Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles
45 comments
·April 30, 2025comrade1234
neodypsis
Not true. It depends on the pathogen.
chewbacha
A hot dry cycle will also help with this through desiccation but is more damaging to clothing. Should be fine for scrubs though.
lallysingh
I'll wager the ones that do the poorest job in removing pathogens are also the most power and water efficient. Trade-offs matter.
wnissen
Since less water would increase the detergent concentration, I was wondering if the opposite was the case. My family's old washer filled up the entire tub with water, so any detergent (and any pathogen, to be fair) would be quite diluted.
Short cycle length certainly makes sense to be correlated with pathogens. The lousy LG "TurboWash" only takes 28 minutes to do a full load of laundry but certainly doesn't get very much clean in that time.
I have to admit it was surprising that textiles have been identified as the source of hospital acquired infections. You'd think that even if the laundering didn't eliminate pathogens, it would greatly reduce them and make any clusters more diffuse.
fwipsy
As I understand, it's been identified as one possible vector, not conclusively proven to be the only (or even largest) source.
userbinator
I'm not familiar with the machines in this article, but you can look up the specs on them and see what you find.
cowfarts
[dead]
xyzzy123
That's why you dry your clothes on the washing line in the sun?
jerlam
My HOA has decreed that clotheslines are prohibited.
But my state has also made it illegal to prohibit the use of clotheslines, a "right to dry" law.
nemomarx
Do a lot of apartments have access to a washing line? Also seems kinda slow?
xyzzy123
This is fair - no it won't work in every situation, just didn't see good old air and sunshine mentioned in the thread anywhere.
Surely the only scalable solution in a medical context is to get workers to change out of uniform at work and hand over to industrial laundry service, everything else relies on procedure outside the work environment which not everyone is going to do reliably and is difficult to supervise / QC.
fwipsy
If 90% of workers are able to effectively sterilize their uniforms, will that solve 90% of the problem? Less? More?
whiterock
slow? much faster than hanging them up to dry inside
PaulDavisThe1st
Depends a lot on the climate and season.
positr0n
A lot of people I know would be constantly sick from allergies if they did this.
userbinator
The ones in this study are all relatively new front-loaders. I would've liked to see some much older and top-loader machines in there too, along with "traditional" TSP-based detergent.
m463
I like Dr Annie's laundry experiments:
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe
Well c difficile is an exception rather than the rule in terms of resilience
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tehjoker
Hard to know what to make of this when the types of detergent are not disclosed. I recall in 2022, Oxyclean was recommended for destroying MPOX virions.
gpm
For what it's worth the supplemental methods file has this to say about the detergents selected
> Two commonly used UK washing detergents were selected for the assay: a non-biological liquid detergent (15-30%:Anionic surfactants; 5-15%:nonionic surfactants; <5%:phosphonate, perfume, soap, optical brighteners, methylisothiazolinone, octylisothiazolinone) and a non-biological powder detergent (5-15%: oxygen-based bleaching agents, anionic surfactants; <5%: nonionic surfactants, polycarboxylates, soap, perfume, phosphonates, optical brighteners, zeolites)
This doesn't really mean anything to me, but maybe it means something to you?
In some sense I think the real takeaway from the study is "we shouldn't be having healthcare workers wash their own patient/pathogen facing uniforms", and that takeaway seems robust against the hypothesis that only some detergents would solve the problem. As a population we can be sure that some of the healthcare workers are going to use the detergents that don't solve the problem.
twic
Interesting, the materials and methods says:
> Each wash cycle was performed with either biological (14g per kilogram of fabric) or non-biological detergents (20g per wash).
But your quoted passage describes two non-biological detergents. So did they use a biological detergent or not?
Anyway, the first one sounds like Persil liquid:
https://www.ocado.com/products/persil-laundry-washing-liquid...
> 15-30%: Anionic surfactants. 5-15%: Nonionic surfactants. <5%: Perfume, Phosphonates, Soap, Optical brighteners, Methylisothiazolinone, Octylisothiazolinone
And the second one sounds like Persil powder:
https://www.ocado.com/products/persil-fabric-cleaning-washin...
> 5-15%: Oxygen-based bleaching agents, Anionic surfactants. <5% Nonionic surfactants, Polycarboxylates, Soap, Perfume, Optical brighteners, Zeolites, Tetramethyl acetyloctahydronaphthelenes
Not quite the same, but similar. Both are perfectly normal brand-name household laundry detergents.
gpm
> But your quoted passage describes two non-biological detergents. So did they use a biological detergent or not?
It depends on what experiment in the paper you are looking at.
The supplemental section is addressing the "Laundry detergent tolerance induction assay" (a heading you can ctrl-f for) where they only used the non-biological detergent, "as biological detergent contains enzymes and other potentially disruptive components that may influence the assay".
If you go to the results section you will see results for both the biological and non-biological detergent under "Decontamination efficacy of domestic laundry machines" and so on. I didn't see anything specifying what biological detergents were used.
tehjoker
The second one sounds similar to oxyclean.
neodypsis
You need to add sanitizer to the wash cycle, not just detergent.
eth0up
First, I neither have an eidetic memory or links to the patents nor lawsuit. However....
I remember finding a lawsuit, if I remember correctly, between Samsung and a certain municipality of an unremembered state.
The patent involved a lining within surfaces of the washing and drying systems for hospitals which impart silver particles. The marketing part suggested it would spare x amount of bleach and have equal or greater efficacy.
The municipal water waste management objected based on the breakdown phase of the sewage relying on bacteria. The silver, they surmised, would obviously hinder this process and so on.
Then, as a side note, you have products from waste management called eg Sludge, which is used as fertilizer. Supposedly it is forbidden on vegetable crops, but I once interviewed a cattle rancher who said his subsidies were dependent on his acceptance and use of Sludge.
Further aside, the real problem here is the 'forever chemicals' that accompany these products. It tends to permanently compromise the land it's used on.
I remember the rancher telling me he's seen his cows chewing on condoms.
OutOfHere
Maybe use a long cycle for the washer.
tuatoru
Do hospitals seriously allow people to launder their own uniforms?
That would never be allowed in the food industry.
zabzonk
I don't know about today, but when I worked in microbiology in the 70s & 80s all our lab coats and similar clothing were washed in central facilities - in most hospitals, the central laundry was (and still is) one of the biggest facilities in the hospital.
iaaan
What do you mean? I've never heard of a restaurant that launders the employees' clothes for them.
Brian_K_White
restaurants have laundry service for kitchen pants, jackets, aprons, right along with all the towels, napkins, and tablecloths. They aren't the employees own clothes they got from walmart, they are provided by the laundry service like the towels.
forgetfreeman
Now I'm wondering where you live because this is definitely not a thing in the overwhelming majority of restaurants in the continental US.
LadyCailin
I have worked at sit down dining and fast food, and neither places did my laundry for me. Aprons, sure, but not the rest of the clothes. The clothes which I had to buy in the first place.
tacker2000
I would guess that most restaurants already have a laundry service for their tablecloths, etc… which would also take on the staff clothes?
But i never worked in a restaurant, just guessing here.
ender341341
they probably do aprons and stuff like that but even places with uniforms it's super rare that the restaurant would handle laundering clothing.
closewith
In most of the world, most healthcare workers launder their own scrubs and uniforms at home. I used to have a specific washing machine for it because I hated putting forgets uniforms with patient bodily fluids in my normal washing machine.
Things like scrubs exchange machines and central laundries washing staff gear is rare even in hospitals in the developed world.
nadir_ishiguro
I was a bit surprised by that when I first learned that from a healthcare worker, but it's true.
I think this should be taken care of by the employer.
forgetfreeman
So should sane work hours and good pay but here we are.
dylan604
After watching The Pitt, they have a mini-plot line around the scrubs exchange machine like it's a normal thing. It was the first I had ever seen one, but I don't work in the medical industry. It felt like something used just to allow for the script to work.
lotsofpulp
After seeing that machine, the only way I could make sense of that machine being used is a corrupt hospital exec buying it from their cousin’s company or something.
PaulDavisThe1st
Nor firefighting PPE.
60C held for 15+ minutes should be enough for sterilization. The research paper says they washed at 60C but that the quick cycle was especially poor at sterilization. Other than that I didn’t read the paper closer to see if it was a temperature control problem or not enough time at 60C or something else.