Is it safe to wash your anus with water and your (ungloved) hand after pooping, assuming (of course) that you don’t touch anything with your hand until you wash it with soap and water?
I’m currently traveling in India. It’s common here, instead of using toilet paper after deification, to pour water down your back and use your left hand to wipe your anus clean of feces. I googled to find information from medical professionals to understand if this is safe or not, but I (surprisingly) couldn’t find any information on the Internet about this.
Of course, let’s assume that we’re doing this properly:
- You only use one hand (typically your left hand), so feces only contaminates one hand.
- You don’t touch anything in the bathroom (eg pitcher, faucet, door knob, etc) with your soiled left hand until after you wash your hands
- You wash your hands properly, following best-practices: using soap and water, scrubbing vigorously for at least 20 seconds.
I’m less interested in your personal opinion, and more interested if any studies have been done analyzing the efficacy of safety in this scenario, using a proper scientific study.
Have any studies been done to analyze if it’s safe to wipe your ass with your hand (and wash your hands properly with soap and water after)?
Imagine, rather than showering with water, rubbing your whole body with dry tissues and thinking “I’m clean now”, lmao.
If you’re washing your hands properly, you don’t have to worry about much of anything tbh. There’s a reason hand washing inservices are mandatory for pretty much everyone in anything related to medical care.
You don’t need ass-specific studies because the existing studies included bacterial cultures as a measurement.
Seriously, poop isn’t some kind of horrible thing that won’t wash off. It isn’t radiation, it isn’t going to burrow in the skin and resist removal. You take care of patients, and you have to poop, most places in the US you’re gong to be wiping with paper, which isn’t exactly great at protecting the hands. You then wash your hands, and you’re good to go as long as you did it right. Gloves aren’t mandatory for all contact, believe it or not, and that includes feeding patients. You should wear them for feeding, but not every facility requires it. They should, but they don’t. Well, didn’t back when I was still working.
More importantly, you aren’t likely wearing gloves to feed yourself. You wipe your ass with toilet paper regularly, wash your hands and move on with your day, right? The presence of water in the wiping process is no more or less “clean” than using paper, unless the water is pressurized enough that you don’t use your hands at all. Bidets are awesome.
Besides, aren’t most of the actual toilets in India the low profile ones, or have the hotels and such started putting in higher ones? I’ve never been, but it used to be a pretty common culture shock point of interest. When that’s the case, or it’s one of the squatting toilets that’s basically a hole in the ground, you won’t have much feces clinging unless you’re really hairy and/or your feces is unusually sticky from fats or sugars. Even with loose stools, it doesn’t stick.
No bullshit, number 3 on your list makes the rest irrelevant. Yeah, don’t be an asshole and grab handles with the “wiping” hand until after you’ve washed your hands, but in terms of your own safety, that isn’t relevant.
The amount of any possible pathogens left on the hands after washing like you described is no greater after wiping than after any other time you wash them. That’s why it’s done.
Seriously, poop isn’t some kind of horrible thing that won’t wash off. It isn’t radiation, it isn’t going to burrow in the skin and resist removal.
No, it literally does that. Try this. Go touch your poop. Really rub it into your skin like you’re wiping your anus. No go wash your hands with unscented soap. Smell your fingers. I guarantee you you’ll smell shit. Wash them again. Same thing. You literally can’t wash it out. You just have to wait.
There’s a reason we always shake hands right handed. It’s because your left hand is for you know what.
My homie, I literally washed people’s asses for twenty years. I have had feces on my hands, forearms, chest, hair and beard, and neck. Even once on my face when I was too slow to dodge.
Every bit of it washed off, and did so the first time I used soap and water.
If you’re smelling shit on your hands after washing, you either didn’t wash right, or you’re imagining it.
Also, what kind of wiping are you doing that you’re smearing it everywhere? That’s just wiping badly. I’ve run out of tp with patients and had to clear poop with gloved hands before moving to washcloths got the finish, and smearing it everywhere is a matter of paying attention to what you’re doing, not the job itself.
Seriously, twenty years of wiping and washing people’s asses. I’m not pulling this out of my ass, I’m pulling it out of hundreds of asses. Wash your hands properly, as described, and any smells lingering mean you didn’t do the job right. And that’s with unscented soap at that, I can’t stand the stuff, so I carried my own unscented and uncolored stuff for most of my years.
There are two main chemicals that make poop smelly; skatole (also spelled scatole) and indole. Skatole is fat soluble, and that’s why you need soap to remove its smell. But indole is soluble in warm to hot water. Both are caught up by soap easily because surfactants. That’s what surfactants do, they bridge the gap between solids and liquids. Anything bound up in fats (scatole) are going to be removed just as easily as the fats themselves. The indole will go with only water, though you would need to scrub much harder without soap, and the water would need to be almost too hot.
That only time you might need multiple washings to get rid of those smells is if you had a very fatty diet, and let the poop just sit on your hands for a while before trying to wash. Gods know, if you get poo on your scrubs, the smell can linger if you don’t get it all gone before it dries.
Even once on my face when I was too slow to dodge.
This needs further explanation
Lmao!
So, some patients are bed bound, or only have limited ability to be elsewhere.
One of the biggest reasons for that in facilities is called contracture. Basically, all the muscles draw up and can’t unbend without serious difficulty. It’s a fairly common thing post stroke.
This can result in both the patient and the caregiver having to do some difficult and awkward work for bathing and other personal care.
In that case, the guy was in really bad shape. Knees drawn up to his chest, but the spine twisted, and his arms locked in the way of turning. So, obviously, any personal care meant I had to be right there, up close and in contact. One arm holding him in position, the other doing the work of (at the time it happened) bathing his butt. To be able to achieve this, I had to pull up a chair, use my left arm to hold him in position, and kinda lean in so that it minimized how much stress was being put on his back. The would cause him less pain both during and after than other options, despite being harder to do.
Now, the guy was incontinent, but could feel things happening, so he said he was going to poop. But you can’t just drop him because if I had, his head would have hit the bed rails due to positioning. That’s not a good thing, this poor guy had so many cuts and skin tears because of how severe his contractures were. He’d fallen out of shower chairs because he’d just slip out of the belt that was supposed to keep him in.
Anyway, he gives me warning, and the poop I had just cleaned was relatively firm. Mushy, but all in one piece. So I just leaned back some and supported him until I heard the first rumble and spatter. That’s when I knew it was going to be wet. But even if I had just let go, I was wedged in close by the chair. So I’m trying to let him down gently, stand up, and get out of the way at the same time.
His bowels were not waiting, and I got hit by a handful of warm, sticky, smelly goop. My glasses caught enough that I couldn’t see anything else. My mouth was closed, but it was running off my nose and lips.
It was not a pleasant thing.
I get him down as best I can, and stumble to the sink in the bathroom. Poop washes off pretty easy, even when you have a beard. But you still don’t feel clean lol. But it did take a while to get it all off. I did though. Then I finished cleaning him, and went to the desk and told the charge nurse I was taking a damn shower. By that point, all I could smell was soap, it was dial antibacterial because that’s what was in the dispensers, but my brain was still screaming at me lol.
I was 18. This was maybe a month or two after I had started working at the facility, and I had managed up to that point to not get poop past the elbows.
But the guy was so upset. He was crying and apologizing, and I’m in the bathroom scrubbing while trying to console him without opening my mouth.
After everything got handled, and I was clean, it was pretty damn funny. And I made sure to let him know that I thought it was hilarious on my end. He was such a sweet guy.
But holy hell, that hot splat of butt mud was memorable :)
