If you needed yet another reason to go for the beautiful softness of patinated brass in your door furniture, here it is! We’ve already looked at how brass is naturally bactericidal, without having any resins, coatings or anything else applied to it. And we also know (from the foot pull post!) exactly how icky door knobs that aren’t in your own home can be.

Well, courtesy of an American news service, we are reminded that if somebody with the flu covers up a cough or sneeze with their hand, exactly like they are supposed to for good hygiene (when there aren’t any tissues handy), but then needs to open a door immediately afterwards, that door knob becomes a little flu heaven. Flu germs are one of those that can survive for a time at room temperature, and if they have little droplets of liquid (mmmm!) to live in, then you basically need to wait until other people have wiped the door knob clean with their clean hands to not have microscopic flu monsters running around on your skin.

While brass door knobs help with this issue, we are still working on converting the world! In the meantime, medical staff advise the same thing that work safety posters all over the world do – unless you have just washed your hands, you should consider them dirty. This means that if you clean your hands before you eat and even before you touch your face, you should be fairly safe from infecting yourself with the flu. Then if you clean your hands after coughing or sneezing (better yet, sneeze into a tissue and then clean them), and also after going to the bathroom, and eating, you can also protect other people from getting the flu … a flu which, if you pass it on, may eventually come back to haunt you!

Photo credits: Do the Sleeve Sneeze by djcmackay

          

This entry was filed under Door Furniture, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.