Study: Dyson's powerful jet dryers may spread 1,300 times more germs than paper towels

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Sticking your hands into a Dyson Airblade — those super-effective hand dryers often found at fancy restaurants and train stations — is kind of magical. The machine's opposing "blades" of air slice the water right off your hands, no paper towels required.

But there may be be an unseen cost to those wondrous air blasts: spraying virulent germs everywhere, according to a new study in the Journal of Applied Microbiology.

Led by researchers at the University of Westminster in London, the study from the found that jet air dryers tend to spread 1,300 times more germs than using paper towels.

To test the spread of germs, the study used the MS2 virus, which only infects bacteria and not people. The researchers covered their gloved hands in the virus, then dried their now virus-loaded hands with three different methods: a jet air dryer, a common warm air dryer, and paper towels.

They also set up glass plates with outlines of people on them at six different heights — ranging from the level of an adult's head to a child's legs — to measure the viral spread. The plates were covered in a layer of E. coli, a target for the MS2 virus. If a virus managed to land on a plate, it would wipe out the bacterial colony, leaving a noticeable dead patch known as a plaque.

The results? Pretty disgusting.

Using a jet air dryer dispersed 1,300 times more viruses than just drying with paper towels, and the jet dyer spread 60 times more than your average box-like air dryers. Even more surprising, 70% of the viruses spread by jet dryers landed at the height of a child's face.

Most of the viral material spread by the jet air dryer settled about 0.25 meters away, but even at three meters, the jet dryer spread 500 times more viruses than the warm air dryer. Unsurprisingly, drying your hands with a paper towel spreads zero viruses at the three-meter mark.

Tomwsulcer/Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)

And the viruses lingered, too. Fifteen minutes after using the jet air dryer, there were 50 times more remaining viruses in the air than after using a warm air dryer and 100 times more than 15 minutes after using paper towels.

Tech Insider reached out to Dyson for comment on the study, and the company chalked it up to fear tactics from rivals in the hand-drying industry.

"The paper towel industry has scare mongered with this research for the past four years," a Dyson representative wrote in an email to Tech Insider. "It has been conducted under artificial conditions, using unrealistically high levels of virus contamination on unwashed, gloved hands." (Tech Insider contacted the authors of the new study, but they were not immediately available to respond to Dyson's comment.)

Dyson has a point: Roughly 90% of people say they wash their hands after using the restroom. Then again, perhaps 95% of them are not doing it correctly — that is, with soap and water and scrubbing vigiorusly for at least 20 seconds.

The company also noted that its Airblade jet dryer filters its air supply (though clean air can still certainly blow existing germs around a bathroom), and shared a video with us titled "Paper's dirty secret," which counters the cleanliness of paper towels.

There are certainly benefits from air dryers — for one, they don't create massive amounts of paper waste like paper towels do. Also, Dyson Airblades are amazing at their primary function: drying hands.

The moral of this story is to always (and correctly) wash your hands with soap after using the bathroom. And if we're to trust this new research, that seems to be especially important before using a jet air dryer.

Otherwise you may be aerosolizing harmful microbes and risk launching them right into the faces of kids.

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