Toilet Tale

Jimbo was pleasantly surprised when he saw a little post card slipped under the door of his office when he came in for work yesterday morning. The card was from a student who recently made a trip to Singapore and picked up the card, thinking that Jimbo would “find this postcard interesting”. (Thanks! And yes, it is interesting)

Here’s what was printed on the card:

Which begs the question: Okay, so you can’t get HIV from the toilet seat, so what CAN you get from the toilet seat?

Actually not much, from what Jimbo read on the net.

For instance you can’t really catch public lice (crabs): Crabs – also known as pubic lice – can be spread by sex play and other intimate or close contact. They’re also spread by contact with infected bedding, clothing, upholstered furniture. A common misbelief is that infestation can be spread by sitting on a toilet seat. This isn’t likely, since lice cannot live long away from a warm human body. Also, lice do not have feet designed to walk or hold onto smooth surfaces such as toilet seats.

You can’t really catch Genital Herpes, unless “Basically you have to be sitting on a toilet seat immediately after someone who has Herpes Simplex in outbreak sat on it and managed to smear a large amount of virus on the seat. You will then have to have rubbed either your genitals, anus or an open cut on your bottom or thighs on the toilet seat to catch the virus but even in an unlikely scenario like this, the chances of catching Herpes are very slim”

And basically, you can’t really get any STD from a toilet seat. “To my knowledge, no one has ever acquired an STD on the toilet seat — unless they were having sex on the toilet seat!” says Abigail Salyers, PhD, president of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).

Still, there are some things that one can do to minimize the risk of getting an infection when using a public toilet:
* Rather than flushing the toilet with your bare hand, use your shoe. Everyone else is probably doing it.
* After washing your hands, use a paper towel to shut off the faucet and to open the door on your way out, in order to keep from becoming contaminated (but then again, in Malaysia, toilets with paper towels are rare)
* Whenever possible, use a restroom stall with toilet paper that is almost completely covered in a metal or plastic holder, which will guard against splattering water and germs.
* Use hot-air hand dryers with care. In order to feel the hot air, you might have to get very close to the vents. Don’t let your hands touch the surface of the vents, however, or you’ll risk contamination.

So, why is Jimbo talking about toilet (tall) tales?

Here’s a story.

Once upon a time, a young couple got married. As expected with marriage, the young couple had sex. Two weeks later, the wife felt pain and discomfort near her genitalia which rapidly progressed to severe ulcerations and secondary bacterial infection. Because she sought treatment late (due to shyness maybe), she was in shock and having high swinging temperature by the time she presented to the hospital.

Thankfully, with a good course of antibiotics and Acyclovir, she recovered over a period of 2 weeks. The diagnosis was Herpes Simplex with secondary bacterial infection.

The wife said she never ‘did it’ before marriage. “Ditto”, claimed the hubby but he did say he had some ‘lesions’ on his penis on and off for a long time.

The wife asked Jimbo how she got the awful thing. The hubby asked Jimbo how he got the awful thing.
The wife looked at the hubby one kind.
The hubby looked back at the wife one kind.
They both looked at Jimbo one kind.

It’s a one month old marriage.

And so Jimbo took a deep breath….

Muttered a prayer asking for forgiveness for what he was about to do….

And said…

“Maybe one of you got it from a dirty toilet”…

Friday, 030709 @ 0700

*Confession is good for the soul, bad for the reputation.