old chrome shopping cart handles weren't, either, but those have gone out of use.

Anyway . . . so unless someone in your household is sick, wiping surfaces once a week is plenty.

But look out for those shopping carts!

 

[PrinceCory]

Waste of time. The most germ infested items in society are gas pump handles. Nobody wipes off gas pump handles.

I do use the wipes before using the cart. It is not common around my part of the world but I would love it if the gas pump islands had dispensers of wipes in order to get any gas smell off of my hands.