Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles

That hospitals should clean their employee's uniforms to prevent the spread of antibacteria resistant strains in a hospital setting, in the UK and elsewhere.

Washing on cold or warm, gentle cycle, and then either tumble drying on low or hang drying will greatly extend the life of your clothes. Washing on hot with a more vigorous cycle and then drying on hot not only risks shrinkage in the short term but will cause your clothes to wear out and fall apart much faster.

They didn't. The “health care workers who wash their uniforms at home" did.

That's on the manufacturers for adding "sanitize" cycles: https://cdn.avbportal.com/magento-media/GrandBlog/mhw8630hc%...

Nasty aggressive washing agents have a pretty devastating effect on bacteria, molds etc. especially bleaching percarbonates and such used for whiteners/stain removers. Surely then it's just a matter of increasing the amount of washing powder to achieve the desired sanitation level.

A rule I use is that if soap suds aren't still present in reasonable quantity on top of water until the end of the wash cycle then there's not enough soap powder being used.

Perhaps the trend towards minimizing the amount of cleaning agents used in washing has gone too far.

Similarly, perhaps also we've gone too far by removing phosphorus (in the form of trisodium phosphate—aka TSP, etc.) from washing powders, which has been a trend in recent years through environmental concerns. TSP, Na₃PO₄, is remarkably good at removing heavily ingrained dirt. It's also highly alkaline and hostile to living organisms.

That said, surprisingly TSP is not very toxic to humans—at least in small amounts. It's used as an acidity regulator/preservative in food, it's E339.

Everything I have is cotton which is very resistant to such high temps.

That's more a quality issue though, I think. The fabric itself seems weak.

No such hypothesis was made.

This is one reason this study seems rather dubious. In fact all the machines (they provide a table with model numbers, one of which is not correct, i.e., “00” should be “DD”) are European front loaders, but what is more concerning is that a far as I could see, there seems to be no mention of whether or how the clothes were dried.

The problem I could see with European style/model front loaders is that they usually and often proudly use little water, water which could rinse pathogens that were released from fabric by soaps, rather than allowing them to effectively reattach to fabric, but that is just my theory, yet a valid consideration altogether.

Then there is the fact that three of the washer models are masher/dryer combos, which are not only notoriously bad at both functions but their performance and designs may have an impact on results too.

Another huge hole in this research is that there is no clear mention of the brand of detergent used, only the type, biological vs non-biological (presumably only one of each). From other common testing, we very well know that different detergents perform very differently, especially across the types of stains, let alone between machines, not to mention types of machines. So we must conclude, assuming all other things being fine, this research would only even be relevant in the UK.

But then there’s also the matter of whether the detergent, the amount of detergent, and even the washing machines are representative of those used not only in the UK, but by hospital staff at all. Nothing indicates that there was some questioning, let alone observation of staff on their usage, equipment, or practices.

Frankly, this research, even if it were only relevant to the UK is still full of huge holes, even some not mentioned that I won’t bother going into detail about.

It is the kind of research that grates me because it is such sophistry, has the appearance of science and the confidence in its conclusions, but in the details it just kind of falls apart as rather purely executed, assuming the best.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if someone did some digging and found conflicts of interest, even just indirect ones that the researchers are not even aware of. Backroom research, research for the purpose of driving a commercial agenda is far more common than people think. I know this for a fact because I’ve witnessed it in person many times, from the smallest levels mostly for personal “publishing” interests, to the highest multi-billion dollar expenditures that are basically little more than very elaborate, very orchestrated, very high level get rich con jobs.

The article is about “health care workers who wash their uniforms at home.”

Likewise for washing machines. If you read the paper you will see they only tested 6 machines and chose 60C as a theshold for some reason. Every machine I've used with a sterilize function uses ~76C water.

resteraunts that reuse dishes several times need a better plan but not my house.

It's almost as though people forget these are machines that require maintenance and cleaning.

Extra annoying: enabling eco mode (the one that is tested when generating the power usage stats on the sticker for these machines) on some machines will make it run "60 degree equivalent", which usually means "longer but at a lower temperature", which obviously doesn't work for sterilization at all.

Of course, this is rarely an issue for consumers who don't need to sterilize their clothes (except when a family member is sick with some specific illness maybe?). But, for hospital workers, which this paper is about, that's a different story.

Still, maybe a failed machine is still a valid test - how many hospital staffs machines are unknowingly faulty?

A quick fix would be to swab staffs clean clothes every so often (or put a test patch in with their washes?) and check it.

Seems like I ended up with a software-controlled washer that is not very straightforward in its behavior and it may have something to do with energy rating.

There's no setting to get a hot rinse, not even a warm rinse, as expected. All those were taken away decades ago on purely mechanical models anyway, but at least a "hot" wash is still there. A mainstream US washer uses the household hot water supply though, they do not self-heat the water. You have two separate water inlets to the machine, one for hot water, one for cold.

You put in the laundry, start a hot cycle, and the drum starts to fill by opening only the hot water supply. It keeps filling whether the top lid is open or shut but it will not start agitating unless the lid is down.

When the lid is open, you can feel how hot the water is as it pours in.

As soon as you shut the lid, the cold water opens up too at full blast even though you just wanted hot. You can hear it and feel it for a second if you open the lid, but then that cuts off the cold and all you get is hot as long as it's open.

Saves a lot of energy when things are not as hot as people think they are.

Short cycle length certainly makes sense to be correlated with pathogens. The lousy LG "TurboWash" only takes 28 minutes to do a full load of laundry but certainly doesn't get very much clean in that time.

I have to admit it was surprising that textiles have been identified as the source of hospital acquired infections. You'd think that even if the laundering didn't eliminate pathogens, it would greatly reduce them and make any clusters more diffuse.

But my state has also made it illegal to prohibit the use of clotheslines, a "right to dry" law.

Article is about healthcare workers taking their laundry home, and the resulting sustained pathogens in a medical setting.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/312705939

You would place worn uniform in a bag labeled with your name and drop if off at the laundry to collect the next day.

Then privatisation came, first they shut down the tailors and you were expected to both purchase your uniform and pay for alterations and repairs (costs you could claim back as a tax rebate if you knew how, how not being advertised.) Then they privatised the laundry, shutting down the one on site and shifting everything to a central location, by everything I mean just the bedding, you were now expected to wash your uniform at home.

The only exception I am aware of is Surgical scrubs, those were provided in sterile wraps and were to be returned to a certain laundry bin for cleaning.

You're right about the food industry, when I worked in kitchens that days uniform was provided, freshly cleaned and returned for laundering at the end of my shift.

Things like scrubs exchange machines and central laundries washing staff gear is rare even in hospitals in the developed world.

Also though, you think people buying & wearing their own Figs scrubs would get them back if they put them in the hospital laundry service? And what about non-scrubs for that matter?

"Require" might be more appropriate.

And I agree - the medical industry (specifically in the United States) cares more about profit than care. It's nuts.

> Two commonly used UK washing detergents were selected for the assay: a non-biological liquid detergent (15-30%:Anionic surfactants; 5-15%:nonionic surfactants; <5%:phosphonate, perfume, soap, optical brighteners, methylisothiazolinone, octylisothiazolinone) and a non-biological powder detergent (5-15%: oxygen-based bleaching agents, anionic surfactants; <5%: nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, soap, perfume, phosphonates, optical brighteners, zeolites)

This doesn't really mean anything to me, but maybe it means something to you?

In some sense I think the real takeaway from the study is "we shouldn't be having healthcare workers wash their own patient/pathogen facing uniforms", and that takeaway seems robust against the hypothesis that only some detergents would solve the problem. As a population we can be sure that some of the healthcare workers are going to use the detergents that don't solve the problem.