Healthy Living
And the Filthiest Thing You Touch on Your Way to Work Is...
By Emily Main
As if high gas prices didn't make your weekly fill-up unpleasant enough, you now get to pay an arm and a leg knowing that, as you gas up your car, you're handling one of the filthiest surfaces you might encounter.
A group of researchers from Kimberly-Clark Professional, the occupational safety arm of the personal-care giant behind Kleenex, Scott Tissue, Huggies, and other brands, swabbed the surfaces of objects people touch every day: gas pump handles, handles on public mailboxes, escalator rails, ATM buttons, parking meters and kiosks, crosswalk buttons, and buttons on vending machines, just to name a few. After gathering samples from six cities, the researchers determined that gas pump handles are the filthiest surfaces, with public mailboxes, escalator rails, and ATM buttons close behind.
When you consider that no one cleans these surfaces, these results shouldn't come as a huge shock. But what is slightly alarming is that the levels of bacteria found were high enough to make people sick.
The bottom line? Wash your hands every time you touch one of these surfaces, and if that's not possible, stash some homemade natural hand sanitizer in your car or purse. Avoid those comforting-sounding "antibacterial" soaps and sanitizers because many contain triclosan, a hormone-disrupting chemical that could actually cause the growth of more antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
No comments:
Post a Comment