Nowadays we tend to see loo-breaks as a chance to catch up on Twitter and Facebook whilst doing our business, but it needs to stop immediately because, unsurprisingly, it’s super gross.
The bathroom might be a safe place where you can quietly see all the latest cat GIFs, but germ experts Charles Gerba and Kelly Reynolds have the disgusting truth for all you pooping phone users.
“Bathrooms are covered in germs, pathogens, and enteric bacteria (from the intestinal tract), mostly from fecal matter,” says Gerba.
“When you flush the toilet, water with feces and urine sprays about six feet in every direction,” adds Reynolds.
But that’s no big deal because you wash your hands, right? Wrong. When did you last wash your PHONE after a trip to the bathroom?
You might not eat a sandwich on the toilet, but you’d probably scroll Facebook in the bathroom, wash your hands, touch your phone again and THEN eat a sandwich.
So all the pee and poop ended up in your mouth anyway.
Okay, so the amount of bacteria, germs, and poop floating around the bathroom depends on how often it’s cleaned and sanitized, of course, which you can control at home.
But you don’t know (and maybe don’t want to know) how often public bathrooms are cleaned.
Even just setting your phone on a bathroom surface, it still picks up germs spread by aerosolized dirty toilet water (that lovely flush-spray) and whatever was placed there last, like used toilet paper, sanitary towels, etc…
Studies at University of Arizona showed that 9 out of 10 smartphones carried a potential disease-causing microbe and 16% tested positive for fecal matter.
Other bacteria found on smartphones included germs that transmit norovirus, salmonella, and E.coli.
And experts have directly linked outbreaks of E.coli, shigella, hepatitis A, MRSA, Streptococcus and stomach flu to public bathrooms.
And let’s not forget one final peril of toilets in bathrooms: the leading cause of iPhone death — dropping it down the toilet.
But a dead iPhone is the least of your worries, according to the experts, “Even if the rice trick works and your phone dries, now it’s totally contaminated with germs and fecal matter in the smallest nooks and crannies.”
So, if you haven’t got the message yet, please, please, please stop taking your phone to the bathroom with you. Go back to reading cleaning products like we did in the 90s.