Washington Post When you flush a toilet, invisible plumes, which may contain viruses, can shoot almost five feet into the air and spread horizontally within a short time, a study showed. Is it true that there’s an invisible plume of pathogens that spews out of the toilet when you flush it — and that it can make you sick? When you flush a toilet, aerosols containing any pathogen residing in the bowl spray into the bathroom. A 2022 study that used lasers to illuminate these aerosolized plumes found that the plumes, which may contain bacteria and viruses, can shoot almost five feet into the air — the approximate height of the nose and mouth of an average adult — within about eight seconds of the flush, said John Crimaldi, a professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was the lead author of the study.
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