Would you "re-wash" your clothes if you found a dead cockroach in the wash?
I found one the other day, in the wash, after I removed some pants from the laundry machine. After the initial mortification, I just let it ride. It was only three pairs of pants and I didn’t think much of it. I’m just not terribly phobic about things like that. I mean, it was dead and, I suppose, very clean. Still though, in retrospect, I’m wondering if I could contract some sort of illness? I have already worn two out of the three pairs and have not had an adverse reaction. Still though, what would you do?
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No, and I have bigger fish to fry right now. I have a FROG stuck in my washing machine.
No issues there, poor little roach, whatta way to go.
@Coloma – Oh dear; that sounds awful! Good luck with all that.
@jca – Cool; thanks!
“I mean, it was dead and, I suppose, very clean.”
That’s pretty much the crux of the matter. Your clothes aren’t going to get any cleaner than that cockroach on a second wash. I’d just let it go. You’re definitely not going to get an illness, if that is worrying you.
I would, for my peace of mind.
Nope, no reason to. A rat or a mouse, yes, but not a roach.
@Coloma Did the frog croak? Or is it still alive?
Oh, yes. Its not the germs that would bother me, but the possibility of one of its missing parts falling onto my skin later on. Eww! The idea would creep me out.
No. A well washed dead cockroach is not a threat unless you swallow it and choke on it.. It’s best, in that case, to spit it out.
I probably wouldn’t rewash them, but I’d be on the lookout for more of those guys around my house. Where there’s one, there’s more.
No. Assuming you used the correct amount of detergent, all the nastiness should have come out in the wash, as they say.
I wouldn’t. I always use hot water so that would be enough to sterilize it.
I have no idea what kinds of diseases you think you could get but I’ve never heard of any that cockroaches transmit. They don’t bite, you know. They just look big and disgusting.
Fleas and ticks. Now that’s a different story. Currently Lyme disease is carried by the bite of deer ticks. And in centuries past, it was the fleas on the rats which bit people and carried Bubonic Plague which wiped out countless numbers of people in the Dark Ages.
So worry about the tiny fleas and ticks which you can’t see rather than a thoroughly washed cockroach which admittedly looks gross but doesn’t present any actual danger. It’s just the gross out factor (which hasn’t killed anyone yet.)
I wouldn’t . I’d hate to waste the soap, water, heat, electricity, and time on a phobia. The critter is gone.
Roaches are all over the place without one knowing. And we survive so no I wouldn’t bother.
Why? If nothing else, the washing machine cleaned any germs that the roach would have brought. I wouldn’t worry.
from this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01qna.html?_r=0
“It was known as early as a 1911 study in The Journal of Public Health that roach bodies harbored staphylococcus, streptococcus and pneumococcus germs; as many as 50 such pathogens have since been identified. But roaches do not have their own direct disease franchises, like malaria from mosquitoes or plague from fleas.
However, efforts to get roaches out of the home are not misplaced. The insects are well equipped for mechanical transmission of microbes to foods and to surfaces used by people, and some outbreaks of illness in crowded dwellings infested with roaches are seen as strongly suggestive that roaches were involved.
Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists roaches and their droppings as triggers for asthma attacks in those who are susceptible and urges depriving roaches of food and water and using traps to kill them.”
But I wouldn’t bother re-washing stuff because of a cockroach.
If it was in the washing machine, then no I wouldn’t re wash them. The dryer, maybe.
No, I would figure he was clean too now.
Did it come in after the washing was done, it just happened to die there just because of old age? In any case I wouldn’t bother.
No way, life is too short to waste on a pointless exercise.
I probably would, all the while knowing that it wasn’t necessary. It would be kind of a psychological thing for me. It would just make me feel better, feel cleaner, if I washed them again. There might be a cockroach leg or something, trapped in the seam of the crotch of my blue jeans or something, from the first go round, and I would like a second chance to get that out.
And if I were still living in Texas and it had been a Palmetto bug, a huge, mutant, flying cockroach, I would probably do the load another 4 or 5 times. I’m really not all that creeped out by bugs, but cockroaches, Palmetto bugs and cave/camel crickets, they creep me out; don’t like them at all. I had a Palmetto bug crawl up the leg of my pants once, all the way to my mid-thigh and feverishly stripped myself of my pants, right there in the kitchen. I had been washing my dishes. I felt that creepy crawly sensation up my leg for weeks.
I hate yellow jackets but they don’t creep me out, I just slaughter them without mercy. I have a scorched earth policy with yellow jackets.
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