I'm extremely uncomfortable with where this conversation has gone.

The official medically recommended method is dry your hands with paper towels.

If you are taking care of a sick person who could die on you, following recommended procedures is the most legally defensible thing to do. If they die, you are less likely to be charged with neglect and found guilty if you can honestly say "I followed medically recommended procedures."

It's probably a super bad idea to go into a court of law and say "I took the advice of some random internet stranger over medically recommended procedures." You should only take the advice of a random internet stranger in cases where you can't do what the medical establishment suggests because there's a shortage of medical supplies and they don't have answers for you etc.

When the medical establishment is giving you an emoji shrug and you could seriously die because of it, then it makes sense to listen to people with serious health problems who are saying "Well, I don't have a study, but this is what I do." and do a few of the things they suggest, but only those you can adequately wrap your brain around.

Based on a track record of getting healthier for nearly two decades, I'm confident that what I do is effective and is a superior approach to standard recommendations. I'm far less confident that I can adequately convey all the details in an internet discussion so as to make it work for other people.

I've made a few comments trying to be helpful because the medical establishment doesn't have adequate solutions and neither does the government. I've tried to be careful, but this discussion is getting into territory I actually was trying to avoid because it's overly personal, I can't prove it, it opens me up to personal attacks, etc.

As stated previously, I only commented at all because they are rationing medical care. So some people will be dependent on doing their best at home, in spite of being so sick that they should be hospitalized, but there just aren't hospital beds available for everyone in some places.

So, having said that, I'm going to try to reply in a conversational fashion to some of what you have asked. Please do not mistake this for medical advice or even for me trying to win some internet argument.

Do you have any references linking paper towel (disposal) in particular, as an added risk for drug-resistant bacteria, stunting enteric infections, sick building syndrome or your other claims?

To be clear: I am not making claims that paper towels are a source of sick building syndrome, etc. I'm saying we know that an unclean environment makes people sick. We even have words for it, like Sick Building Syndrome. This is not a new concept.

I've taken a quick look at your links. I'm not going to try to Google up citations of my own.

I'm speaking from first-hand experience as someone immunocompromised who has gotten off all drugs. I've certainly read up on studies about various things over the years, but trying to find you a study to support the opinions I've expressed here would be somewhat disingenuous.

I'm also really tired of trying to play that game. It's not a good game to play.

I've been attacked and harassed online for a lot of years by people who have a huge issue with the idea that I know anything medical in nature. No amount of trying to find citations to defend myself ever gets me anywhere at all.

So I'm speaking from first-hand experience and telling you this is my opinion and I stated up front that I'm not a doctor. I'm a former homemaker who spent years homeless and I have zero credibility in the eyes of a whole lot of people.

From your first link:

air from real-world bathrooms may contain fewer bacteria than the bathrooms in the study. The sampled restrooms were located in a university health sciences building, and at least some of the bacteria came from experiments going on in laboratories within the building.

So your study doesn't really say what your comment suggests it says.

Some general and rambling thoughts on hand dryers and semi related topics:

Most residential bathrooms will have fewer people using them than most public bathrooms. So they will typically have less variety of microbes.

It's absolutely possible for a hot air device to get contaminated and be a source of problems. But in my experience, when they are clean, properly located away from toilets and motion activated, they are better than paper towels.

I tend to hate the big commercial blowers used to dry out carpeting. They tend to be nasty and are sometimes visibly covered in lint.

You can Google up studies on how vacuum cleaners actively spread around infection. So it's certainly not unprecedented that some mechanical system nominally intended to improve hygiene actively spreads infection.

(I have no carpeting. It's nasty stuff. I have wood and tile floors.)

I also generally dislike forced air HVAC systems and stopped using the forced air heat in the last apartment I had that had such. I began buying space heaters rather than run the central heat in that apartment. I currently have radiant heat.

I most often use hot air hand dryers in Walmart bathrooms. Walmart bathrooms are unusually well designed. They are generally better than most other public restrooms and I wish Walmart would write the handbook for how to do a public bathroom right.

I don't like using hand dryers that aren't motion activated. The need to touch a button with wet hands degrades the cleanliness of the experience.

My dream home would include a motion activated hot air hand dryer because it's my preferred method of drying my hands when it's done right. It's certainly not always done right.

Your second link says:

The transmission of bacteria is more likely to occur from wet skin than from dry skin; therefore, the proper drying of hands after washing should be an integral part of the hand hygiene process in health care.

To me, this in no way suggests air drying your hands is a problem. To me, it suggests you should let them air dry thoroughly before touching stuff, not that you must use a quicker method.

I would especially be interested in this claim, as I would intuitively expect paper to be a worse environment for dangerous organisms than most other damp indoor locations.

Again, I'm absolutely not going to try to Google up some source to cite. I'm speaking from first-hand experience.

I do not own a trash can. Dry, non germy trash accumulates on the table between trash runs. Any damp or germy trash gets fairly promptly run down to the dumpster.

I will reiterate that I think it's a bad practice to let trash accumulate in an area with a sick person. My opinion that this is a super bad idea inspired my suggestion that if you use paper towels, you should flush them.

People have since provided a compelling argument that flushing them is a bad idea. Some have even done so without snark or personal attacks.

As someone with an incurable medical condition who has spent time on email support lists for people with chronic health issues, I can tell you that, in practice, when everyone at home is sick or when one person at home is extremely sick, it's very hard to stay on top of normal household chores. It's often just not realistic to add yet more chores, such as taking out the trash several times per day.

So in practice, not creating big piles of wet, germy trash is superior to finding ways to deal with the trash created by a lot of recommended best practices. Because in practice, you will probably find it sits there a lot longer than you thought it would while everyone is overwhelmed by events and struggling to come up with the energy to even put together a meal.

The combination of germiness, lack of energy and other constraints that come together during a health crisis create a perfect storm where there often seem to be no actual good answers and I think this very much contributes to fatalities.

Anything you can do to reduce the work load instead of adding to it while meeting a high standard for germ control is nothing short of a godsend in a situation like that.

It's why I usually air dry my hands. It's the only solution that I know will be actually clean and will not have knock on effects like creating piles of damp trash.

This is not medical advice. This is the ramblings of a chronically ill person currently running a fever, as I often do, who maybe should just not reply to you at all.

I said I was trying to leave this particular discussion. I would still like to do that. I don't at all like where it went.