People who wipe with dry tissue paper after using the toilet move around with dirty anuses and the practice can cause health problems, experts and celebrities have warned.
Doctors also said in addition to the poor sanitary condition, health problems such as anal fissures, hemorrhoids and urinary tract infections that may take some months to heal can occur due to excessive wiping using the tissue, in a person’s quest to keep clean.
Dailymail report said households in some countries now use a devise that functions similarly to what most Nigerian households do manually, squirting water into the area to make cleaning thorough after defecating.
The sanitation device, toilet bidet, is said to have been installed in bathrooms by about 90 per cent household in countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece to clean the anus as it makes cleaning with toilet paper easier.
Most Nigerian households and public facilities still rely on the use of dry tissue paper, with some using water with bare hands in the toilets as bidet suppliers have reportedly said moving into other markets has been more difficult because most people are satisfied with just the methods above.
Celebrities such as Will.I.Am of the Black Eye Peas, Will Smith and Terrence Howard said though toilet paper is easier, using baby wipes instead is better, with Smith even hailing the habit as “special and incredible.”
“Using dry toilet paper to wipe can actually leave behind feces and cause health problems,” noted the report. “People who excessively wipe the rectum increase their risk of developing fissures or hemorrhoids.”
If people wipe from back-to-front with tissue paper, they are pulling bacteria from the anus towards the front of the body and this can impact women especially and cause them to develop at UTI from the bacteria getting into the urethra, it added.
Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, said using toilet paper doesn’t remove feces like it should.
“Here’s proof on why people should have baby wipes. Get some chocolate, wipe it on a wooden floor, and then try to get it up with some dry towels. You’re going to get chocolate in the cracks. That’s why you gotta get them baby wipes,” Will.i.am also said.
An anal fissure is a tear in the lining of the rectum and can cause bleeding or pain for the person when they are pooping. Most fissures heal at home after eight to 12 weeks.
Hemorrhoids are swollen veins and tissue in the lower rectum and anus. They are more serious than fissures and sometimes can be harder to treat.