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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time buying the idea that if you are going to catch stomach flu, it will be from germs from "clean" laundry. Most germs just get washed away, and you can't completely eliminate germs elsewhere in the environment, so that seems like one of the least likely vectors.

Sorry, but this just seems like OCD disguised by a bit of science.

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Honestly, if you've got norovirus rolling through your household, the CDC's recommendation is to pretty much bleach as much of your house as possible.

And laundry as a source of transmission is pretty well known in infectious disease epidemiology. One of the biggest issues is not that people get it from clothing, but that the person who handles contaminated clothing is also quite likely to be the person who preps food. Norovirus only needs a very small number of viral particles to make you sick, and a kid sick on either end is shedding a lot of virus.

In a household full of disease you should be disinfecting (I mean with ethanol, not with soap) your hands before you handle the food anyway.

Soap works better against a number of pathogens, most notably sporulated C. difficile.

And while yes, you should, multiple different pathways to reducing your fomite exposure are better than relying on a single point of failure.

Well they handle the dirty laundry when putting it in the machine don't they? How does this help with that?

Another recommendation is "Wash your hands after handling laundry".

Kids get all sorts off of weird diseases that are hard to diagnose. The game of guess the critter whilst sleep deprived is awful. Bed bugs? Hand foot and mouth? Fleas? Skin sore? Chicken pox? You reach the stage where you are contemplating binning all soft furnishings. A tested way of washing things isn’t a silly idea.

Exactly what I meant. Yes, you can bleach all your clothes, but not your whole house.

Then, if you already have stomach flu, then I don't see how bleaching your clothes might help here. Take a medicine.

Finally, reading about stomach flu (I'm not a doctor), it doesn't look like a serious problem: > Most people with the stomach flu require no formal treatment. The key to a rapid and safe recovery at home (home remedy) is proper hydration.

If it gets more serious then take a pill or/and go to a doctor.

you see news articles about norovirus all the time in the context of cruise ships because these are enclosed spaces with stable populations who infect and re-infect each other through fecal contamination and aerosolized vomitus. full decontamination (to stop the spread) without clearing everyone off the ship is very difficult.

imagine a house with small children (who are not good at personal hygiene) as a tiny cruise ship which you can never fully disembark, and then when the cooking/cleaning staff (parents) get sick, things get really ugly.

it's generally easier to clean the hard surfaces in your house (with harsh stuff like bleach wipes) than to clean the soft surfaces. that's presumably why she focuses on the laundry infection vector.

It is still unpleasant and if you have deadline in work or have to care about relatives or have any other duties or train a sport or are paid by hour + have bills, then you don't want to stay home in bed vomiting unnecessary. Also, if you have one sick kid, you probably don't want two sick kids and you sick at the same time on top of it. It is cool that it is not dangerous, but you still need to find baby sitting or stay from work.

If you are high school student who dont like to go to school, getting sick is fine. If you are anybody else, you want to avoid it even if it does not require formal treatment.

It's a serious problem for the 70,000 people who get hospitalized for norovirus every year in the U.S. It's even more serious for the 800 people who die.

And given there's not "a pill" you can take for it, I don't see how a couple capfulls of bleach is more problematic.

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