Why Does My Family Keep Getting Ill? Your Shower Head Could Be the Reason
There's a question I hear from parents more often than you might expect: "Why does my family keep getting ill?" They've done everything right. Good diet, decent sleep, hand washing. And yet someone in the house always seems to have a sore throat, or another ear infection, or a skin flare up that won't quite clear.
We spent 35 years working on bacteria control in hospital environments. And when I started looking at what was happening inside domestic shower heads, I understood exactly why so many families feel like they're stuck in a loop of low-level illness.
What's living in your shower head
Your shower head sits warm, damp and largely undisturbed between each use. These are near perfect conditions for bacteria to form what scientists call a biofilm, a sticky, protective layer that allows colonies to grow and multiply. By the time your household has been using a shower head for several months, that biofilm can contain not thousands but billions of individual bacteria.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that opportunistic pathogens, bacteria capable of causing illness, were enriched in showerhead biofilms at levels more than 100 times higher than in the background tap water flowing through them. In other words, the water entering your shower may be relatively clean. What comes out after passing through your shower head is a different matter.
The bacteria most commonly found include Mycobacterium species, Legionella pneumophila and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Each of these has been linked to respiratory infections, skin problems and in serious cases, conditions requiring hospital treatment.
How the bacteria reach you
The mechanism is important to understand. When your shower runs, it doesn't just produce water droplets. It produces aerosols, fine mists of water so small they hang in the air and are inhaled directly into your lungs. Independent research has confirmed that this aerosol exposure during showering is the primary route through which showerhead bacteria cause infection.
Every morning, before most of us have even had a coffee, we're spending several minutes breathing in air that passes through a cloud of bacteria laden mist generated by our own shower head.
Why the symptoms are easy to miss
This is the part that frustrates me most. The illnesses caused by everyday shower head bacteria don't usually announce themselves dramatically. They tend to look like recurring colds, persistent sore throats, ear infections that keep coming back, or skin conditions that doctors treat with creams without ever finding a root cause. Because they're intermittent and familiar looking, neither patients nor GPs tend to look for an environmental cause.
If your family seems to pick up more illness than seems reasonable, and particularly if symptoms cluster around the ears, skin, throat or chest, it's worth looking seriously at your shower head.
What we built, and why
The Fereno RefreshFlip was developed directly from the antibacterial technology we originally designed for hospital showers. The same principle that protects immunocompromised patients in clinical settings has been adapted for the home. It kills the bacteria that form in the shower head itself, at source, so what reaches your family is clean water rather than an aerosol rich with pathogens.
It won't fix everything. But if your family keeps getting ill and nothing else explains it, your shower head deserves a serious look.
Steve Bennett, Co Founder, Fereno
