Your phone, desk and kitchen are all crawling with bugs. Just how worried should you be?
Pull on your rubber gloves and get out your mobile phone — for this little gadget can harbour 18 times more bacteria than a toilet flush handle, warns new research. Or we could try exchanging mucky e-mails. Because your laptop keyboard is likely to be crawling with the stomach bug campylobacter, says another new report.
That may be enough to send you running to the bathroom for a good scrub — but beware: the seals around your bath and washbasin are a “prime spot” for dangerous bugs including E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus, which are linked to food poisoning and breathing problems, says yet another new study.
These three separate reports last week — from the consumer watchdog Which?, the Hygiene Council and the microbiologist Professor Hugh Pennington, are merely the tip of a revolting iceberg. They add to research that shows how our lives are beset by contamination with potentially lethal bacteria. The Hygiene Council report says that bathrooms are not the only home threat: 20 per cent of kitchen cloths are a danger, and a third of fridges are contaminated by fungal spores.
A wealth of studies have been done in hygiene-conscious America by Dr Charles Gerber, of the University of Arizona. He has found that there are more faecal bacteria in your kitchen sink than in your toilet after you flush it. And there is apparently 200 times more E. coli on your kitchen cutting board than on a toilet seat. “It’s safer to make a sandwich on a toilet seat,” he says.
It may also be safer to work on the loo than at your desk, says Dr Gerber, a professor of environmental microbiology.
He has shown that there are typically 400 times more bacteria per square centimetre on a desk surface than on a toilet seat. He also notes that television remote controls in hotels are dirtier than the loo. “The dirt is often urine, semen or faeces,” he says.
There is no escape. Dr Gerber has found serious contamination pretty much everywhere: inside domestic washing machines, on supermarket trolley handles — even your Manolos are not safe. Shoes can harbour ten million bacteria per square inch, he says. It may be safer to wear toilets.
In fact, there is no need to panic. Yes, we are surrounded by bacteria. And our skins are covered with bacteria. These two statements have always been true. But we haven’t all dropped dead. Most bacteria are harmless, and those that may be pathogenic are not usually around in sufficient numbers to cause harm. Infectious-disease experts say that the one common household item that should be handled with caution is the dishcloth, as it tends to stay damp as well as dirty and can act as a breeding ground for infectious nasties to grow in sufficient numbers to be dangerous.
Our best bet is simply to follow sensible hygiene routines, such as washing hands after using the bathroom and before handling food. And to prevent infecting others, the official advice (as it was during the swine flu scare) is to cover our noses and mouths when we cough or sneeze, use a tissue whenever possible, and dispose of used tissues quickly and sensibly. It is tediously unspectacular, but effective.
But why do all this research? Without in any way disparaging Dr Gerber’s integrity, there is a wider agenda in such awareness-raising. It is worth pointing out that Dr Gerber has worked closely with commercial companies that, for example, sell cleaning agents and personal sanitisers, market washable shoes and build trolley-sanitising machines. Closer to home, one should also point out that the Hygiene Council is sponsored by Dettol.
But we also love to read these stories. They tickle our primordial paranoia about contagion and death, to the point where mass media reporting has helped to precipitate an epidemic of spermaphobia (even the clinical term for fear of germs sounds yucky).
A report by Mintel, the market researchers, shows how deeply this fear has spread. Last year, about 26 million British adults bought antibacterial handwash. An astonishing nine out of ten of us bought some kind of antibacterial personal-care product (and these figures predate the impact of swine flu fears).
