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From: twcaps@tennyson.lbl.gov (Terry Chan)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Tourist's strange intestinal attack
Date: 30 Nov 1995 01:16:50 GMT

-Thanks to JVG, I found the original article to which the newspaper -account refers. It was a letter to the Journal of the American Medical -Association (JAMA): JAMA March 6, 1987 257(9):1177 ...

[...]

• (2) I've never seen a vacuum toilet, as far as I know; but they're -standard toilets as far as having a seat and so forth is concerned. I -have a hard time picturing how you could get a seal around a toilet -seat. Could it be done? Remember, we're talking about a woman who was -'slightly obese'. I suppose it might depend on the design of the -particular toilet. People who have led a less sheltered life than I have -should speak right up.

There was a post by levinger@boeygen.uio.no (David Levinger) back in Jan 1992. He claimed to work for Boeing at the time and wrote:

Boeing was the first aircrap, I mean aircraft, manufacturer to pioneer the use of vacuum toilets on airplanes, entering service in 1982. They are now in use on 767, 747-400 and several models of Airbus airplanes. These toilet systems have been in use on ships and in other special situations for a longer period of time. The vacuum toilet was originally developed in Sweden in the first half of this century.

A few months before the Vancouver accident, we had responded to a letter from an Australian airline transmitting a concerned question from a doctor who had been riding on a 767 airplane. He wanted to know if this possibility had been considered. A study was done in which medical doctors were consulted. The doctors reported one occurance of someone's intestines being sucked out. This was an accident in Pittsburgh where a boy was sucked up against a water pump inlet in a pool and 14 feet of his intestines had been hanging out. It was never possible to ascertain exactly how much suction would be required to achieve this, but I would not be so bold as to stick my bare butt out the porthole of the Space Shuttle. I personally don't know anatomy well enough to know exactly what is holding the intestines in place.

Anyway, the conclusions of the study were that there are multiple safeguards preventing such an event from happening on an airplane vacuum toilet. First, for such an event to happen, the passenger would have to flush the toilet while sitting down, which may be easy at home, but it is hard to do in the unfamiliar environment and tight quarters of the airplane bathroom. Second and Third, are the two airgaps on the toilet seat and between the shroud and the toilet, so that if someone sat down with the seat up, they would still not be able to form a seal no matter how oooobeeeese they were. Fourthly, the shape of the toilet bowl itself prevents a child from sitting down in the toilet bowl itself in a way that could form a seal. And finally, a flush cycle lasts only four seconds. Water sprays down first, which would cause someone to jump (if they were in the bowl), and then the flush valve opens a second later. Suction is pneumatic, not hydraulic.

WARNING: The above relates to Boeing aircraft toilets only. On Ships, the system is different. Porcelean bowls are used, so it would be quite unwise to sit down without the seat down first. Further, a greater quantity of water is flushed, which might mean that hydraulic suction would take place.

A NOTE OF INTEREST: The vacuum toilet systems on airplanes send air at over 100 feet per second down the tube. Airline flight attendants have been known to have toilet paper races between left and right side toilets when waiting for passengers to start boarding. They roll out equal lengths of toilet paper down the isle and then flush at the same time. Tell your favorite flight attendant next time you fly a 767 or 747-400.

"Hey, it was a sh*tty job, but someone had to do it."

...Dave

• (4) Here I have a slight problem. The author describes "several feet -of small intestine with omentum attached". First, as others have noted, -if you're dealing with eversion of the intestine you'd see large rather -than small intestine;

This was a objection at the time and folks thought that the elderly woman would have been in much worse shape than she was.

• For the purpose of comparison, there are several articles on children -who have had unpleasant experiences after sitting on swimming pool pump -intakes. This should be a fairly similar event, although the suction will -be more localized. In each of these cases, the child experienced eversion -of the intestines rather than rupture through the perineum.

That's true although to me, from a folklore standpoint, that's different because a salient point is the obesity of the individual causing such a "good seal" that causes it to happen.

• o Does anybody know of any followup articles or responses to this letter?
• I'll go through the JAMA's following it for a while, but I'm not going
• to read every letter for the past ten years. Medline lists no
• followups, and no other articles or letters by J.B. Wynne.

With his usual panache, snopes posted about this story back in Jan 1992. He also mentioned that there was no followup article in the nearly five years (at the time) that the article originally came out.

Terry "Down the Drain" Chan