Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Fart of death? British Politicians are allegedly concerned about a case of Covid-19 transmission apparently caused by someone passing wind in an adjacent toilet cubicle.
Ministers ‘fear coronavirus could be spread by farting in a confined space’
Ministers have privately pointed to evidence that suggests Covid-19 could be spread when an infected person breaks wind in a confined space, such as a toilet, it is reported
By Chris Kitching Senior News Reporter
19:28, 24 JUL 2021Some UK Government ministers have privately expressed concerns that coronavirus could be spread through farting, it is claimed.
They have pointed to evidence that suggests Covid-19 could be spread when an infected person breaks wind in a confined space such as a toilet.
Tests have revealed that the virus can be present in faecal matter, though the science on whether flatulence could spread Covid is not definitive.
One minister, who wasn’t named, told the Telegraph that they had read “credible-looking stuff on it” from other countries, and there had been evidence of a “genomical-linked tracing connection between two individuals from a [lavatory] cubicle in Australia”.
…
Read more: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ministers-fear-coronavirus-could-spread-24609803
Sars-CoV-2 virus is present in urine and faecal excretions, though it seems to vary between patients – some patients suffer diarrhea and nausea, caused by the virus multiplying in the stomach. However even when present, the viral load in fecal matter appears to be significantly less than the load emitted when someone sneezes or coughs.
Shedding of SARS-CoV-2 in feces and urine and its potential role in person-to-person transmission and the environment-based spread of COVID-19
David L Jones 1, Marcos Quintela Baluja 2, David W Graham 2, Alexander Corbishley 3, James E McDonald 4, Shelagh K Malham 5, Luke S Hillary 4, Thomas R Connor 6, William H Gaze 7, Ines B Moura 8, Mark H Wilcox 9, Kata Farkas 10
The recent detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in feces has led to speculation that it can be transmitted via the fecal-oral/ocular route. This review aims to critically evaluate the incidence of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, the quantity and infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in feces and urine, and whether these pose an infection risk in sanitary settings, sewage networks, wastewater treatment plants, and the wider environment (e.g. rivers, lakes and marine waters). A review of 48 independent studies revealed that severe GI dysfunction is only evident in a small number of COVID-19 cases, with 11 ± 2% exhibiting diarrhea and 12 ± 3% exhibiting vomiting and nausea. In addition to these cases, SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be detected in feces from some asymptomatic, mildly- and pre-symptomatic individuals. Fecal shedding of the virus peaks in the symptomatic period and can persist for several weeks, but with declining abundances in the post-symptomatic phase. SARS-CoV-2 RNA is occasionally detected in urine, but reports in fecal samples are more frequent. The abundance of the virus genetic material in both urine (ca. 102-105 gc/ml) and feces (ca. 102-107 gc/ml) is much lower than in nasopharyngeal fluids (ca. 105-1011 gc/ml). There is strong evidence of multiplication of SARS-CoV-2 in the gut and infectious virus has occasionally been recovered from both urine and stool samples. The level and infectious capability of SARS-CoV-2 in vomit remain unknown. In comparison to enteric viruses transmitted via the fecal-oral route (e.g. norovirus, adenovirus), the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted via feces or urine appears much lower due to the lower relative amounts of virus present in feces/urine. The biggest risk of transmission will occur in clinical and care home settings where secondary handling of people and urine/fecal matter occurs. In addition, while SARS-CoV-2 RNA genetic material can be detected by in wastewater, this signal is greatly reduced by conventional treatment. Our analysis also suggests the likelihood of infection due to contact with sewage-contaminated water (e.g. swimming, surfing, angling) or food (e.g. salads, shellfish) is extremely low or negligible based on very low predicted abundances and limited environmental survival of SARS-CoV-2. These conclusions are corroborated by the fact that tens of million cases of COVID-19 have occurred globally, but exposure to feces or wastewater has never been implicated as a transmission vector.
Read more: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32836117/
Of course, most people don’t walk around in public naked – so in a sense we are already wearing butt masks in public, except when we do the business. A 2001 study suggested wearing clothes makes a significant difference to how how much environmental contamination can occur when someone farts.
Hot air?
“It all started with an enquiry from a nurse,” Dr Karl Kruszelnicki told listeners to his science phone-in show on the Triple J radio station in Brisbane. “She wanted to know whether she was contaminating the operating theatre she worked in by quietly farting in the sterile environment during operations, and I realised that I didn’t know. But I was determined to find out.”
Dr Kruszelnicki then described the method by which he had established whether human flatus was germ-laden, or merely malodorous. “I contacted Luke Tennent, a microbiologist in Canberra, and together we devised an experiment. He asked a colleague to break wind directly onto two Petri dishes from a distance of 5 centimetres, first fully clothed, then with his trousers down. Then he observed what happened. Overnight, the second Petri dish sprouted visible lumps of two types of bacteria that are usually found only in the gut and on the skin. But the flatus which had passed through clothing caused no bacteria to sprout, which suggests that clothing acts as a filter.
…
Read more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121900/
Lets just say I’m not exactly panicking about the hypothesised flatulence mode of transmission. Sneezing, coughing and surface contamination seem far more likely routes to infection than flatulence, though it seems remotely plausible that the occasional transmission through flatulence may occur.
Correction (EW): Sars-CoV-2, not Covid-Sars-2…
There are videos of people farting in the X-ray unit.
Pants doesn’t stop transmission of the cloud, it comes through very well!
Demand Double!
No, triple masking!
Better be triple (or even quadrupple ass-masking) as most people already double mask their asses (underwear plus trousers).
Same goes for masks.
Wuwt doing Sunday funnies now. Great comments, I laughed so hard I farted. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, no doubt there will be more comments and more laughs.
Explains why CCTV cameras have appeared in the toilets of UK public houses.
Mmmmm, maybe CO2 does radiate after all?
A rate of taxation will have already been calculated – all were waiting for now is for an Act of Parliament to be (haha) passed
And it’ll be a windfall (no no no, tell me I did not just say that) for the Exchequer because of The Eatwell Guide – chock full of fibre and other nutrient free mush as it is.
The food it recommends is little better.
Apart from being nutrient to vicious carcinogenic/anaerobic bacteria in our intestines – where they have perfectly NO business being.
And there’s already a tax for that, ’tis called: Inheritance Tax as payable by our kids.
(Aren’t they sooo good, always ‘Thinking of the Children’ IOW: Themselves)
Game of Thrones fart scene (one of them – bit of a weak effort)
https://youtu.be/AejyvoedtH0
Wasn’t originally going to comment, but the absurdity of these just kept growing on me, Shows both the abject ignorance and unwillingness to do the most basic reseach.
The fecal-oral transmission route is well established for intestinal diseases like typhoid and cholera.
The inhaled aerosols route is well established for respiratory diseases like flu and Covid-19. (BTW, if aerosolized rather than aspirate droplets, ordinary surgical masks are of zero value and even Well fitted N95s offer Limited protection.)
The fecal-inhalation route was disproved in the 1840’s by Dr. John Snow when he disabled the Broadstreet well pump handle and stopped a raging London cholera epidemic, thereby experimentally disproving the miasma theory of cholera. While excellent book about that, The Ghostmap (mapping cases was how Snow located the Broadstreet well as the cholera source).
It should be noted that the Cholera pathogen is a bacteria.
This is a great opportunity to test facemask efficacy.
How many masks does it take to not smell it?
Just sayin, same principles apply to this transmission vector as the others, no?
Now all we need are some volunteers! 🙂
volunteers to smelt it or volunteers to dealt it? Or is he who smelted it also the one who dealt it?
The obvious solution is to have everyone wear fart-catching bags, in public, 24/7/365
At the end of each day, the bag is removed, and aired out on the porch to show neighbors you are “woke”.
Each week, the bag must be burned in your burning barrel, etc.
BTW, woke anti-GW folks, who have continued to wear facial masks, are already wearing the “rear-end” precautions.
They want to show off their dedication to wokeness.
As a result, they walk funny and usually cannot think straight
BTW, this measure was proposed for cows, because they exhaust a lot of methane.
Except, speaking as an almost 4 decades long owner of a major Wisconsin dairy farm, all those greenies demanding no cows cause methane cow farts just show their basic biological ignorance.
Cows are ruminants. The methane comes from methanogens in their first ‘stomach’, called the rumen, where cellulose and hemicellulose in grass and hay are decomposed by these Archea ‘bacteria’ into digestible simpler sugars. Also called foregut fermentation. The methane produced is emitted when cows burp up the resulting cud, chew it again to add saliva, then swallow it back into their true stomach for digestion. It isn’t cow farts, it’s cow burps what done it.
So cows need masks? Better decorate them with apparatus on both ends, just to be safe.
Could this be termed Fart Sequestration? LOL
Fluid dynamics will influence the virus spreading potential of farts of different sorts.
In short, loud sonorous farts will have turbulent flow, disrupted by rim flapping during delivery.
By contrast the “silent but deadly” type will likely retain laminar flow.
SBD farts with laminar flow will mix less with surrounding air thus retaining their high temperature, as I can personally attest. Thus the ejected gas bolus will experience thermal lifting adding to potential for long distance travel.
While the loud farts with immediate laminar-turbulent transition at rim will equilibrate temperature with surrounding air quite quickly due to the chaotically increased surface-to-volume ratio. Thus they could be “much sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
So it could turn out that the laminar flowing thermally buoyant silent but deadly farts could be appropriately named regarding virus spreading potential.
Universities need to create fart departments. We need more studies and (of course) a lot more funding for studying fart dynamics!
And hey, the scientists need not go far to find test subjects. The universities fraternity will have plenty of test subjects capable of emitting all the farts they need on demand, just supply beer and beans.
Hatter,
It’s gratifying to see someone doing REAL science again! None of this namby-pamby climate pseudoscience, or the politicized plandemic science-of-the-week crap!
Now we’re talking real crap science!!
Glad to be of service, seeking funds and support for a Sir Thomas Crapper Institute for that very purpose!
OK someone has to post Jonny Cash and Ring of Fire 🔥 (it burns burns burns burns!)
https://youtu.be/zI-GGnzSQa4
G’Day Hatter,
May I add to the list of recordings? I have yet to find an audio online, just ads for actual disks. (It dates to the 1940’s.)
“The Original Crepitation Contest – Paul Boomer vs Lord Windesphere “
If someone can come up with a URL, please post it. Thank you…..
Breaking news.
Artsy fartsy is a trueism.
I’m forever blowing covid bubbles.
tiny bubbles…
Now. That image is just wrong on every level.
“Ministers ‘fear coronavirus could be spread by farting in a confined space”
If the Biden administration or anyone else fueling the COVID-19 alarm here in the U.S. thinks I am going to wear a giant mask on my butt, they’ve got another thing coming. Forget it.
Do people tend to fart in public with their knickers down?
I better be careful when I visit the Edinburgh Tattoo
.
When I farted in the grocery store and Karen scolded me I told her her mask didn’t work and she wasn’t social distancing properly. :0
The best comment in my opinion. Thanks for the laugh. 🤣
I can’t wait to see what Gretchen Whitmer does to the citizens of Michigan with this one.
I live in Michigan and was having such a great time reading all of these humorous posts… and then YOU had to mention not my governor or more affectionately known as sugar tits.
“He asked a colleague to break wind directly onto two Petri dishes from a distance of 5 centimetres, first fully clothed, then with his trousers down.”
And thus he “proved” (subject to statistical significance) that the first fart of a series of two non-spontaneous farts forced out by an experimental subject wasn’t as full of germs as the second.
We are all going to die. What we do between the realization and the fact determines our success in life.
I disbelieve masking or mASSking counts as a success.
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
In cargo cults, probably. In genes, maybe. The science is indeterminate.
It was a known fart at work : Before the turn of the year, even, that Facts could pass through 3 LAYERS of clothing: so what was the point of wearing masks at work in large Aeromaintenance workshops?
In the interests of public health, all farts must now be ignited.
In other news, police are now testing fart detecting cameras.
I thought politicians would need to worry about the feces coming from their mouths.
Jim,
So many of them suffer from severe rectal-cranial inversion that there is little difference for them now!
In an ironic twist of fate the face diaper may become the butt diaper. All it takes is for some of the chronically afraid to demand N95 butt covers and it will be our social duty to comply.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term “viral load!”
In completely unrelated news, introducing Massks! They pinch your cheeks together while covering your exhaust to help prevent COVID transmission. Wear them to prevent the spread!
Thanks, everyone! I needed a laugh today more than I expected. 😆
Here in Australia, “authorities” have been testing household waste water and sewage for the virus and have found it present. They don’t say if the virus they found is viable.
It’s just shows you the madness we have to endure here in Australia. We here in New South Wales (NSW) are expecting increased lockdown measures and the lockdown to be extended until mid-September.
Our Chief Health Officer (CHO) in NSW claims to be a doctor but I can’t find out what that is. The last qualification recorded I found is a Masters in Public Health in 1997. No other qualification/experience in 26 years and she has not worked in the Health sector at all. Our Health Minister is an ex-lawyer and ex-teacher, no medical qualifications or any experience working in the health sector and yet he is advising the Govn’t of a state with a population of over 8+ million people. Then goes on to say anti-lockdown protesters in Sydney on the 24th were “boofheads” (Australian saying, someone who is a little slow, or maybe just does silly things).
The CHO from another state, South Australia, trying to explain testing;
Each of the states are in breach of many Commonwealth Acts/Laws which overrule state laws.
https://commonlaw.earth/covid-downloads/
It’s utter madness.
Virus present, or a small genetic sequence was identified in the PCR amplification?
In NSW, Australia “authorities” use a Ct value of 40 which basically means the tiniest fragment produces a “positive” result when the candidate isn’t infectious as the virus load is so small and unviable.
We are not told. But given the PCR here in NSW uses a Ct of 40, you can guarantee it’s just a tiny fragment with ZERO infectious risk. Proof PCR is being used as a political tool, not a diagnostic tool (Which it was never designed to be used that way).
For what it’s worth, the CDC wants to dump the RT-PCR assay as it doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish between CV-19 and the seasonal flu.
It’s extremely bizarre. Corona and the flu (influenza) are totally different viruses.
Which inevitably leads to the question: how many of the stated Covid-19 cases over the past 18 months actually were Covid-19?
Is this guy from NSW?
https://twitter.com/camus37/status/1419247343812161537
Yes he is. Not seen him before. Another highly paid, secure income, Govn’t bureaucrat.
Oh yes, the woman who told her state that catching a football kicked into the crowd at an AFL game was a COVID vector and then, having been internationally mocked, tried to back out by saying she was clearly being tongue in cheek.
Which makes it all okay, because the population love it when someone nominally in authority decides to branch into stand up comedy.
So maybe the vaccine passport (passport of shame) is a joke and people should produce fake ones for better comedic effect?
I refuse to. However, I learned today that there are powers in Australia that allows states to force people to be administered medicine without consent. That is in breach of the Nuremberg Act of 1947 and many UN acts.
hi Patrick usually reserved for seriously at risk to self or others psych patients in involuntary admissions scenarios….theoretically
a large swath of aged care patients get given psych meds to keep them biddable and also get ALL the going jabs regardless ie flu every yr and the less than good shingles vax that GAVE people n kids shingles!!
better hope someones got the records cos the pneumonia vax is ONLY meant to be 10yrly due to adverse events from the phenol in it as preservative/adjuvant effects
Yes I know. However, it is being considered for *EVERYONE*. Mandated vaccinations are being considered, and it is the state premiers who think the protests of last Saturday were a worry, think again if this “mandate” comes to pass.
She also said we must not talk to friends and people we know in shops etc.