It's not surprising that the world is a dirty place full of millions of bacteria.
What may come as a surprise, though, is what the dirtiest items in your house and in public are!
After you read this list, you might think twice about touching certain items and then
forgetting to wash your hands.
Ready to find out what the germiest and dirtiest places and things are?
I'm Mike with List25 and here we go...here are the 25 Dirtiest Things You Touch Every Day!
25.
Door Knob Although modern knobs are usually designed
to be bacteria resistant, these types of defenses aren't always effective.
Moreover, older non-resistant door knobs are going to be even worse.
Keep this in mind next time you are trying to escape a public bathroom.
24.
Fridge Handle Let's be honest, how often do you clean your
fridge handles?
Probably never.
You should consider it though, because they are often infested with the same bacteria
that live on poultry and pork.
The reason for this is that people usually take meat out of the fridge, make themselves
a sandwich, and then return it with without rinsing their hands.
23.
Vending Machine Buttons Next time you use a vending machine consider
this as you are probably swallowing more than just your favorite snack.
As dirty as the buttons on that machine are, most of your selection consists of finger
food which gives the bacteria a fairly direct path to your esophagus.
22.
Parking Meters According to a recent study, 40 percent of
parking meters and kiosks were labeled as being a high risk for illness transmission.
Who knew parking your car could be so dangerous?
21.
Crosswalk Buttons Looking both ways before crossing the road
may not be enough to stay out of the dangerzone these days.
Crosswalk buttons were actually found to have high levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP),
a molecule that signals the presense of yeast, bacteria, and mold cells.
20.
ATM Recent studies found ATMs to have high levels
of bacillus and pseudomonads, two bacteria famous for causing sickness and diarrhea.
Interestingly enough, these are the same bacteria that infest public toilets.
So next time you reach to type in your PIN number, just imagine yourself running your
hand around the rim of the toilet bowl across the street.
19.
Remote Control While the cleanliness of your remote control
at home will depend upon your own personal hygeine, know this at public remotes at hospitals,
hotels, etc. are filthy little creatures.
Not only do their cracks and crevices make them ideal for microbes, spores, and bodily
fluids to hide, but studies have found semen, urine, and even SARS on public remotes.
18.
Toilet Seat Although you'd probably have to be pretty
thirsty to drink from a public toilet, as you can see it's certainly not the dirtiest
thing you come in contact with on a regular basis.
We still don't recommend quenching your thirst from it though, as the statistics tell us
there are about 295 bacteria per square inch covering its shiny surface.
17.
Cell Phone Yup, it's dirtier than your toilet seat.
The reason for this is that phones are generally warm, and like the tv remotes, they have numerous
crevices for bacteria to hide in.
A recent study in the United Kingdom even found that some cell phones can be staph bacteria
breeding grounds, which can lead to everything from skin infections all the way to meningitis.
16.
Inside Latch of Public Bathroom Stall At least the inside of the toilet bowl gets
rinsed off a little bit with every flush, the latch on the door thoughâ€¦probably
never.
In fact, theres a good chance that since the stall was constructed it hasn't been cleaned
at all.
Just another reason to wash your hands.
15.
Bathtub Unless you're cleaning your bathtub weekly,
then most likely whatever is lingering around your drain is going to be worse than whatever
you find in your toilet.
Staph infections, pneuomonia, septicimia, and urinary tract infections have all been
caused by dirty tubs.
14.
Light Switch Like numerous other entries on this list,
lightswitches often suffer from the never been cleaned sydnrome.
And after years of being flipped up and down by thousands of fingers, they tend to end
up with hundreds of bacteria per square inch.
Just make sure that you're not the last person to leave the conference room!
13.
Microwave Pads While you may keep your own personal microwave
clean, how about at work?
Even if you did decide to do everyone a favor by washing it down, just using soap and water
won't be enough to get rid of all the grease.
In fact, unless you attack it with bleach, you'll have yourself a nice little bacteria
colony growing right next to where you heat your food.
12.
Elevator Buttons It shouldn't be too surprising to see these
on here.
They're pretty much exactly like switches except they get flipped way more often.
11.
Mailbox Handles Surprised?
The same study that found crosswalks, ATM buttons, and parking meters to be bacteria
hotspots also listed mailboxes right behind gas pumps as one of the most infested things
people touch on their way to work.
10.
Self Checkout at the Supermarket Just like with ATM's, you'll find some nasty
stuff growing on those keypads.
While other types of checkouts aren't any cleaner, the supermarket only made the list
because there is food involved, which means an increased chance of ingesting all that
bacteria.
9.
Money Generally speaking, the smaller the denomination,
the dirtier you can expect it to be with 1 dollars bills carrying numerous bacteria.
That shouldn't be surprising though when you think about how often they change hands.
Upon analyzing a randomly sampled stash of paper money, researchers at the Wright Patterson
Medical Center in Ohio actually found that a majority of paper bills have enough bacteria
to give someone with a compromised immune system (HIV or cancer) some serious problems.
8.
Gas Pump Handles How often do you stop to fill up and at the
same time get some food for the road?
Hopefully only sporadically because eating those chips after touching that gas pump is
almost like licking the hands of every person to have ever used it to fill their tank.
Moreover, gas pumps are consistantly ranked by studies as one of the dirtiest places that
we regularly stick our hands.
7.
Escalator Rails Topping the list of the world's most useless
bacteria infested things, unless you find some pressing need to stabilize yourself,
we suggest you stear clear of the hand rails.
6.
Keyboard If you don't wash your hands after surfing
the web at your local library, then you might as well just never wash your hands because
those keyboards are some of the worst offenders when it comes to germ infestations.
Studies have even found bacteria like staph and E. coli on their surfaces.
5.
Kitchen Sink With over half a million bacteria per square
inch, this is surely one of the dirtiest places in your house, and without a doubt, far dirtier
than anything in your bathroom will ever be.
4.
Shopping Cart Researchers at the University of Arizona recently
found that shopping carts had more bacteria, saliva, and fecal mater than public bathrooms,
telephones, and even those nasty escalator handrails.
For this reason, many shopping centers are now offering wipes to clean off your shopping
cart before entering the store.
3.
Drinking Fountain With school fountains being the worst, they
can have over 2.5 million bacteria per square inch on their spigots.
That's over 5 times filthier than anything on this list so far.
2.
Playground Equipment Although this is no secret to the parents
among you, there is nothing on this planet dirtier than a kindergartner.
Now imagine dozens of them swinging, crying, bleeding, and drooling all over brightly colored
slides and staircases.
Absolutely terrifying, but hey, it's good for their immune systems, right?
1.
Your Mouth Most of those germs on the playground, in
the elevator, and all over your keyboard came from one spot - ¦human mouths.
And with millions of bacteria per square inch, over 700 different species call it home.
But remember, not all germs are bad.
In fact, your body is teeming with good bacteria that do everything from help you digest your
food to fight off all the bad germs you get from touching the things on this list.
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