Tired of being sick
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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.
Carpet is the king of breeding grounds for harmful bacteria IMO
If you can not run the vacuum at least once a day over ALL carpets in household you need to consider removing This MONSTER... And if you have pets you can just imagine the increase of harmful air quality ...
Our exaggerated hyper sense of smell or normal for that matter is the way our bodies warn us of bad chemical smells that are definitely not good for us IMO.......
Tierno's research indicates that your carpet probably contains about 200,000 bacteria per square inch, making it 4,000 times dirtier than your toilet seat. "Rugs are botanical and zoological parks," says Tierno, who says hundreds of thousands of different types of species live there. These invasions occur because the average person sheds about 1.5 million skin cells every hour; these skin cells hit the rug and serve as food for germs. Add in food particles, pollen, and pet dander, and you have a gratis buff et, he says. And since a vacuum cleaner's suction and rotating beater brush don't usually reach the bottom of the carpet, you're bound to have communities of E. coli, salmonella, staphylococcus, and other bacteria down there. Every time you walk on the carpet or roll around on it with your kids, you disrupt the bacteria, bringing some closer to the surface
Gerba says.
Your cleanup: Hire a company to do a deep steam-cleaning at least once a year, and consider covering high-traffic areas with machine-washable area rugs.