No Longer Quivering
This morning bright and early this pops up on my Facebook feed.
This is a huge problem in Quiverfull where you have uneducated meeting with people so sheltered they have no idea how the world actually works. Sprinkle in a soupcon of believing you are special and you get these lies pushed as truth. We’ve been seeing Jill Rodrigues spreading fake health news frequently about the pandemic while violating her home state’s rules on the pandemic. I am not surprised. I have to debunk this.
At first I was scrambling to make sure this was not true. There’s been a few cases of people with unwashed CPAP machines contracting it in the past. Especially since the newer models have water tanks to provide moisture all night long. The disease is water-borne. Plus I know it’s a serious enough infection that the medical clinic I used to work at shut down and sanitized everything one afternoon when we had a patient diagnosed with it. Water-borne or not, we were taking no chances.
The more I started thinking about the cloth nature of most masks, including the good N95 ones, the more I thought this was unlikely. Most masks are porous enough to allow for evaporation while wearing, even if you get that moist clammy feeling wearing it. Even if you are not washing it they should dry out of all moisture between wearings.
What Jill Rodrigues is proposing here is mere apocryphal tales with zero substantiation again. This belongs in the same fake news dumpster with those crazy ideas of masking tanking oxygen levels and masking giving you COVID 19. There is literally zero scientific accounts of anyone ever contracting Legionella from a face mask. I only found a few apocryphal “A cousin of a friend of a in law says they know people” but not one legitimately confirmed case.
Again, it’s a water-borne illness that would not do well in a mask. Here are some true FAQs about the illness, which does share some symptoms with COVID 19.
But there is a real risk of higher Legionella infection rates once this entire pandemic shakes out and things reopen. Particularly in office buildings that are now sitting shuttered and silent with the workers performing their jobs from home. There is some real concern in the medical world that when workers return, and water systems plus long dormant air conditioner systems kick on they will be filled with Legionella bacteria. It may happen that Legionelle cases emerge and spike as the world attempts to resume some normalcy.
I hate to admit it, but Jill Rodrigues is right about one thing here….. WASH YOUR MASK! I am in the habit now of hand washing in antibacterial mild soap our masks as soon as we return home. Pegging them out in the sunshine to dry. A few weeks ago we had a mask-denier here claiming that washing masks was too hard to do and remember. It does not have to be if you incorporate it into your life as a ritual. Returning from the grocery store – put everything away, put aside your reusable grocery bags and wash your mask. It really is that simple.
I am always amazed at the amount of dirt they pick up sometimes.
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