Demand for secondhand and vintage clothing has surged within the last few years. Pre-owned fashion is seen by many consumers as a cheaper, more environmentally friendly way to expand their wardrobe.
But as excited as you might be to wear your next secondhand purchase, it’s important you disinfect it properly first. This is because clothing can actually be an important reservoir for many infectious diseases.
The skin is naturally coated in millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses, collectively known as the skin microbiome. This means every item of clothing we wear comes into close contact with these microbes.
Many of the microbes that regularly call the skin microbiome home include the bacteria Staphylococcus (which causes staph infections), Streptococcus (the bacteria behind strep A), fungi such as Candida (the species of yeast that most commonly causes thrush) and viruses such as the Human papillomavirus (which causes HPV).
Each person’s skin microbiome is uniquely adapted to them. What’s normal and harmless for one person can be disease-causing to another.
Infection risk of used clothes
Clothing is a well-known carrier of many disease-causing pathogens. This means that germs from the original clothes owner’s unique skin microbiome could still be found on secondhand clothes if the items weren’t cleaned prior to selling. It also means that any infections or pathogens they might have had when they last wore the clothes could still be found there.
Research has found clothing can harbour many infectious pathogens – including germs such as Staphylococcus aureus (which causes skin and blood infections), bacteria such as Salmonella, E coli, norovirus and rotavirus (which can cause fever, vomiting and diarrhoea) and the fungi that can cause athlete’s foot and ringworm.
A survey of secondhand clothing specifically, which was being sold in a market in Pakistan, detected the presence of Bacillus subtilus and Staphylococcus aureus in many of the samples taken. These bacteria can cause skin and blood infections. Parasites which can cause skin infections (such as dermatitis and scabies) have also been found on secondhand clothing.
The skin’s microbes can live on the amino acids in sweat, as well as the sebaceous oil released from hair follicles and the proteins of skin cells, all of which are deposited into clothes when we wear them.
Not only that, but research shows many pathogenic germs – such as E coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes – can survive on clothes for months when kept at room temperature. Germs on cotton or mixed-fibre clothes stayed alive for up to 90 days. But on polyester fabrics, these germs lived as long as 200 days. Most bacterial species survived better in the fabrics when the air humidity was high. This suggests that to minimise germ growth, clothes should be stored in a dry environment.
While it’s difficult to say how great your risk of actually contracting an illness from secondhand clothes is (as no study has been done to date), people who are immunocompromised are probably at the greatest risk. If you have an impaired immune system, you should take extra care before wearing secondhand purchases.
