Sometimes Hotel Guests End Up Sharing the Room With Germs

Most weary travelers unlock the hotel door, drop their suitcases and collapse. David Britton’s entry style is a little different.

He moves a hand over doorsills and the tops of mirrors. He runs a thumbnail over the inside end of the tub, where soap residue tends to collect. He looks everywhere--behind the shower curtain, on the bedspreads--for stray hairs.

And if you want to know whether the carpet’s clean? “Wear white socks and walk across it,” says Britton, vice president of marketing for Vagabond Franchise System Inc. in Los Angeles, which operates Vagabond hotel properties.

His checklist goes to the heart of an issue that should concern travelers: How do you know if a hotel room has been cleaned thoroughly? And what do you do if it isn’t? How do you know which dirt or other residue in a hotel room is hazardous to your health and which is a cosmetic, albeit disgusting, one? Is the hotel pool a risk? And should you take antibacterial sprays and soaps just in case?

Hotel rooms can be less than spotless and still not be hazardous to your health, experts agree. But hotel rooms that would pass the health department’s guidelines can still be cosmetically unacceptable, Britton says.

“Every member of the traveling public applies a stiffer standard to a hotel room than their own home,” says Britton, a past president of the California Hotel & Lodging Assn.

Stray hair, for instance, generally elicits disgust, but probably “you’re not going to catch anything from a stray hair,” says Dr. Aaron Glatt, a fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America and chief of infectious diseases at the St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers of New York. “Theoretically a stray hair could have nits [from head lice],” he says, but it’s not likely.

Cold viruses can live hours or even longer, Glatt says, although how long varies. If a departing guest with a cold sneezed on the door handle and it wasn’t thoroughly cleaned, in theory an arriving guest could touch the door handle, touch his face or nose and catch the cold, he says. But Glatt says that some things left in a hotel room should give you pause and trigger a request for a new room--or a move to another hotel. Those include a blood-stained bandage or towel and used condoms or syringes.

Beyond those red-flag items, “things can look clean and not be clean,” says Dr. John M. Leedom, professor of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at the USC’s Keck School of Medicine. For instance, you can catch scabies, which causes intense itching, from bedding or clothing as well as skin-to-skin contact with an infected person.

Guarding against scabies isn’t always easy, as Dr. Brian Terry, a Pasadena physician who often counsels travelers, can attest after treating many patients with the condition. “You get it from people and linens,” he says. “Make sure your linens are clean as well as your bed partners.”

It can be difficult for hotel guests to determine how sterile a hot tub is. Leedom simply avoids them. But if you can’t resist taking the plunge, be aware that one risk is so-called hot tub folliculitis, in which hair follicles become infected and inflamed as a result of bacterial contamination of the water. Again, it’s impossible to know by looking whether the organisms are lurking.

The hotel pool is generally not a major risk for health problems, Glatt says, but it is not risk-free. One hazard is fecal contamination. When this contamination occurs, it dramatically reduces the ability of the chlorine to kill the parasite Cryptosporidium, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That parasite can cause diarrhea if swimmers ingest contaminated water in swimming pools and water parks, the CDC says. There’s no foolproof way to avoid this, but Leedom suggests avoiding pools where young children in diapers are wading.So should you arm yourself with antibacterial products before leaving home?

Glatt calls the antibacterial sprays and soaps “a waste of time for non-hospital use.” And Leedom says, “I don’t think it’s been proven that these products are helpful to anyone but the people who sell them.”

But Terry suggests that waterless hand cleaners, available over the counter, can be helpful because they allow you to clean your hands before meals if water isn’t readily available, reduce germs and possibly illness.

All agree that the best defense is common sense.

If you do find potential health hazards in a room that’s clearly substandard, you have a right to leave without paying, says Jim Abrams, executive vice president of the California Hotel & Lodging Assn. “When you make a reservation it’s a basic contract,” he says. If the room is substandard “the innkeeper has breached his contract.”

He suggests alerting the innkeeper that you are departing and not paying, giving the reasons and requesting your credit card not be charged. If the room is substandard and no other acceptable room is available, there should be no repercussions, Abrams says.

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Healthy Traveler appears twice a month. The writer can be reached at [email protected].