Higher end hotels that used to have wall-mounted dispensers for hand soap, for shower gel and for shampoo and for conditioner end up moving slowly but surely to streamlining to fewer wall-mounted dispenser and making toiletries multi-purpose (and not just multi-use). For example, instead of having hotel shampoo & hotel conditioner and shower gel dispensers in the tub/shower area, they end up having two products instead of three there and you may end up with the same product being deliberately provided (by the hotel) for use as shampoo and shower gel. And guess what else may happen, the shower gel-come-shampoo ends up being the same exact liquid that is used in the hand-soap dispenser. This reduces the hotel costs and makes things easier for hotel housekeepers but it’s really a down-grading of the product provided to customers in hotel rooms.

LThen what do you think, for surely you just “don’t think”? Or maybe what you say is what you mean? ;)

Your post proclaims “Cleanliness is not next to godliness. And not a goal to be achieved by everyone.” Surely, dipping one’s hands in a public facility’s heavily-used toilet bowl isn’t what anyone here would suggest be the goal along with other things to get away from “cleanliness”?

I understand the pharmaceutical business well enough. Investing in new drugs — antibiotics in particular in this case — isn’t all that productive for pharma when the costs of discovery of new antibiotics with higher efficacy levels have been de facto hiked up and compromised as a consequence also of increased (and increased variety of) drug resistance due to use/overuse of more and more antibiotics.

If Marriott really cared about the environment and public health — not that they really do — they would be willing to cut back on the hotel gross margins from food and beverage sales/service. But they don’t really care, and they are really just cherry picking to maximize their profits and/or to virtue signal to gullible audiences that don’t fully appreciate that there can be negative environmental and public byproducts from moves that at first blush may seem to be positive overall but really may or may not be.

With or without any appreciation for anything beside a simple-minded “stop single-use toiletry containers” when it comes to this Marriott move, there are going to be practical problems that this kind of move will lead to for hotel customers.

There is a reason why one of the first things I do upon entering a bathroom with fixed toiletry dispensers is to check to make sure that:

1. there is actually stuff in the dispensers to come out; and

2. the stuff comes out; and

3. it seems to be like soap rather than body lotion or who knows what else.

It’s because the hotels mess up way more extremely with dispenser toiletries than single-use toiletries and because cleanliness does matter enough that it’s a public health benefit to have people make more of a habit of properly washing their hands and doing so rather frequently at that. ;)

Washing hands without soap is just a very poor substitute to washing hands with proper soap without manual pump dispenser issues. ;)

I wouldn’t skip the MSN one, which is but a redistribution of what is indeed akin to News of the World; but it mentions some names that are useful to follow-up on for those who find information valuable in a world where otherwise things are packaged to grab attention as part of the vulgar orders of the day.

So, do you think the ideal scenario for "infection prevention" is sterilizing the hotel rooms? Do you think having disposable everything is a great solution short of that?

I think some need to first understand what “I don’t think” means in this context, as the phrase may or may not be intended to mean “I think you don’t ......”.

Providing questionable lessons about the pharmaceutical industry, antibiotic development pipelines or health and hygiene science related to this Marriott move is of diminished utility when they come packaged with grammar which doesn’t facilitate a meaningful, good-faith discussion about this Marriott move and topics related to it. But good-faith discussions about all of this are far and few between when one or more idea about this Marriott change is rooted in an ideological or financial self-interest to defend Marriott on this move come whatever may from it.

It almost seems like I might have to provide a lesson in my meaning of “also” in the post of mine quoted by the above.

But I’ll let Wikipedia be your guide about “efficacy”. ;)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy

If Marriott went only to touch-less toiletry dispensers, there would be less of a concern about pathogen exposure via the dispensers. But Marriott hotels are probably too cheap to do that and do it in a way that has them always fully functional for hotel guests.