Dyson Airblade Is Not Better Than Alcohol Hand Rubs
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Enoch Choi
Although Dyson’s done good with vacuums, if making it into MoMa is what vacuuming is all about, I’m not so sure with their newest invention. Or shall we say, reinvention? The Dyson Airblade is your daddy’s hand dryer on steroids - a 400 mph blast of air to dry your hands in 10 seconds. But does it dry them any better? No! Just quicker. Well, one thing it does remind me of is in med school we did experiments in biochemistry class, placing damp hands and dry hands on culture plates, and guess which ones grew more bacteria? The damp hand ones of course.
Instead of getting this Dyson dohickey or a similar Mitsubishi unit, grab a bottle of Purell, and keep it handy. A research study in the Sept 2005 Pediatrics details exactly how much better alcohol based hand rubs are than soap and water - you’ll get less stomach flu if you have wee little ones in daycare. You may not reduce the frequency of your colds & flus, but at least you know you can avoid getting Montezuma's revenge from your kids.
An unpublished study here in my urgent care clinic by Dr. Charles Weiss shows drastically increased usage of alcohol-based rubs if you place the bottles in easy to access areas. So get a ton of these bottles and scatter them around your home. We have them strategically placed on our dining table, by each sink, in each of our kid’s bedrooms, and by diaper changing stations. The more the better!
Update: here's a link to a video of 400 mph in action...
via CrunchGear, Engadget who claims it a copycat, The Sun, Arbroath, ArsGeek, Gizmodo.
Thanks to TailRank for listing more commenting on this device.
4 Comments:
At Thu Oct 05, 12:03:00 AM 2006,
phatmac@gmail.com said…
That's so funny that you would be blogging about this right now. Everyone in my entire office just received a bottle of antiseptic gel from HR. But why won't they reduce the chances of colds or flus?
At Thu Oct 05, 11:24:00 AM 2006,
Enoch Choi said…
The alcohol based antiseptic gel does decrease passing stomach bugs since that's passed by touching stool then touching other things. Unfortunately, colds and flus are spread by respiratory drops that others inhale.
At Mon Oct 09, 05:16:00 PM 2006,
sanfran111 said…
And what about the argument that these alcohol-based hand gels are actually doing more harm than good becuase they destroy ALL the bacteria on your skin -- even the good ones that help protect you from certain illnesses?
At Tue Oct 10, 01:45:00 PM 2006,
Enoch Choi said…
Well, if the eliminating the good bacteria was more damaging than eliminating the bad bacteria, you'd expect to see worse outcomes (sicker patients) among those that used alcohol hand gels. Instead, they saw that those that used the gels got less stomach flu.
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