Sign up to our newsletter
Health

This is why you should always close the toilet lid before flushing

toilet lid
You’ll always close the toilet lid after reading this

Do you put down the lid of the toilet before you flush? If the answer is ‘no’, we’re here to convince you that this is something you definitely need to start doing. When you read why you should really do this, you’ll probably always close the toilet lid from now on. 

This was a bit of a shocker to us!

Bacteria

Your toilet bowl is full of bacteria. That’s not that weird when you think about what we flush through there on a daily basis. Actually, we’d rather not think about that. Whether it’s important to close the lid is a topic of much discussion. In 1975, one Dr Charles Gerba conducted research which showed that small drops of splashing water that contained bacteria like E.coli could travel up to 4.5 metres and stay in the air for six hours.

Fireworks

If you were to zoom in on a toilet bowl and slow down the image you’d see that when you flush, thousands of tiny drops of water splash upwards. It’s like an actual fireworks show! These drops of water are full of bacteria like the dangerous E.coli bacteria. That means you can actually get pretty sick from these tiny drops of water. So, where do these splashes land? Well, they end up everywhere throughout the room. If your toilet is situated in your bathroom, this means the water ends up on your mirror, cabinets, toothbrush, makeup and potential contact lenses.

Diseases

So, when you use these items again after flushing the toilet, you come into contact with these gross germs. Research from 2012 shows that if you don’t close the toilet lid, there are 12 times as many diarrhoea-causing bacteria in the air than if you do close it. What kind of diseases could you get from this so-called ‘toilet plume’? Norovirus, SARS and pandemic influenza. That doesn’t sound good at all, does it?

Conclusion

Close the toilet lid before flushing if you want to reduce the chance of nasty diseases!

Read more: 8 handy cleaning tips that hardly anyone knows about

Want to keep this article for later? Pin it on Pinterest!

Source: TipHero | Image: pxhere