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Originally Posted by HarryT
Urine is not "insanitary". It's entirely sterile, in fact. It used to be used to clean wounds prior to the invention of antiseptics.
Of course, there may be other reasons why one would not wish to have a urine-soaked book (warping due to the liquid, or the smell of it) but "sanitation" is certainly not an issue.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
When I took a tour of Pompey they pointed out that the public laundry was right beside the public restrooms as the ammonia was used to clean the clothes.
Dale
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I've been to Pompei. Interesting place .... but yes, chemicals in urine and even fecal chemicals can be pretty damn handy. There's a reason that people have been using excrement to replenish nutrients in soil for centuries. Mainly ... it works.
Really .... aside from the fact that they smell a bit nasty, and there are strong cultural prohibitions from being around them, both urine and feces, whether human or animal, are just a bunch of chemicals and bacteria. I can't tell you how many times I've been covered in both (I've been around more than one centrifuge explosion in my life), and .... well, you get over it.
Oh man .... I just remembered about the patient that we got, I think it was at UCLA, this would have been close to 30 years ago, but the poor girl kept having these awful E-coli infections of her sinuses. It turned out that she slept in the nude and in her sleep she was scratching her butt and then picking her nose.
I felt so sorry for her. The only thing we could suggest in the end was that she sleep in pants with a belt tight enough that she couldn't get her hands down where the E-coli tend to hang out.