ArticleIndoor air2018
Emission strength of airborne pathogens during toilet flushing.
Article in Indoor air, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sodium dichloroisocyanurate: a promising candidate for the disinfection of resilient drain biofilm.Infection prevention in practice · 2025Article
- Exploring toilet plume bioaerosol exposure dynamics in public toilets using a Design of Experiments approach.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Virus Emissions from Toilet Flushing: Comparing Urine-Diverting to Mix Flush Toilets.ACS ES&T water · 2023Article
- A comprehensive review of microbial contamination in the indoor environment: sources, sampling, health risks, and mitigation strategies.Frontiers in public health · 2023Review
- Technologies for pollutant removal and resource recovery from blackwater: a review.Frontiers of environmental science & engineering · 2023Review
- Commercial toilets emit energetic and rapidly spreading aerosol plumes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Vertical outbreak of COVID-19 in high-rise buildings: The role of sewer stacks and prevention measures.Current opinion in environmental science & health · 2022Review
- Changes in residents' hygiene awareness and behaviors in public toilets before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hangzhou, China: a two-round cross-sectional study.BMC public health · 2022Observational
- Ability of Essential Oil Vapours to Reduce Numbers of Culturable Aerosolised Coronavirus, Bacteria and Fungi.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- On the Critical Role of Human Feces and Public Toilets in the Transmission of COVID-19: Evidence from China.Sustainable cities and society · 2021Article
- What is the risk of acquiring SARS-CoV-2 from the use of public toilets?The Science of the total environment · 2021Review
- Wastewater aerosols produced during flushing toilets, WWTPs, and irrigation with reclaimed municipal wastewater as indirect exposure to SARS-CoV-2.Journal of environmental chemical engineering · 2021Review
- Numerical investigation on the transmission and dispersion of aerosols in a 7-stories building drainage system.Building and environment · 2021Article
- Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the environment: Occurrence, persistence, analysis in aquatic systems and possible management.The Science of the total environment · 2021Review
- Quantifying the risk of indoor drainage system in multi-unit apartment building as a transmission route of SARS-CoV-2.The Science of the total environment · 2021Article
- Article
- Aerosol generation in public restrooms.Physics of fluids (Woodbury, N.Y. : 1994) · 2021Article
- The bioaerosols emitted from toilet and wastewater treatment plant: a literature review.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2021Review
- The COVID-19 pandemic: Considerations for the waste and wastewater services sector.Case studies in chemical and environmental engineering · 2020Article
- A pilot study on the disinfection efficacy of localized UV on the flushing-generated spread of pathogens.Journal of hazardous materials · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The flushing of toilets generates contaminated aerosols, the transmission of which may cause the spread of disease, particularly in the immunocompromised or the elderly. This study investigated the emission strength of three types of airborne bacteria, namely Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas alcaligenes, during toilet flushing in a custom-built toilet under a controlled environment. Flushing was activated by a flushometer operated at two pressure levels, 400 kPa (high pressure [HP]) and 200 kPa (low pressure [LP]), and by a water cistern tank placed 95 cm (high tank [HT]) and 46 cm (low tank [LT]) above the toilet seat. The pathogens emitted by the first flush were calculated, with the correlations between airborne pathogen emissions and droplet concentration (HP, r=0.944, P<.001; LP, r=0.803, P<.001, HT, r=0.885, P<.05) and bacterial size (HP, r=-0.919, P<.001; LP, r=-0.936, P<.001; HT, r=-0.967, P<.05) in the different conditions then tested. The emission strength in the HP condition was statistically greater than that in the LP condition, whereas the cistern tank system produced less emissions than the flushometer system, and tank height was not found to be a sensitive parameter.
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