The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health was awarded to three physicians from the Glasgow Western Infirmary for a Case Report on wounds sustained to the buttocks due to collapsing toilets.
This was attributed to the age related weakening of the porcelain fittings, many dating from the earliest instances of Victorian Public Health.
Furthermore, injuries are frequently sustained by people who stand on toilet seats to reach a height, and slip. There are also instances of people slipping on a wet bathroom floor or from a bath and concussing themselves on the fixture.
It is certainly a dangerous activity to go to the toilet and yet it is such a regular and mundane event in our lives that we may not be totally aware to the possibility of a range of hazards or choose to ignore them if in a hurry to do our business.
The following, and continued in the following blog, contains a sorry catalogue of some of the pitfalls and dangers of using a lavatory or bathroom.
In young boys, one of the most common causes of genital injury is when the toilet seat falls down while they are standing at the toilet. Just the thought of that is enough to make your eyes water.
Smaller children run the risk of drowning if they fall headfirst into the toilet bowl. There are also plenty of urban myths and hearsay cases of forcible immersion into a toilet as part of an initiation ritual at a school, organisation or in the military or as just plain bullying.
Injuries to adults include bruised buttocks, tail bones, and dislocated hips from unsuspectingly sitting on the toilet bowl rim because the seat is up or loose. Most modern floor mounted water closets are quite low set to the floor and a twinge or muscle spasm can occur whilst mounting and leaving the sitting position.
Injuries can also be caused by pinching of the skin on bottom or thighs due to splits in plastic seats or by splinters from wooden seats, or as documented in the research of the Ig Nobel Prize Winners the collapse of a toilet itself under the weight of the user.
Older high tank cast iron or lead-lined wooden cisterns have been known to detach from the wall when the chain is pulled to flush, causing injuries to the user. These are heavy and cumbersome fittings and happily not many are left in toilet compartments following modernisation in many homes.
Toilet related injuries are also surprisingly common, with some estimates ranging up to 40,000 injuries in the US every year.
In the past, this number would have been much higher, due to the material from which toilet paper was made. This was shown in a 1935 Northern Tissue advertisement which depicted splinter free toilet paper.
In 2012, 2.3 million toilets in the United States, and about 9,400 in Canada, were recalled due to faulty pressure-assist flush mechanisms which put users at risk of the fixture exploding.
There are also injuries around sanitary ware caused by animals. Some black widow spiders like to spin their web below the toilet seat because insects abound in and around it. Therefore, several persons have been bitten on their nether regions while using a toilet, particularly in the case of an outhouse facility. Although there is immediate pain at the bite site, these bites are rarely fatal.
It has been reported that in some cases rats crawl up through toilet sewer pipes and emerge in the toilet bowl, so that toilet users may be at risk of being bitten by a rat. However, many rat exterminators do not believe this, as pipes, at generally six inches wide, are too large for rats to climb and are also very slippery. Reports by janitors are always on the top floor, and could involve the rats on the roof, entering the soil pipe through the roof vent, lowering themselves into the pipe and then into the toilet.
In a very rare incident in May 2016, an 11 ft snake, a reticulated python, emerged from a squat toilet and bit the man using it on his penis at his home in Chachoengsao Province, Thailand. Both victim and python survived.
That must have been quite a shock to all parties involved.
(continues with the following blog..............)
source for #1 and #2; Wikipedia. Ig Nobel Prize Winners
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