The DOI matches its Crossref record.
A Tribute to Toilet Paper
Abstract
In modern use, toilet paper would seem to play an important role as a barrier to the transmission of enteric infection by the fecal-manual-oral route. A historical review reveals a dearth of information on this topic. The remarkable compliance with the hygienic practice of toilet paper use is in contrast to the more limited compliance with hand-washing policies touted universally as a sound infection-control measure.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“Panic buying of storable consumer goods is a common phenomenon during natural disasters and manmade crises.”
From Consumer panic in the COVID-19 pandemic (2021) · cites this paper as Hughes 1988
In the citing paper
“In natural disasters or crises, however, consumers are commonly observed to stock up on consumer goods to an extent that greatly exceeds levels observed in normal times.”
From Consumer panic in the COVID-19 pandemic (2021) · cites this paper as Hughes 1988
Citations
Cited by
Consumer panic in the COVID-19 pandemic
Keane, M., & Neal, T. (2021) · Journal of Econometrics · doi:10.1016/j.jeconom.2020.07.045 · Cited by 245
“Examples include both World Wars (Hughes 1988), the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011,1 and the recent hyperinflation in Zimbabwe (Musvanhiri 2017). Panic may be provoked by much less, such as in the United States in 1973 when Johnny Carson joked about a shortage of toilet paper on The Tonight Show, causing the Grea…”
Influential
Metadata
- Authors
- Hughes, W. T.
- Affiliations
- St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (US)
- Corresponding author
- Hughes, W. T.
- Venue
- Clinical Infectious Diseases
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1988-01-01
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 218-222
- ISSN
- 1058-4838 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-6591
- OpenAlex
- W2054301037
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 0.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Clinical Infectious Diseases (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Infectious Diseases › Infection Control in Healthcare
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Food Science › Food Safety and Hygiene
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis › Insects and Parasite Interactions
- Keywords
- toilet paper, hand washing, hand hygiene compliance, gastrointestinal infections, fecal-oral transmission, infection control, hygiene practices
- MeSH terms
- Bacterial Infections, Enterobacteriaceae Infections, Humans, Hygiene, Paper, Toilet Facilities, History, 18th Century, History, 19th Century, History, 20th Century
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Tribute to Toilet Paper. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/clinids/10.1.218
- The paper
- Hughes, W. T. (1988). A Tribute to Toilet Paper. Clinical Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1093/clinids/10.1.218
