Personal hygiene can be one of our biggest icks, and while someone might say the toilet is clean enough to eat your dinner off, you'll know nobody wants to be doing that. Still, there are some shocking statistics about how much bacteria could be living on other everyday objects that we might not think about. After all, how many of you take your phone to the toilet and sit there scrolling? You wouldn't take a sandwich to the bathroom with you.
Now, some are shocked about how much bacteria could be lurking on our laptop keyboards.
According to IT-training company CBT Nuggets, there's likely more bacteria per square inch on a laptop keyboard than on a toilet seat...a lot more.
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CBT Nuggets swabbed items ranging from keyboards to phones, then compared the samples to swabs from the likes of money and toilets.
The team shockingly found that the average office keyboard had 3,543,000 colony-forming units (CFU) of bacteria per square inch. To put it into context, this is 20,589 times more bacteria than the average 172 CFU per square inch you'd find on a toilet seat. A toilet handle apparently only has 30 CFU per square inch, compared to a computer mouse's 1,370,068 CFU per square inch.
Worst of all, you might expect a company ID badge to be reasonably clean. It's actually the dirtiest, boasting an average of 4,620,000 CFU per square inch. That means your ID badge could have 243 times more bacteria than a pet's toy having an average of 19,000 CFU per square inch.
A different report from CBS News points to a University of Arizona study that claims the average desktop has only 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat. Large concentrations of E. coli, staph aureus, and streptococcus can cause serious health problems, while some of these bacteria can live on surfaces for up to 24 hours. Even if you count yourself as something of a 'clean freak', shared workstations are the biggest offender.
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When the CBT Nuggets news was shared on Reddit, the comments were full of concern.
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One worried keyboard user said: "I read this, quietly got up, headed to my toilet, and brought back a pack of anti-bacterial wipes."
Another added: "Wait until you find out about that water bottle you have on your desk."
Someone else wrote: "Great, now I'm anxious about the keypads at the grocery."
Still, many pointed out that while people (hopefully) regularly clean their toilet seats, the same can't be said about keyboards. They suggest that the constant comparisons of how clean something is to a toilet seat are pretty redundant. We'd like to think people are more conscious about these things in a post-COVID world, but that might not be the case.