10 ms·
Impacts of lid closure during toilet flushing
- SergeAx 3y agoNow this is first class Ignobel Prize material.
- delichon 3y ago> These results demonstrate that closing the toilet lid prior to flushing does not mitigate the risk of contaminating bathroom surfaces and that disinfection of all restroom surfaces (ie, toilet rim, floors) may be necessary after flushing or after toilet brush used for the reduction of virus cross-contamination. I fear the collision of safety culture and robot technology that will make it cheap and easy to actually keep bathroom surfaces sterile. We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome. The same kind of objections apply to things like clothes, shelter and agriculture. I'm not advocating that we do away with these, or the idea of cleanliness. But our dependence on them comes with a cost that isn't always worth paying. Particularly where the cost is a compromised immune system.
- goodpoint 3y ago> We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome This is a huge oversimplification on how the immune system works, same as saying "what does not kill you makes you stronger". No.
- moredingo3 3y agoThis has real world implications to prevent the spread of disease today. For example, the norovirus is a very contagious and nasty bug that quickly spreads to patients and staff. It is not something you want to encounter. This study implies that that PPE on staff in those environments is critical and could help inform their standard disinfecting procedures.
- lukev 3y agoI presume you're referring to the "Hygiene hypothesis" which links early childhood exposure to microorganisms with fewer allergies and autoimmune disorders. It's important to note that this has not been demonstrated conclusively, and when medical professionals talk about it they stress that it's not worth exposing yourself to fecal matter intentionally to "build resistance." Personal cleanliness is still one of the more important things you can do for health. A reasonable compromise seems to be: let your kids play in the dirt, but also teach them to wash their hands after using the bathroom.
- zdragnar 3y agoWe've absolutely seen that people not exposed to certain types of bacteria don't develop resistances to it. There's a reason tourists have to drink bottled or sterilized water, after all. That said, your compromise seems right, but it missed the point of the parent post. Living in a hyper-sterilized world is going to have consequences.
- solarpunk 3y agoYeah, folks gotta understand the hygiene hypothesis kinda relies on assumptions about baseline environments, it falls flat on its face if you consider environments with industrialized biological contaminants such as hospitals, factory farms, or open sewage.
- pmarreck 3y agoFYI I have psoriasis and I was consciously avoiding any dirt as a kid, I was just always repulsed by dirt and mud and whatnot (was not a huge fan of sand either)... Years later I find out that non-exposure to certain environmental bacteria (that usually exist in dirt) within a certain developmental window results in a much higher chance of getting stuck with lifelong psoriasis... F___ me
- Chico75 3y agoIn case anyone is curious about research related to this area, you can read the short history from Karelia study to biodiversity and public health interventions (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10043497/#:~:text=The%20Karelia%20Allergy%20Study%202002,circuits%20and%20lower%20allergy%20prevalence https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10043497/#:~:te....) research paper that looks at the health condition disparities between the Russian and Finnish border kids.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoI had the same reaction to that paragraph. There is simply no convincing me to that such paranoia is rational. Bathrooms are a bit gross when it comes to germs and that’s fine. Focus on the important stuff, and let bygones be bygones.
- burnished 3y ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 3y agoYes, paranoia. You have about as many nonhuman cells in you as human cells. It’s hard to count. The would around you is full of microscopic life. You are absolutely covered in it. Your immune system did not evolve to function in a sterile bubble. Some people were traumatized as children to be so afraid of microorganisms that they make ridiculous decisions. The biggest culprit of foodbourne illness is sick cooks with poor hygiene. Not the failure to bleach every surface in your bathroom every time someone flushes the toilet. Oversterilization is a strong suspect in many sources of disease.
- medler 3y ago> The biggest culprit of foodbourne illness is sick cooks with poor hygiene This study suggests ways to prevent those cooks from becoming sick
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoIt goes much further than that, and insinuates that one ought to manually disinfect all surfaces in the bathroom after flushing the toilet.
- burnished 3y ago...as an alternative to closing the lid, which was the hygiene practice they determined was not effective.
- Terr_ 3y ago> cheap and easy to actually keep bathroom surfaces sterile I think that flatteringly overstates modern human abilities: Almost every surface on Earth either has life on it or is about to be get recolonized in short order. (Often after we did some temporarily-effective thing involving brute force radiation or unusual heat or volatile chemicals.) At best we'll end up with almost-sterile bathrooms that we're OK with because life that is both process-resistant and dangerous hasn't popped up yet. > We'll adapt to our increasingly sterile bubbles and become increasingly vulnerable to Earth's microbiome. There are two flavors to this that I think really need to be distinguished, because they lead to very different experiments and recommendations: 1. "Hygeine Hypothesis" - "Our immune systems need to be toughed up by winning battles against actual pathogens." 2. "Old Friends" - "Our immune systems need additional calibration by harmlessly interacting with the suite of benign things we co-evolved with." The former suggests that a certain level of (literal) inner turmoil and danger is required, whereas the latter suggests that it's a much more general issue of micro-ecological diversity and no pathogens are needed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- unsupp0rted 3y agoHow often in nature do humans encounter their own aerosolized fecal matter?
- adolph 3y agoWith small kids not unoften.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoWhenever they have beans for dinner
- unsupp0rted 3y agoThere’s a big difference between a fart and a toilet plume, I presume, in terms of viral/bacterial load. It might be like the difference between being in an airport for 5 minutes with a Covid stranger vs. sharing a bed with a Covid family member.
- freedude 3y agoMy Grandpa used to say if a child didn't eat a pound of dirt a year it just wasn't healthy. This was usually in response to my Aunt's frenetic diatribe about a cousin getting dirty while on the farm. He was right. We got dirty on the farm. We ate dirt in the form of working and playing in the dust and mud. We would get "cleaned up" on the hot summer days by swimming in the river. Not only did we survive, we thrived. It was some of the greatest years of my life, eating a pound of dirt a year...
- hermitcrab 3y agoI worked on developing compartmental modelling software for consultants to use, so they could estimate how radionucleides moved around the environment. One of the parameters the consultants had to work out for their model was - how much dirt does a child eat in a year. I don't know what figure they ended up with.
- adr1an 3y agoI love research articles that include TL;DR bulletpoints/ Highlights • Viral aerosols from toilet flushing pose a possible route of pathogen transmission. • Toilet lid closure prior to flushing is believed to mitigate cross-contamination. • We show toilet lid closure prior to flushing does not mitigate cross-contamination. • Brushing toilet bowl without disinfectant results in contamination of surfaces. • The use of a disinfectant during bowl cleaning reduces cross-contamination of surfaces.
- croisillon 3y agoi came to say that! the first 5 lines are all i needed to read, really great job
- whstl 3y agoLove it. I used to really suck at some school subjects that had heavy text, until I started "converting" the prose of textbooks to bullet points, tables and whatnot. Then it would magically become interesting to me. Some people would also photocopy my stuff. Funny enough my sister was the opposite, she could read a book and write a thesis in a weekend. I guess different people have different preferences.
- renewiltord 3y agoWow, those people who keep their toothbrushes capped and out of the bathroom win another one. Never me, though. I'm a Hygiene Hypothesis Hoplite. Might well be a Semmelweis Simpleton though. Who can tell? Only time.
- gambiting 3y agoI assume that all of them put a plug up their ass so they definitely never fart in their bed at night putting those exact same fecal bacteria where they sleep. Like, I get it - it's gross. But humans can be exposed to a certain level of gross and not die, it's fine.
- modeless 3y agoIt's more than fine, in many cases. We need the right bacteria in our guts to digest our food properly and they have to get in there somehow. Also our immune systems need exposure to a diversity of natural bacteria and other organisms in order to develop and function properly. Lack of exposure to natural biota is strongly suspected to be a major cause of the rapidly growing epidemic of allergies in modern life. (This is the Hygiene Hypothesis referenced upthread.) Not saying you should stick your toothbrush in the toilet, but unusually strict hygiene measures are unlikely to be net beneficial for you. My reading of the research is that greater exposure to bacteria is very healthy and desirable as much as possible without actually getting sick.
- dylan604 3y ago> But humans can be exposed to a certain level of gross and not die, it's fine. I'm reminded of this every time someone posts a link to FDA regulations of what is acceptable as "food", what level of contaminants are allowed in "food", and other things that really make you not want to eat "food".
- doubled112 3y agoI thought kink shaming was wrong.
- 3y ago
- SamBam 3y agoThis is definitely interesting. However, their diagram at the bottom makes me wish they had done another test site to model a sink near a toilet. While the lid-closed position still allows plenty of aerosolized water to emerge from the sides of the closed lid, it's not clear whether the aerosolized particles are then light enough to head upward towards a sink, or if they fall semi-ballistically like their diagram implies.
- thfuran 3y agoIsn't an aerosol pretty much by definition able to be carried all around by air currents rather than being just a briefly suspended droplet? I do agree though that the bathroom sink area seems like an important thing to test. I'd have thought it's of much more interest than the floor beside the toilet.
- actionfromafar 3y agoBut are aerosols like the proverbial spherical cows? I mean, is there a distribution of droplet size, and how much does that affect things?
- stcredzero 3y agoBut are aerosols like the proverbial spherical cows? This makes me want to see some physics simulations of cow shaped particles.
- zonkerdonker 3y agoAsk and ye shall receive: https://www.avclub.com/consider-if-you-will-the-aerodynamics-of-a-cow-1846379998 https://www.avclub.com/consider-if-you-will-the-aerodynamics...
- thfuran 3y agoThere definitely will be a distribution of droplet sizes (plausibly not unimodal) depending on the mechanics of what's producing and dispersing the droplets. Broadly speaking, the smaller the droplet, the longer it stays in the air. I'm not sure precisely where the line is, but in the context of virology, 'droplet' and 'aerosol' are distinct. Droplets are large enough that they still fall mostly ballistically, albeit potentially a bit slowly for very small droplets. But once it's small enough that it doesn't really fall anymore, it's an aerosol. And they can remain suspended in the air for hours.
- atum47 3y agoback in college I was living an a room that I rent from a nice old lady trying to make some extra money. Due to it being a small space and other factors like noise and sun light, my bed end up next to the door to the bathroom. I got pink eye at least three times that year, before I was able to get a better place. Ever since myth busters my toothbrush almost always have a cap on it and I always close the lid before flushing the toilet.
- aksss 3y agostore toothbrush in medicine cabinet by sink, and douse with Listerine (or something) before and after brushing.
- pmarreck 3y ago... and now you know that closing the lid doesn't matter, but using disinfectants does.
- okdood64 3y ago> now you know that closing the lid doesn't matter For something so low effort, this one new study isn't going to change my habit of closing it "just in case."
- bryan0 3y agoI remember that mythbusters episode and I thought the conclusion was that the toothbrush bacteria cultures were no different than the control, which was a toothbrush right out of the package?
- falserum 3y agoMy vague recollection of that show matches yours.
- altairTF 3y agoI knew I had this info from some place, and it was the MythBusters episode! Thanks for the reminder. I always put the lid down because of that episode but was unable to remember it. It just became natural
- polishdude20 3y agoHow many cases have there been of people getting sick from things on their bathroom counter though? Like sure, you're measuring the physical phenomena and then concluding it leads to sickness but how significantly does it lead to sickness?
- unsupp0rted 3y agoIt’s very hard to measure and attribute. But that doesn’t mean it’s not common. Similar to how many (?) cases of patients getting sick from a doctor’s neck tie or a nurse having used a touchscreen. It’s almost certainly not zero. Is it a lot though?
- Sakos 3y agoI think it's not really relevant for your home toilet, but once you start thinking about public toilets in high traffic areas and/or high points of contact between different population groups like airports, doctor's offices, hospitals, malls, etc., I don't know why it wouldn't be worth investigating this and the potential risks.
- q1w2 3y agoIt's definitely relevant in family homes where parents/siblings/guests share bathroom use. When one child gets sick in our house, we take some efforts to keep them somewhat isolated, and these measures have been usually successful. The bathroom is the weak link in their routine as they continue to share it with siblings. This report reinforces us asking them to spray disinfectant. Before we enacted some of these policies in our home, one kid getting a bug from school meant the entire family would get it. Now that's much less common.
- mariushn 3y agoWhat other measures do you take? How do the children feel about it, do they understand why it's necessary? Thanks
- 3y ago
- low_tech_punk 3y agoThe true power of lid closure is that it makes you feel gross and REALLY want to wash your hands, and by washing your hands, you get rid of 99% of the risks.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoNot if you close the lid using your foot :)
- WeAddValue 3y agoOr your, oh, nevermind.
- low_tech_punk 3y agolol, exactly to the point though, knowing others using their foot makes you want to wash hands even more ;)
- sixstringtheory 3y agoI know other people use their feet, which is partly why I use my foot
- cooperadymas 3y agoAh, game theory at its finest.
- low_tech_punk 3y agotragedy of the public toilets
- sokoloff 3y agoUnless the lid is powered as part of a washlet... (which I can whole-heartedly recommend as one of the best ways I've spent $1K on my house).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackthememes 3y agoI remember seeing this pitch on Dragon's Den about sealing toilets when they flush and the founder being laughed out of the room: https://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/pitches/common-sense-toilet-seat-company https://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/pitches/common-sense-toilet-se...
- goodpoint 3y agoIt's amazing how disrespectful the "dragons" can be when they don't understand the value of a product.
- hermitcrab 3y agoThey sure love toilets on Dragon's Den (the 'inventors' anyway).
- schiffern 3y agoCan't blame the inventors really. Reality: to most audiences the toilet (and sanitation technology in general) is just a punchline, and the show's producers know that. That's why. We're getting what we pay for, and we vote with our eyeballs. The proposed sealed toilet seat[0] is honestly a good idea, and it's a sensible implementation of the concept. I wish them luck. The TV segment felt oddly like a modern-day version of when John Snow said that maybe we shouldn't drink cholera water, everybody. :-\ [0] https://whatsonyourtoothbrush.com/ https://whatsonyourtoothbrush.com/
- adolph 3y agoMaybe this whole "emitting body waste into a liquid" thing isn't a good idea. Maybe vacuum containers should be held to one's body during emissions and the silver/copper/stainless steel interfaces cleaned with lasers and UV afterward. The toilet was a great innovation in its day, but it seems ripe for disruption.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoAnd think of how much more productive we could be if we could save trips to a dedicated room for it! Every desk could be fitted with a waste vacuum, right next to the soylent dispenser. Just don't mix them up...
- adolph 3y agoWhy fit desks with it? It would be like a mid-sized handheld vacuum cleaner. Carry it around with you. Clothing will be redesigned around it. [0] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/12/04/the-invention-that-runs-on-hype/8481bee1-6c48-4c02-af00-b433e1312aa7/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/12/04/...
- g8oz 3y agoVacuum toilets are a well-established technology that deserves more attention. https://www.introba.com/news/5-reasons-vacuum-toilets-are-future-healthcare https://www.introba.com/news/5-reasons-vacuum-toilets-are-fu...
- harveywi 3y agoThat is a bit overkill and lacking in energy efficiency and sustainability, though. A more environmentally conscious solution would be for western nations to bring back some French innovations from the centuries ago such as the bidet followed by the trebuchet.
- maxglute 3y agoThis post looks grey from downvote, but I agree, I am profoundly disatisfied with how stagnant flushing technology has been. I don't just want nice bidet and warm seats, I want a continuous flow removing poop while I'm on the seat.
- wiradikusuma 3y agoI know this is serious science, but I can't help but wonder, how did these people conduct their research? I kept thinking the toilet in a gas station, but I'm sure they did it in an isolated, purpose-built toilet in a research facility. But shit is shit, and how did they "deploy" the object for repeatable experiments?
- dumpHero2 3y agoFrom what I remember, they put a toilet in a clean white empty room, and flushed some ink. Then they looked how far the ink spots splattered. But don't quote me on this.
- kej 3y agoIt's literally the second paragraph of the article: >A surrogate for human enteric viruses (bacteriophage MS2) was added to household and public toilet bowls and flushed. The resulting viral contamination of the toilet and other restroom surfaces was then determined.
- nashashmi 3y ago> The use of a disinfectant during bowl cleaning reduces cross-contamination of surfaces. Why is the title of the paper about lid closure when it says that does not help? It should be about disinfecting as that does help.
- gainda 3y agothe full title says toilet bowl cleaning, too
- scythe 3y agoNot sure why they used viruses? Most of the interesting fecal pathogens are bacteria — particularly E. coli, Clostridium dificile, Vibrio spp., Shigella spp.. The major exception is polio, which has thankfully become rare. Bacteria are a bit larger and probably less diffusive than viruses, raising questions about the generalizability.
- jallbrit 3y ago> Aerosolization of viruses via toilet flushing may be more impactful, compared with aerosolization of bacteria, given differences in response to humidity and in droplet size. Various studies have indicated that viruses retain viability at both low or high relative humidities and, therefore can remain infectious in droplet nuclei and other aerosols, which may stay suspended in the air for hours to days. Also, viruses are likely to aerosolize more easily than bacteria and 94% of virus has been shown to partition into liquid phase rather than solid phase.
- Aachen 3y agoIf my very rudimentary biology knowledge serves me well, viruses are a lot smaller than bacteria because they're just little bits of RNA and bacteria have a whole bunch of stuff around that to actually live. Wouldn't the smallest realistically dangerous particle be the thing to test with? Larger things might not be carried by the droplets, but shouldn't the other way around be fine? I'm just guessing/reasoning it out here and would be happy to learn more if you know this isn't correct!
- scythe 3y agoMy suggestion is that the more diffusive, small particles are less likely to be trapped by a lid. That could mean that larger, heavier bacteria follow more ballistic and less Brownian trajectories and their distribution would be affected more by putting the lid down.
- dorfsmay 3y agoThe next step will be fan intake in the floor of the bathroom instead of the ceiling. Now, everytime I switch the toilet fan on I think about the researches on airplanes during covid that showed that there was little contamination thanks to cabin air intake being at the floor level and fresh air coming from the top.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThat research is pretty much bunk because those systems are not always active when the place is occupied. They’re almost always off during boarding and taxiing. Like it’s great to filter the air in this way, but if you let everyone bathe in each others breath for an hour before turning them on, the practical impact on transmission is drastically diminished.
- Arelius 3y agoYes, sure. But it gives helpful guidance. It means that if you wear a mask through the airport, and before takeoff and after landing. Taking it off for meals and the like is a much lower risk then not wearing a mask at all.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoSure, this is true. I just remember being somewhat peeved during the pandemic when this was being touted by airlines without this caveat, with the express intention of misleading people about actual risks.
- Arelius 3y agoAgreed. The study was really important. The messaging around it was not so great.
- dekhn 3y agoModern industrial toilets (that is, ones installed in work facilities) use high pressure to, uh, mash up the flushable materials, which seems to greatly increase the aerosolization. I had some friends in grad school who put bacteria-sensitive substance on the walls of the toilet stall and you could easily see hot spots of deposited matter.
- nerpderp82 3y agoAerosol Generation by Modern Flush Toilets https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4666014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4666014/ https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/36734 https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/36734 has additional supporting material > Up to 145,000 droplets were produced per flush, with the high-energy flushometer producing over three times as many as the lower energy PAT and over 12 times as many as the lowest energy HET despite similar flush volumes. The mean numbers of fluorescent droplet nuclei particles aerosolized and remaining airborne also increased with flush energy. Fluorescent droplet nuclei per flush decreased with increasing particle size. These findings suggest two concurrent aerosolization mechanisms—splashing for large droplets and bubble bursting for the fine droplets that form droplet nuclei.
- basil-rash 3y agoDoes anyone know what to make of the error bars? Most of the time the plus/minus is larger than the actual datum. Lid up (1014 PFU MS2) 11.02 ± 10.77 3.64 ± 3.19 6.23 ± 6.47 Lid down (1014 PFU MS2) 4.25 ± 4.48 1.77 ± 1.97 2.31 ± 2.54
- armoredkitten 3y agoTypically, when I see that it's an indication that the distribution is non-normal. And for anything resembling "count" data (e.g., number of dollars, parts per million, whatever), it's pretty much guaranteed that it will be positively skewed -- because you have a hard lower limit (0) but no upper limit. That said, I have no expertise with the field of, uhh, toiletology, to know whether they handled this data appropriately or not. Edit: Sorry, just to add that typically with non-normal data like that, my inclination would be to report the median (which will be less affected by skew than the mean), and perhaps the interquartile distance (difference between the 25th and 75th percentile) rather than SD. But most statistical models are still designed around means and SDs, so you may still be inclined to report means and SDs since that's what you statistically tested for differences.
- CaffeinatedDev 3y agoMy life is a lie
- demondemidi 3y agoI’ve eaten enough random ass after getting blackout drunk at bars during my 20s to not worry about this.
- stcredzero 3y agoI think one of the fancier hotels I was staying in, in China during my last trip had a fancy toilet with heated seat, bidet, and bowl air extraction fan. (Fancy hotels in China are geared to the tastes of party officials, which is why they often outdo the fanciest hotels in the US. Often for about 1/10th the price!)
- itronitron 3y agoCan't wait for them to evaluate the ultra-aerosolizing Dyson Hand Dryer which is unfortunately in so many airport bathrooms. Pro-tip >> when traveling at least wear a mask when using a public bathroom.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoI consider it a game to try using those without bumping my hand into any part of it or getting any water in my face
- m3kw9 3y agoBut if you close to flush when standing next to it, it would definitely stop aerosols from flying into you. This study is not saying anything new because everyone knows the toilet seat is dirty regardless what you do, while everyone’s concern is aerosols flying on their faces.
- forgueam 3y agoIs there a functional reason for why toilet lids do not close in an air-tight fashion? If there were no openings for the particles to escape through, it seems like it would make closing the lid more effective.
- wellthisisgreat 3y agohow would you open it without struggling to pry it from the suction?
- Symbiote 3y agoIt could have a seal like a fridge door.
- JJMcJ 3y agoWouldn't the air above the water tend to hold the water in the bowl, since emptying the bowl would create a partial vacuum? And would that effect, if it exists, be enough to prevent effective flushing?
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoI wonder if this will be submitted as a candidate for the Ig Nobel prize?
- superkuh 3y agoIn winter I bring my tropical plants indoors and that means lots of lights in the bathroom where I overwinter them. 20,000 lumens is enough to see the droplet spray. Gross. It definitely changed how I urinate and lid closure during flushing.
- twic 3y ago> Two types of toilets of United States design were used. [...] The public toilet was tankless, using water line pressure for flushing, as is typical of United States public toilets. [...] The home toilet was a typical siphonic toilet with a tank So neither was a tanked washdown toilet, as is universal in Europe. I wonder if those behave any differently.
- sudden_dystopia 3y agoIn other words, out of our control and we should stop worrying about it as we have been flushing toilets for roughly a century and we haven’t all dropped dead.
- d1str0 3y agoThe best reason to close your toilet lid, in my opinion, is you are 99% less likely to ever drop anything into the bowl. I’ve accidentally knocked TP rolls in several times, and the phone once or twice, and probably other stuff. Ever since I started closing the lid habitually I realized I havent dropped anything into the bowl in a long time.
- tass 3y agoI remember at work years ago hearing a little scream from the bathroom and it was because someone dropped the roll in and didn’t know what to do. Lid’s always closed at home - I have a cupboard above the toilet that’s full of stuff likely to fall.
- smcleod 3y agoAnd your cat isn’t going to drink from it.
- mikrotikker 3y agoNot to mention cats knocking jewelry and phones in for a laugh.
- londons_explore 3y agoI want toilets to have better fans. Specifically, we need a fan that runs while the light is on in the toilet and for 5 mins afterwards and can do perhaps 1 full air change per minute (that's a lot of air moving, but toilets tend to be small). And that air should go outdoors (maybe via a heat exchanger and filter)
- higgins 3y agorequested follow up study: Impacts of toilet seat position during marriage
- bikenaga 3y agoDespite the conclusions of the article, I'm going to keep closing the lid since my toilet uses a Flushmate. The power flush works really well, but it surely produces lots of aerosols (though seemingly not a lot of large-droplet splash).