Hand Washing: For Removing Bacteria, Paper Towels Beat Hand Dryers

Dyson and his Airblade hand dryer.This probably wasn't exactly the result the hand-dryer-making company, Dyson, was looking for when they funded this small study on hand washing. Anna Snelling of the University of Bradford, UK asked 14 volunteers to dry their hands for 15 seconds using either paper towels or three different typs of air dryer, sometimes rubbing their hands together and sometimes not. When volunteers kept their hands still (which is how the extremely loud Dyson dryers work) skin bacteria numbers dropped by roughly 37% compared to just after washing; however, paper towels knocked out the bacteria by half. That's because the towels actually scraped off the bacteria. In a partial victory for Dyson, when volunteers rubbed their hands together under a standard hand dryer, the bacteria count actually rose by 18%. So drying with a Dyson-type dryer was more sanitary than a standard hand-dryer, but paper towels won, hands down.

View the study.