I do not mean to gross you out, but each and every single thing you can imagine has fecal matter or bacteria on it. Like you, I have little knowledge of where these fecal bacteria are hiding, but thanks to our microbiologists, we know which to avoid, which to clean most, and of course, to wash our hands religiously.
Let’s start in your home. You’d probably think the toilet is the dirtiest place, do you? Think again, it’s actually the kitchen. The sponge that you use to scrub off dirt from your dishes has the most number of fecal matter. There is also a concentration of fecal bacteria in the kitchen sink drain. Guess what else? The mighty chopping board! The cleanest areas in your home turn out to be the bathroom counter top, floor and toilet seat.
And don’t think you’ve escaped the wrath of the fecal bacteria. Your purse that you carry around has fecal bacteria, especially on the bottom part. Definitely your shoes. Your mobile phone, of course, has it as well so don’t be surprised if you test positive for fecal matter or bacteria on your hands now. And even if you wash your underwear, there’s a one-tenth gram of poo in it.
In the office, your keyboard is the dirtiest place and the office coffee mugs as well. And where else? If you climb, those walls have fecal material, shopping carts in groceries have poo, and even in our air! Scientists say it’s most likely from dog’s feces.
But will these get you sick?
Scientists say NO.
You will only get sick if the fecal matter that you touch or accidentally ingest has salmonella or shigella. And the odds that the fecal matter that you have in contact with can transmit disease is quite low. But this also doesn’t mean that you should be lax about hygiene.
Proper hand washing is still the way to go. As I mentioned in the previous entry (Read: 5 Reasons to Ditch Your Antibacterial Soap Right Now), good old water and plain hand soap can eradicate these germs and keep you clean.
Watch this video and know more about the areas that have germs. Happy hand washing!
Chopping boards are disgusting sometimes. Once there’s a lot of cuts in the surface, bacteria gets in the cracks. I can also imagine that scrubbing it won’t be enough anymore. I change my cutting boards frequently because of that.
I know!! Sponges are so gross. The trick that we do is to not get food in the sponges as much as possible.We rinse everything with water first, no soap until most of the grime is out.
Germs are everywhere. We can’t always be germophobes either. I think we just have to take precautions in lessening the amount of germs we have at home and keep our immune system working great.?
I don’t allow shoes inside the house, especially in common places like living room and kitchen. In the bedroom we have slippers only in the bedroom. I think it keeps germs being spread all over the house too, especially ones that are from the outdoors.
We can always wash our hands properly, but if it’s not just our hands spreading all the poo all over the place, nothing is clean.
It’s mostly our hands that do the spreading because we touch our mouths with it and touch everything else too. It’s not like we directly nibble on our dirty bags, so with handwashing, we can make surethat our hands have less germs.
How about sanitizing things? Like spraying/wiping alcohol in phones, disinfecting table tops and counters, all of that.
For the moms out there who have kids who always put things in their mouth, how do you deal with it? My son has been hospitalized by amoebiasis before and they said that it was because he possibly ingested poo.
For toys that are plastic, we sometimes put it in the dishwasher or manually soak them in a tub full of soap and water. For toys that can’t be soaked, we clean it manually by wiping it. For things we can’t wash, if it gets too dirty, we just throw them out. We also don’t buy expensive toys for our little ones because we can’t just throw those out.
Let’s just say that 5 out of 10 chances there will be salmonella and shigella. So we just have to treat it like it can make us sick all the time because it CAN happen. I agree with washing our hands all the time, especially before we eat and after we use the bathroom.
Almost all of our soaps at home are anti-bacterial.