Report states we are all covered in s---- fecal matter....

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Hmmmmmm... I'm a Germ-O-Phile, myself! And everything comes up from "down there" enough that anything that I think is contaminated, I am quoted w/ saying: "There's Doo-Doo on it!!!!"

Sorry, had a recent experience that I had to bring back this thread to put in my 2-Cents-worth...!

-- Dave
 
Hospital Laundry

It will vary by country and or region but in the United States there is not any such requirement that healthcare facility (hospital, nursing home, etc..)laundry be disinfected by going into a bucket or whatever before it goes to the wash.

Center for Disease Control does have guidelines and there are others from various US federal agencies but the latter tend to deal more with protecting workers than anything else. Many of the latter rules were put into place during the HIV/AIDs epidemic when no one was at first sure what was going on.

For instance healthcare linen containing any sort of body fluid (blood, urine, feces, etc..) is to be placed into a separate bag and labeled accordingly. This is so the laundry knows what it has and workers can unload it using proper precautions.

In the United States chlorine bleach is widely used for whitening, stain removal and disinfection of laundry in both commercial and domestic settings. Most standards regarding disinfection of hospital linen revolves around using that substance.

Most wash programs for commercial laundries dealing with healthcare linen begin with a series of flush washes. This in theory sends a large amount of soils including body fluids (feces and such) and the germs residing on said textiles down the drain. Alive but none the less down the drain. It also begins the process of reducing germ count.

Tests done with commercial laundries going back to the early part of last century determined that not just hot water, but using sufficient amounts of soap or detergent (alkaline substances) along with frequent changes of water left textiles sufficiently "disinfected" for all normal purposes. The addition of disinfectants such as chlorine bleach further those affects.
 
well, in our grandmother's time...

Our grandmothers lived in mortal fear of germs, this isn't a new thing. In the past the idea of letting a germ sneak past your cleaning methods and infect your family was horrifying to any housewife, women who didn't keep their home spotless were considered slovenly and lazy.

My grandmother used to use scalding hot water for dishes, each dish wash scraped, rinsed in scalding water, washed in one side of the sink, and placed into the other side of the sink in more hot soapy water. When all the dishes had been washed the first time, she would let out the first wash water, refill that side of the sink with scalding hot rinse water, wash all the dishes again, rinse them, then the pans were dried with a spotless towel, and the dishes and glassware allowed to dry on a scrupulously clean dish rack which was bleached overnight once a week.

Laundry was just as intense, work clothes from the farm were pre rinsed in warm water, washed once in warm water with Murphys oil soap, then again in hot water with all detergent, then double rinsed in warm, with a splash of brown bottle lysol in the first rinse, and a capful of downy in the second rinse, then hung out in the hot sun to dry.

Regular clothes weren't treated quite so harshly, but they were still washed in the hottest water safe for the fabric, and double rinsed, whites being dosed with bleach and everything else dosed with lysol, all except for the finest fabrics.

Then everything was ironed, to keep it looking presentable, and to annihilate any poor unsuspecting germ she had possibly missed earlier.

As she got older, got an electric dryer, and we left the farm, she relaxed somewhat, giving up adding lysol to laundry, no longer ironing anything unless absolutely necessary, but she and ladies of her generation are still far more concerned about household germs than most generations before or after.
 
Thing Is

The weakest of the germs most commonly found on laundry is E.Coli. That bacteria requires temps at or over 160F held for at least ten minutes to be destroyed.

You aren't going to get those temps on domestic American top loading washing machines not now or in the past. Don't know any front loaders sold for domestic use in the USA reach 160F much less hold that temp. Some commercial units can heat or boost water temps either via steam or other heating, but not sure how many laundries do so. They can get hot water from central systems piped in at that temp by using recirculation systems to ensure water from the boilers reaches washers with minimal heat loss.
 
What a minute. Didn't our grandmothers (like Vintagekitchen's and mine) do the things they did precisely BECAUSE they knew germs were everywhere? Wouldn't this be especially so on a farm where animals were slaughtered and there was always the danger of accidentally carrying a germ out of its normal environment and leaving it in another where it could flourish and cause problems?

My grandmother was raised on a farm and later became a nurse (R.N.). While she wasn't so much for tidy-ness or neatness, you could have used her kitchen or bathroom as an operating room. She was also the one who taught me never to overload a washer because if there was insufficient turnover clothes couldn't get clean.
 
Yes, persons kept things clean because of germs

It was seen as a housewife's primary duty to safeguard her family's health by attacking dirt and therefore germs to prevent illness. However there was more to it than just keeping things clean.

Modern antibiotics would not be available until after WWII with the arrival first of penicillin. Prior to this persons could and did die off in droves from what would be considered simple infections today. Anything from pneumonia to a simple prick of your finger by a rosebush while gardening could prove fatal.

To combat this threat you had all that scrubbing, boiling, using disinfectants (carbolic soap, Lysol and other phenol based products), and so forth. The idea was to eliminate as much as possible the potential for disease.

That being said many diseases that we hardly hear about in the Western world today were common, and could be transmitted by improper handling of things in the home. Typhoid fever, TB, diphtheria, and so forth were common with often limited treatments. Best persons could hope for in any infectious disease situation was that the infected was strong enough to fight off the bug.
 
No antibiotics and hearing loss

Prior to WWII ear and sinus infections were serious, chronic problems. When all available treatments failed and the infection threatened to spread a radical mastoidectomy, I believe it would be called today, was performed. The result was a permanent, moderately severe conductive hearing loss of 60-70dB. While today's hearing aids can overcome this, that was not the case back then. That's one reason schools for the Deaf back then were so numerous.
 
"It DOES work..."

If you say so. I'm not going to un-convince you of that which you think you "know", any more than you're going to un-convince me. All I've got to run with is 100 closely-measured fat/alkalai reactions using laboratory-pure fats and alkalais measured within a tenth of a gram.

Oh, did I mention diammonium phosphate? Without which the water phase could not possibly support the oil phase load.

But nevermind all that science nonsense.
 
GROSS!!!

Now that I think about it, I should do whites separate...
With bleach and hot water...
 
Getting around the eco-nazi's

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that a steadily rising portion of the population has a need to rant, rave, harangue, etc. It's really not about the topic; it's about satisfying that need. but I digress....

As stated further up, does your new, eco-friendly, water-saving toilet not flush properly? Simply flush it repeatedly until the job is done. The GE Hydrowave I inherited uses almost no water. So I washed everything twice with second rinse. First wash with soap, second without. My so-called 'warm' water was cold so I set the water temp to hot. The new dishwasher didn't clean well on regular cycle so now I run the "sanitize' cycle every time.

It's nice to know I'm conserving resources......
 
Ah, the Home-Ec Generation Strikes Again...

Growing up my downstairs neighbor was what I call the "Home Ec" generation (in fact, she'd taught school briefly in Wyoming or Montana before moving to NYC, and then marrying and moving to Chicago), who went to school in the 20's and 30's, she was the tail end of it, my mom, only a couple years younger didn't get the same training. She was very into everything looking clean, no fancy woodwork and a modern kitchen (she had a Magic Chef range and St. Charles cabinets from '55, which were the first thing the purchasers of her unit ripped out) and it was all about the appearance of cleanliness, if not in fact (I inherited a lot of her cookware, wasn't all that tidy). My grandmother was the same way, everything looked clean, but behind the furniture, ho-boy (course she was too old by that time to move things).

My neighbor was the product of the school movement of Home-Ec which taught cooking and so forth, not just from a hygienic point, but also to assimilate foreigners into American society and expurge their ethnic tendencies and cooking techniques.

Of course, as I understand, we should be more worried about our kitchens than bathrooms, as far as cleanliness is concerned (those sponges should go, as I recall hearing, in favor of paper towels which get tossed right away).

*semi-coherent rant over*
 

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