The Janitors' Closet

Poop on your shoes

Interesting article in Smithsonian's daily magazine, on recent testing for animal fecal matter on sidewalks, shoes and interior floors in New York City.

The supposition (quite reasonably) is that the poop plops (as it were) on sidewalks, spreads via water and traffic, and enters one's building.  Rather evocatively, in testing for bacteria load, per the article:

"They detected the highest amounts of enterococci in the building’s entryway and smaller amounts on interior floors. And carpets had more bacteria than bare flooring: While a carpeted entryway had around 22,000 enterococci per square meter, uncarpeted floor in the same area had only 100 per square meter".

Thus, it appears that carpeting in the entry area (doesn't say how much, as in how far you must walk over the carpet for the observed effect) seems to do a marvelous job stopping bacteria.  Stopping various varieties of "dirt" is the rational behind entry matting; a rented, regularly laundered and treated mat should perform even better than a hunk of carpet.

That's why we suggest them to our clients.  The more dirt (and poop bacteria) stopped at the door, the cleaner the building stays.  Better for our cleaners, and better for our client.

I'm reminded of bleach and vinegar

It's been a while since I've had to put much thought into the dangers of various cleaning chemicals; we use only Johnson/Diversey chemicals, monitor what's in our janitor closets and on our vans, and train our crews in safety and proper chemical usage. So an article from our good friends at Cleaning Maintenance Management, about the danger of mixing bleach and vinegar, served as a useful wake-up:

"While the hazards of mixing ammonia and bleach might be more widely known, there’s another common cleaning product that can cause a deadly situation if added to bleach, and that’s vinegar.

"When vinegar, often used to clean floors and glass as a natural and safe alternative to chemical products, is mixed with bleach, the combination produces chlorine gas, which according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can be deadly."

As we point out to our crews, chlorine gas killed a whole lot of folks on the Western Front during World War I; we don't want to replicate that experience in our accounts.

Fungal invasion

Early on in the Covid pandemic, we started doing quite a lot of electrostatic disinfection jobs, both for own ongoing janitorial clients and others, to help mitigate Covid exposure.  I also did my best to keep on top of the fast evolving science on the pathogen, risk and means of transmission, and so on.  A part of that was following, religiously (if I may combine religion with science), a column by an epidemiologist . 

Much of her work, while certainly useful for anyone in the prevention business, was a bit depressing.  I was delighted to see this morning a column exploring a recent sci-fi flick about a mutant fungus taking out humanity.  Anyone remember "Invasion of the body Snatchers", a generation ago, or "Day of the Triffids". a generation before that?

She runs a fact/fiction analysis, point by point.  Take a look; I shan't spoil the suspense.  Several unexpected conclusions, at least to me. But the fungus is real.

She does, however, note that present day funguses kill quite a few folks world-wide (more than malaria, for instance), and are often encountered in healthcare settings.  I'm delighted that our go-to disinfectant, Diversey's OxivirTB, if fungicidal.