What Is the Chance of Contracting HIV From a Toilet?
According to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, neither water nor toilet seats may spread HIV. Let’s examine the reasons why a toilet splash cannot cause a STI [2]. There are four primary causes:
- The amount of time it takes for a spray of blood from an HIV-positive individual to enter your body must be less than how long it takes for two people to use the restroom.
- In order for HIV to survive, the water would need to be warm enough. HIV would be promptly killed by the temperature of most toilet water since, as we all know, it doesn’t survive long outside of the body. The virus only remains infectious and active for a short time in the cold water of a toilet.
- The toilet would need to contain significant amounts of blood. In practically every circumstance imaginable, the water would have diluted the blood to the point where there wouldn’t have been enough for someone to become infected.
- To infect someone else, HIV-positive blood would need to touch an open wound or sore directly.
All of these protections against infection are present in every way imaginable. Also, they exist in virtually every circumstance similar to this. Because of this, one method that HIV spreads is not by toilet splashback.
One of these circumstances being met is extremely unlikely to occur. There is very little chance that all four of these circumstances will come true at once. It would be practically impossible for someone to acquire HIV in this method since so many factors would need to coincide.
In order for this scenario to occur, someone would need to spill a significant amount of highly infected blood onto a toilet seat, and then another person would need to immediately sit down on it with a significant skin tear that comes into contact with the blood, significantly allowing the blood to enter the wound. This situation is absurd, it goes without saying.