Eliminate Germs in Your House - Men's Health
Eliminate Germs in Your House
By: Danielle Braff
The next time you cut up chicken for dinner, do it on a clean surface: We recommend your toilet seat. "It has the least amount of bacteria of all the spots in your home," says Charles Gerba, Ph.D., a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona. In fact, there are 200 times more fecal coliforms—otherwise known as feces bacteria—on the average cutting board than on the typical commode.
Blame the fact that most people just rinse their cutting boards instead of washing them thoroughly—and that all the little grooves made by knives provide perfect homes for bacteria. (Run your cutting board through the dishwasher after each use—or, if it's wooden, sanitize it with a few drops of bleach mixed with water.)
Want to know what else is scary? The filth on your washcloth. And your water bottle. Even your watchband. You probably don't want to fess up to how often you clean these items, but there's a good chance that at least one of these has made you sick. In a recent multicountry study by the public-education group Hygiene Council, a whopping 28 percent of households were found to be heavily contaminated with bacteria, which can live on dry surfaces for days, or even months. In that time, they can migrate from, say, bathroom to hand to cutting board to mouth. "It's something to be reckoned with," says Philip Tierno Jr., Ph.D., a microbiologist and immunologist at New York University Langone Medical Center and the author of The Secret Life of Germs. "In fact, 50 to 80 percent of foodborne illnesses are contracted in the home, not in restaurants." There are no health inspectors watching you make the food.
